Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/addressesproce1908natiuoft NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ^^ Journal OF Proceedings and Addresses OF THE FORTY-SIXTH ANNUAL MEETING HELD AT CLEVELAND, OHIO JUNE29-JULY3 1908 1908 publisbcD bl? tbe Hgsociation secretary's office, WINONA, MINN. L /3 Composf^d and Printed By The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. CONTENTS Act of Incorporation By-Laws . Certificate of Incorporation Calendar of Meetings . Officers for 1907-8 Officers for 1908-9 Report of Treasurer Report of Board of Trustees Secretary's Minutes of General Sessions Annual Report of Committee on Resolutions Annual Meeting of Active Members Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors for 1907-8 Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors for 1908-9 GENERAL SESSION Addresses of Welcome — Mather; Cooley; Howe Response — Thompson ........ Education for Avocation — Schaeffer Vocational Education in London — Brereton .... The Adaptation of the Schools to Industry and Efficiency — Draper Proposed Work of Commission for Conservation of National Resources — Van Hise The Function of Education in a Democracy — Brumbaugh Negro Education and the Nation — Washington The Reconcilement of Cross-Purposes in the Education of Women — Miss Arnold The Public School and the Immigrant Child — Miss Addams The School and the Practice of Ethics — Mrs. Young The Personal Touch in Teaching — West .... The Personal Power of the Teacher in Public-School Work — Maxwell PAGE I 5 8 10 13 16 20 aa 37 29 33 42 49 54 56 58 6S 78 83 87 93 99 1 03 108 116 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE (Washington Meeting, 1908) Secretary's Minutes — Cook 129 Opportunities for Economy in the Course of Study — Heeter .... 138 Modifications Necessary to Secure Recognition for Pupils of Varying Ability — Kendall i47 Symposium: The Place of Industries in Public Education — 1. Democracy and Education; Equal Opportunity for M— Russell 155 2. Equality of Opportunity: How Secured — Elliott IS9 3. Urgency of Provision for Vocational Needs of Children— McElroy . . 161 4. Importance of Constructive Activities in the Elementary-School Course— Miss Langley ^"8 5. An Intermediate Industrial School — Morse . ■ ■ ■ • • '73 6. A Technical High School— Mar//» '76 Agriculture, Industries, and Home Economics in Our Public Schools— Hay5 177 Nurture and Protection of Physical Wellbeing of Public-School Pupils— . I . How Can the School Contribute to Physical Development ?—Gulick 195 2. Medical Inspection in Public Schools— Harrington .... 200 ▼ VI NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Address at White House Reception — Roosevelt . . 212 Desirable Uniformity and Diversity in American Education — Draper . . 215 The Function of the School in Training for Right Conduct — Miss Schallenherger 232 The School as an Instrument of Character-Building — Teitrick; Williams . 246 The School and the Family (An Abstract) — Mrs. Glenn . / 251 A Plan of Moral Training — Miss Brownlee . 251 ROUND-TABLE CONFERENCES A. Round Table of State and County Superintendents — 1. What a County Superintendent Should Know — Olsen . . . . 252 2. How Can Trained County Superintendents Be Provided and How Should They Be Selected ? — Cotton 254 3. When Inspecting Schools, What Should a County Superintendent See and Do ? — Joynes .......... 260 4. What Can the County Superintendent Lead the People to Do ? — Evans . 263 5. By Whom Shall Teachers Be Selected ? — Blair ..... 264 6. The Relation of the County Superintendent to the School Board — Nelson 266 7. The Relation of the County Superintendent to the State Superintendent — Stetson ............ 268 8. The Relation of the State Superintendent to the County Superintendent — Joyner ............ 269 B. Round Table of Superintendents of Larger Cities — 1. Conditions of Mental Growth of Teachers in Service — Greenwood . . 271 2. The Supply of Teachers and Their Training after Appointment — Davis 274 C. Round Table of Superintendents of Smaller Cities — State Uniformity Laws — Carr; Gibson ....... 280 Principles and Methods of Pupil Government 1. Child-Citizenship and the School City — Gill . . . . . 285 2. School Cities — Cornman ........ 289 D. Round Table on Agricultural Education — Informal Remarks to the Department — True ...... 294 Notes on the Training of Teachers of Agriculture — Brown . . . 295 Co-operation of State Agricultural Colleges and State Normal Schools — Butterfield; Bayliss .......... 297 Co-operation between the United States Department of Agriculture and State School Authorities — Crosby ........ 303 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION Constitution ......... Ofl&cers and Members ........ Secretary's Minutes ........ Report of Committee on Investigations and Appropriations President's Address — Joseph Swain ..... The Progress of Education for the Year — Thwing . Report of Committee of Investigations on the Scarcity of Teachers — McNeill Preliminary Report of the Committee on Provision for Exceptional Children in the Public Schools — Van Sickle List of Books and Articles Available on the Subject . Special Classes in St. Louis, New York, Baltimore, etc. . Extracts from Reports of 1904-7 on Treatment of Backward Children Berlin's New School Idea . . Abnormal Children — Farrington ...... 329 315 318 322 323 326 333 345 359 360 369 374 375 CONTENTS vu Report of the Committee on Industrial Education in Schools for Rural Com- munities— Harvey • . . . . Report on Investigation of Work of Waterford and Calvert School&-CVo% Report on Investigatipn of Work of John Swaney School, and the Congres- sional District Agricultural Schools of Georgia.— Kern Preliminary Report of Committee on Moral Training in Public Schools A. The Problem Stated — Brumbaugh B. The Treatment of Pupils— Carr ..." C. The Home and School Life — Greenwood D. Relation of Moral and Religious Tra,imng— Barnes Distinctive Functions of University, College, and Normal School in the Prepara • tion of Teachers — Brown . Preliminary Report on Need of Investigation of the Culture Element and Economy of Time in Education — Baker Report of Committee on Co-operation with Educational Organizations in Other Countries — Harris . •••..... Possible Co-operation between the Educational Associations of Different Countries — Brown . . ••...... Home Economics in Elementary and Secondary Education— Mw^ Richards Memorial Addresses — F. Louis Soldan — Blewett Rufus Henry Halsey — Keith DEPARTMENT OF KINDERGARTEN EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes Fundamental Factors in the Making of a Kindergarten Curriculum — Barnes The Factor of Environment — Miss Temple The Relation between the Ideal and the Practical in the Kindergarten Program — Miss Palmer . The Art Impulse; Its Early Forms and Relation to Mental Development — Miss Cushman . . .......... Drawing in the Kindergarten — Mrs. Putnam The Use and Abuse of Design — Miss Higgons Motive and Method in Primary Art Work — Miss Weller Conservative and Progressive Phases of Kindergarten Education (An Outline) — Miss Hill The Co-ordination of the Kindergarten and the Elementary School— Mrj. Putnam 385 395 420 448 449 452 453 457 466 479 482 486 492 498 501 502 507 515 523 526 531 536 537 DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes .......•••• 543 The Physiology and Psychology of Elementary Education — Brown ... 544 Is the Technique of Reading, Arithmetic, and Writing Receiving Due Attention in the Elementary Schools Today ? — Van Sickle 553 Moral Training an Essential Factor in Elementary School "Work—Reeder 562 Mathematics in the Grades — Aley 5^9 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes . . . • • -577 The High-School Situation — Morrison . . 579 A Shifting of Ideals Respecting the Efficiency of Formal Culture Studies for All Pupils— Bw/to^ 584 How Shall We Assist Our Pupils When and Only When They Need It ?—Kratz . 59^ Viii NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION The Cosmopolitan High-School Curriculums from the Standpoint of Colleges of Engineering — Magruder 599 The Cosmopolitan High-School Curriculum — Smith .... 606 School Athletics: What They Are; What They Should Bq— Gordon .616 Report of Committee on Six- Year Course of Study — Lyttle 625 ROUND-TABLE CONFERENCES A. Mathematics — The Teaching of Algebra in Its Relation to the Present Educational Trend — McKinney ... v ..... , The Teaching of Geometry in Its Relation to the Present Educational Trend —Betz B. Foreign Languages — Objective Aids in Teaching Modern Languages — WolJ The Position of Grammar in Language Instruction — Kromer The Teaching of Ancient Languages by Modern Methods — Can What Can We Do for the Two- Year Pupil ? — Miss Benson C. English — Ideals versus Realities in High-School English — Noyes; Miss Van Metre Some Practical Problems in the Teaching of English — Hitchcock Practical Problems in English — Miss Apgar ..... D. Science — What Should the Science Laboratory Notebook Contain ? — Butler Botany Notebook— -What It Should Contain and How It Should Be Mad Stuart ........... DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION 628 634 640 644 645 649 653 658 661 664 665 Secretary's Minutes ........... 669 Liberal Education in the Twentieth Century — Craig 670 College Ethics — Fordyce 675 Care of Freshmen in Large Universities — Aley ...... 680 The Relation of the Work of the Colleges to the Work of the Medical School— Crawford ............ 686 Pedagogical Departments in Colleges and Universities — Snedden 691 Some Avenues of Usefulness for the Small Colleges — Stearns .... 696 DEPARTMENT OF NORMAL SCHOOLS Secretary's Minutes ........... 703 President's Address — ^Thomas 704 Industrial Arts in Normal Schools — Seerley 710 What Is an Ideal Course for a Normal School ? — Lyte . 715 What Relation Should the Head of Theoretical and Scientific Education Sustain to the Practice School ? — Keith 723 The Relation of Observation to Practice-Teaching in the Preparation of the Young Teacher — Jones 728 Report of Committee on Preparation and Qualification of Teachers of Elemen- tary and High Schools — Van Liew ....... 735 DEPARTMENT OF MANUAL TRAINING Secretary's Minutes ........... 739 Report of Committee on Collecting Data for Courses of Manual Training in Public Schools — Keyes ......... 740 CONTENTS Democracy in Education — Chancellor Equality of Opportunity: How It Can Be Secured— Miss Dopp Period at Which Secondary Education Should Begin—Snedden Industrial Development Has Exerted a Pre-eminent Influence in Social Progress- Jr (IT RCT • • • • The Industrial Aspect of Social Life Affords Subject-Matter Essential in a System of Education Controlled by Social Standards-G^'ft^ow The Important Function of Constructive Activities in Education Is to Reveal the Social Significance of Industrial Activities— iVoye^ The Most Urgent Educational Need of Today is Provision for Industrial T;aining in Public Schools — Morse .... The Relation of Manual Training to Industrial Education— A/wrray * Intermediate Industrial Schools as a Requirement of a Program in Industrial Education — Barney DEPARTMENT OF ART EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes ••.... President's Address — Eggers Art as a Factor in Culture — Hughes . . . . ' The Bearing of Art on Industry — Zueblin Some Educational Deductions from the Art of the Great Vexiods—Bonser The Place of Art in a Constructive Education— Mo«»y A New Basis of Art Education — Miss Church 740 746 752 757 76s 772 780 786 793 799 800 803 808 813 820 827 DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes g Report of Committee of Resolutions Regarding Uniformity of National Songs . 835 President's Address — Mrs. Clark . . . . . . .8^6 Music in the Schools from the Viewpoint of the Superintendent— Fflm:« . . 840 Music in the High School— McConathy g^ The Psychology of Music and the Light It Throws upon Musical Education— Ha// 848 Child-Song — Its Verse — Mrs. Riley .854 Child-Song — Its Music — Mrs. Gay nor 857 Educational Rhythm-Training— Mm Goedhart 859 ROUND TABLE Preparation by the Normal School of the Grade Teacher and Supervisor for the Teaching of Music — 1. Fullerion ............ 862 2. Miss Crane ........... 863 3. Gebhart 866 DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes ........... 871 President's Address — Brown ' . . 872 The High-School Commercial Course: Its Subjects; Their Practical and Educa- tional Value — Garbuti 876 The Teaching of Shorthand — Moran ........ 881 To What Extent May a Commercial and Industrial Training Be Properly Included in the Grammar-School Course ? — Row^ ...... 888 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION What Should Be Done to Encourage College Education beyond the Commerical Course in High Schools ? — Twiggs ....... 891 Preparation and Improvement of Commerical Teachers — Herrick . . . 895 Methods of Preparing Teachers for Commercial Schools in Germany — De Garmo 902 DEPARTMENT OF CHILD-STUDY Secretary's Minutes 907 President's Address — Burnham ......... 908 The Study of Growth in Children — Tyler 913 Child-Study on the Playground — Johnson 917 Physiological Age and Child-Labor — Bruere ....... 924 The Physical Basis of Attention — Talbot 932 The Visiting Nurse and the Children Requiring Special Attention — MacMurchy 936 What the Regular Class Teacher Should Know of Mental and Moral Deficiency — Sherman ............ 943 Recent Advances in Child-Study — Hall 948 What England Is Doing to Secure Healthy School Children — Barnes . . 952 The Study of Exceptional Children — Miller 957 DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE INSTRUCTION Secretary's Minutes ......... Home Geography — Miss Genthe ....... Geography in the Elementary Schools — Whitbeck . . . Geography in the Secondary Schools — Hubbard The Function of the Lecture Demonstration in Millikan ........ Preservation of Natural Resources of the United States — Smith Secondary School Physics- 965 966 971 978 985 992 DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes ........... 999 Systematic Training for the Teaching of Physical Education — Hastings . . 1000 Should the Public-School Teacher of Physical Education Have the Training of a Physical Director or That of a Physician ? — Sargent .... 1006 Elements of Strength and Weakness in Physical Education as Taught in Colleges — Hall ............ 1013 Criticisms of the Teaching of Physical Education — Thwing . . . .1018 Elements of Strength and Weakness in Physical Education as Taught in Prepara- tory Schools — Nason . . . . . . . . . 1019 Elements of Strength and Weakness in Physical Education as Taught in Public Schools — Wittich 1024 The Essential Elements in the Training of the College Physical Director and the Pubhc-School Physical Director — Seaver ...... 1033 Essential Elements in the Training of Teachers of Gymnastics — Miss Newton 1039 DEPARTMENT OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION Secretary's Minutes ......... President's Address — Thompson ....... The Centralization of Rural Schools in Ohio — Jones Administration of Industrial Education, State and Municipal — Lindemann School Architecture — Ittner ........ Innovations in School Architecture — Mills 1047 1048 1054 1060 1065 1071 CONTENTS XI LIBRARY DEPARTMENT Secretary's Minutes •••.... The Library of Today as Compared with the Library of Thirty Years Ago— Brett Extent to Which Normal Schools and Teachers' Colleges Should Teach the Use of School Libraries — Felmley ..... The Methods of Administering Public Libraries for the Benefit of Public Schools — Canfield ....... How to Make the Library More Serviceable to Students of School Age from 1. The Superintendent's View-Point — Wolfe 2. The Library Worker's View-Point — Power The Library and the School — Seerley ..... DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes .••...... President's Address — Johnstone ......... The Public School and the Special Child — Barnes The Home and the Special Child — Miss Addams ...... The Problems of the Special Class — Miss Farrell ...... The Education of the Blind Child with the Seeing Child in the Public Schools— Miss Adams ........... Some Urgent Needs for Advancement in the Education of Mentally Defective Children — Miss Smart ......... DEPARTMENT OF INDIAN EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes .......... Addresses of Welcome — Elson; Jones; Westwood ..... Responses — Compton; Miss Reel ........ Utilization of Experience in Home Environment — Miss Young Progress the Indian Is Making toward Citizenship and Self -Support — Seger How Far are the Principles of Education along Indigenous Lines Applicable to American Indians ? — Hall ....... Horticulture and Landscape Gardening — Hoffman .... Demonstration Lessons by Teachers in the Service .... Oration "My People" — Miss Penny ...... Demonstration in Rug- weaving by Class of Indian Girls — Mrs. Dietz DEPARTMENT OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes .......•••■ President's Address — Monin .....■■■• Report of the Committee of Seven on Admission Requirements to Colleges of Engineering — Atkinson .....•■•• Five- Year Engineering Course of Study — Marston ...■■■ DEPARTMENT OF RURAL AND INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION Secretary's Minutes . . . • • • • • ■ • What Constitutes Successful Work in Agriculture in Rural Schools f— Davis . The Work of the Normal School in Preparing Teachers to Teach Agriculture— Evans; French .....••••* Some Notes 6n Agricultural Education — Brown What Is Agriculture— Elementary, Secondary, and Collegiate ?—True School Gardening as Conducted in Cleveland Schools— Orr . • Development of School Gardens at the National Capital— Miss Sipe 1079 1080 1087 1095 1099 1 104 1113 1114 1118 1127 1131 "37 "43 "53 "54 "55 1156 "59 1161 1 164 1166 1171 "73 "75 "75 E78 [81 1 187 1 188 "94 "99 1202 1209 1213 xii NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION DEPARTMENT OF NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS OF WOMEN Secretary's Minutes . • . . . . . .1217 The Work of Women's Organizations in Education: Suggestions for Effective Co-operation — Brown . . . . . .1218 Laws for Children's Welfare. An Ideal Attainable in 1920: Child Labor; Com- pulsory Education; Registration of Births; Juvenile Courts — Mrs. Kelley 1222 Compulsory School Attendance in the South — Mrs. Mengal .1229 Women's Work in the Socialization of the Schools — Mrs. Barmtm 1231 General Index ............ 1239 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES 1857-1870 The National Teachers' Association Organized August 26, 1857, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Purpose— To elevate the character and advance the interest oj the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause oj popular education in the United States. The name of the association was changed at Cleveland, Ohio, on August 15, 1870, to the *' National Educational Association." 1870-1907 National Educational Association Incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia, February 24, 1886, under the name, "National Education Association," which was changed to "National Educational Association," by certificate filed No- vember 6, 1886. 1907- National Education Association of the United States Incorporated under a special act of Congress, approved June 30, 1906, to succeed the "National Educational Association." The charter was accepted and by-laws were adopted at the Fiftieth Anniversary Con- vention held July 10, 1907, at Los Angeles, California. AN ACT TO INCORPORATE THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIA- TION OF THE UNITED STATES Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled: Section i. That the following named persons, who are now the officers and directors and trustees of the National Educational Association, a corporation organized in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-six, under the Act of General Incorporation of the Revised Statutes of the District of Columbia, viz.: Nathan C. Schaeffer, Eliphalet Oram Lyte, John W. Lansinger, of Pennsylvania; Isaac W. Hill, of Alabama; Arthur J. Matthews, of Arizona; John H. Hinemon, George B. Cook, of Arkansas; Joseph O'Connor, Josiah L. Pickard, Arthur H. Chambedain, of California; Aaron Gove, *Ezekiel H. Cook, Lewis C. Greenlee, of Colorado; Charles H. Keyes, of Connecticut; George W. Twitmyer, of Delaware; J. Ormond Wilson, William T. Harris, Alexander T. Stuart, of the District of Columbia; Clem Hampton, of Florida; William M. Slaton, of Georgia; Frances Mann, of Idaho; J. Stanley Brown, *Albert G. Lane, Charles 1. Parker; John W. Cook, Joshua Pike, Albert R. Taylor, Joseph A. Mercer, of Illinois; Nebraska Cropsey, Thomas A. Mott, of Indiana; John D. Benedict, of Indian Territory; John F. Riggs, Ashley V. Storm, of Iowa; John W. Spindler, Jasper N. Wilkinson, A. V. Jewett, Luther D. Whitte- more, of Kansas; William Henry Bartholomew, of Kentucky; Warren Easton, of Louisi- ♦ Deceased. NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ana; *John S. Locke, of Maine; M. Bates Stephens, of Maryland; Charles W, Eliot, *Mary H. Hunt, Henry T. Bailey, of Massachusetts; Hugh A. Graham, Charles G, White, WiUiam E. Elson, of Michigan; *William F. Phelps, Irwin Shepard, John A, Cranston, of Minnesota; Robert B. Fulton, of Mississippi; *F. Louis Soldan, James M. Greenwood, Willam J. Hawkins, of Missouri; Oscar J. Craig, of Montana; George L. Towne, of Nebraska; Joseph E. Stubbs, of Nevada; James E. Klock, of New Hampshire; James M. Green, John Enright, of New Jersey; Charles M. Light, of New Mexico; James H. Can- field, Nicholas Murray Butler, William H. Maxwell, Charles R. Skinner, *Albert P. Marble, James C. Byrnes, of New York; James Y. Joyner, Julius Isaac Foust, of North Carolina; Pitt Gordon Knowlton, of North Dakota; Oscar T. Corson, Jacob A. Shawan, Wells L. Griswold, of Ohio; Edgar S. Vaught, Andrew R. Hickham, of Oklahoma; Charles Car- roll Stratton, Edwin D. Ressler, of Oregon; Thomas W. Bicknell, Walter Ballou Jacobs, of Rhode Island; David B. Johnson, Robert P. Pell, of South Carolina; Moritz Adelbert Lange, of South Dakota; Eugene F. Turner, of Tennessee; Lloyd E. Wolfe, of Texas; David H. Christensen, of Utah; Henry O. Wheeler, Isaac Thomas, of Vermont; Joseph L. Jarman, of Virginia; Edward T. Mathes, of Washington; T. Marcellus Marshall, Lucy Robinson, of West Virginia; Lorenzo D. Harvey, of Wisconsin; Thomas T. Tynan, of Wyoming; Cassia Patton, of Alaska; Frank H. Ball, of Porto Rico; Arthur F, Griffiths, of Hawaii; C. H. Maxson, of the Philippine Islands, and such other persons as now are or may hereafter be associated with them as officers or members of said Association, are hereby incorporated and declared to be a body corporate of the District of Columbia by the name of the "National Education Association of the United States," and by that name shall be known and have perpetual succession with the powers, limitations, and restrictions herein contained. Sec. 2. That the purpose and object of the said corporation sh^ll be to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of education in the United States, This corporation shall include the National Council of Education and the following departments, and such others as may hereafter be created by organization or consolidation, to wit: the Departments, first, of Superintendence; second, of Normal Schools; third, of Elementary Education; fourth, of Higher Education; fifth, of Manual Training; sixth, of Art Education; seventh, of Kindergarten Education; eighth, of Music Education; ninth, of Secondary Education; tenth, of Business Education; eleventh, of Child-Study; twelfth, of Physical Education; thirteenth, of Natural Science Instruction; fourteenth, of School Administration; fifteenth, the Library Department; sixteenth, of Special Education; seventeenth, of Indian Education; the powers and duties and the number and names of these departments and of the National Council of Education may be changed or abolished at the pleasure of the corporation, as provided in its By-Laws. Sec. 3. That the said corporation shall further have power to have and to use a common seal, and to alter and change the same at its pleasure; to sue or to be sued in any court of the United States, or other court of competent jurisdiction; to make by-laws not inconsistent with the provisions of this act or of the constitution of the United States; to take or receive, whether by gift, grant, devise, bequest, or purchase, any real or personal estate, and to hold, grant, convey, hire, or lease the same for the purposes of its incorpora- tion; and to accept and administer any trust of real or personal estate for any educational purpose within the objects of the corporation. Sec. 4. That all real property of the corporation within the District of Columbia, which shall be used by the corporation for the educational or other purposes of the cor- poration as aforesaid, other than the purposes of producing income, and all personal prop- erty and funds of the corporation held, used, or invested for educational purposes afore- said, or to produce income to be used for such purposes, shall be exempt from taxation; provided, however, that this exemption shall not apply to any property of the corporation which shall not be used for, or the income of which shall not be applied to, the educational * Deceased. ACT OF INCORPORATION purposes of the corporation; and, provided further, that the corporation shall annually file, with the Commissioner of Education of the United States, a report in writing, stating in detail the property, real and personal, held by the corporation, and the expenditure or other use or disposition of the same, or the income thereof, during the preceding year. Sec. 5. That the membership of the said corporation shall consist of three classes of members— viz., active, associate, and corresponding— whose qualifications, terms of membership, rights, and obligations shall be prescribed by the By-Laws of the corporation. Sec. 6. That the officers of the said corporation shall be a President, twelve Vice- Presidents, a Secretary, a Treasurer, a Board of Directors, an Executive Committee, and a Board of Trustees. The Board of Directors shall consist of a President, the First Vice-President, the Sec- retary, the Treasurer, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, and one additional member from each state, territory, or district, to be elected by the active members for the terra of one year, or until their successors are chosen, and of all life directors of the National Edu- cational Association. The United States Commissioner of Education, and all former Presidents of the said Association now living, and all future Presidents of the Association hereby incorporated, at the close of their respective terms of office, shall be members of the Board of Directors for life. The Board of Directors shall have power to fill all vacancies in their own body; shall have in charge the general interests of the corporation, excepting those herein intrusted to the Board of Trustees; and shall possess such other powers as shall be conferred upon them by the By-Laws of the corporation. The Executive Committee shall consist of five members, as follows: the President of the Association, the First Vice-President, the Treasurer, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and a member of the Association, to be chosen annually by the Board of Directors, to serve one year. The said committee shall have authority to represent, and to act for, the Board of Directors in the intervals between the meetings of that body, to the extent of carrying out the legislation adopted by the Board of Directors under general directions as may be given by said board. The Board of Trustees shall consist of four members, elected by the Board of Directors for the term of four years, and the President of the Association, who shall be a member ex officio, during his term of office. At the first meeting of the Board of Directors, held during the annual meeting of the Association at which they were elected, they shall elect one trustee for the term of four years. All vacancies occurring in said Board of Trustees, whether by resignation or otherwise, shall be filled by the Board of Directors for the unex- pired term; and the absence of a trustee from two successive annual meetings of the board shall forfeit his membership. Sec. 7. That the invested fund now known as the "Permanent Fund of the National Educational Association," when transferred to the corporation hereby created, shall be held by such corporation as a Permanent Fund and shall be in charge of the Board of Trus- tees, who shall provide for the safe-keeping and investment of such fund, and of all other funds which the corporation may receive by donation, bequest, or devise. No part of the principal of such Permanent Fund or its accretions shall be expended, except by a two- thirds vote of the active members of the Association present at any annual meeting, ui^on the recommendation of the Board of Trustees, after such recommendation has been approved by vote of the Board of Directors, and after printed notice of the proposed expenditure' has been mailed to all active members of the Association. The income of the Permanent Fund shall be used only to meet the cost of maintaining the organization of the Association and of publishing its annual volume of Proceedings, -unless the terms of the donation, bequest, or devise shall otherwise specify, or the Board of Directors shall other^^'lse order. It shall also be the duty of the Board of Trustees to issue orders on the Treasurer for the payment of all bills approved by the Board of Directors, or by the President and Secretary- of the Association acting under the authority of the Board of Directors. ^\ hen practicable, the Board of Trustees shall invest, as part of the Permanent Fund, all surplus NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION funds exceeding five hundred dollars that shall remain in the hands of the Treasurer after paying the expenses of the Association for the previous year, and providing for the fixed expenses and for all appropriations made by the Board of Directors for the ensuing year. The Board of Trustees shall elect the Secretary of the Association, who shall also be secretary of the Executive Committee, and shall fix the compensation and the term of his office for a period not to exceed four years. Sec. 8. That the principal office of the said corporation shall be in the city of Wash- ington, District of Columbia, provided that the meetings of the corporation, its oflricers, committees, and departments, may be held, and that its business may be transacted, and an office or offices may be maintained, elsewhere, within the United States, as may be determined, by the Board of Directors, or otherwise in accordance with the By-Laws. Sec. 9. That the Charter, Constitution, and By-Laws of the National Educational Association shall continue in full force and effect until the charter granted by this act shall be accepted by such Association at the next annual meeting of the Association, and until new By-Laws shall be adopted; and that the present officers, directors, and trustees of said Association shall continue to hold office and perform their respective duties as such until the expiration of terms for which they were severally elected or appointed, and until their successors are elected. That at such annual meeting the active members of the National Educational Association, then present, may organize and proceed to accept the charter granted by this Act and adopt By-Laws, to elect officers to succeed those whose terms have expired or are about to expire, and generally to organize the "National Educa- tion Association of the United States;" and that the Board of Trustees of the corporation hereby incorporated shall thereupon, if the charter granted by this act be accepted, receive, take over, and enter into possession, custody, and management of all property, real and personal, of the corporation heretofore known as the National Educational Association, incorporated as aforesaid, under the Revised Statutes of the District of Columbia and all its rights, contracts, claims, and property of every kind and nature whatsoever; and the several officers, directors, and trustees of such last-named Association, or any other person having charge of any of the securities, funds, books, or property thereof, real or personal, shall on demand deliver the same to the proper officers, directors, or trustees of the corporation hereby created. Provided, That a verified certificate executed by the presiding officer and secretary of such annual meeting, showing the acceptance of the charter granted by this act by the National Educational Association shall be legal evidence of the fact, when filed with the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia; and, pro- vided further ^ That in the event of the failure of the Association to accept the charter granted by this act at said annual meeting, then the charter of the National Educational Associa- tion and its corporate existence shall be, and are hereby extended until the thirty-first day of July, nineteen hundred and eight, and at any time before said date its charter may be extended in the manner and form provided by the general corporation law of the District of Columbia. Sec. 10. That the rights of creditors of the said existing corporation, known as the National Educational Association, shall not in any manner be impaired by the passage of this act, or the transfer of the property heretofore mentioned, nor shall any liability or obligation, or the payment of any sum due or to become due, or any claim or demand, in any manner, or for any cause existing against the said existing corporation, be released or impaired; and the corporation hereby incorporated is declared to succeed to the obli- gations and liabilities, and to be held liable to pay and discharge all of the debts, liabilities, and contracts, of the said corporation so existing, to the same effect as if such new corpora- tion had itself incurred the obligation or liability to pay such debt or damages, and no action or proceeding before any court or tribunal shall be deemed to have abated or been discontinued by reason of this act. Sec. II. That Congress may from time to time alter, repeal, or modify this act of ACT OF INCORPORATION incorporation, but no contract or individual right made or acquired shall thereby be divested or impaired. Approved June 30, 1906. Accepted and adopted as the Constitution of the National Education Association of the United States by the active members of the National Educational Association in annual session at Los Angeles, CaL, July 10, 1907. BY-LAWS (Adopted at meeting of active members held in Los Angeles, Cal., July 10, 1907.) ARTICLE I— MEMBERSHIP ACTIVE MEMBERS Section i. Teachers and all who are actively associated with the management of educational institutions, including libraries and educational publications, may become active members. Sec. 2. Any eligible person may become an active member upon application indorsed by two active members, and the payment of an enrollment fee of two dollars and the annual dues for the current year. Sec. 3. Active members only shall have the right to vote and to hold office in the Association, in the National Council of Education, or in the several departments. Sec. 4. All active members shall pay annual dues of two dollars, and shall be entitled to the volume of Proceedings without "coupon" or other conditions. Sec. 5. The annual membership fee shall be payable at the time of the annual con- vention, or by remittance to the Secretary before September first of each year. Sec. 6. Any active member may discontinue membership by giving written notice to the Secretary before September first in any year, and may restore the same only on pay- ment of the enrollment fee of two dollars and the annual dues for the current year. A written application for active membership shall constitute an agreement to continue such membership and pay annual dues, unless written notice of discontinuance is sent to the Secretary before September first of the fiscal year for which such discontinuance shall apply. CORRESPONDING MEMBERS Sec. 7. Eminent educators not residing in America may be elected by the Board of Directors to be corresponding members. The number of corresponding members shall at no time exceed fifty. Sec. 8. Corresponding members shall be entitled to the volume of Proceedings without the payment of fees or other conditions. ASSOCIATE MEMBERS Sec. 9. Any person on paying an annual membership of two dollars may become an associate member. Sec 10. Associate members may receive the volume of Proceedings in accordance with the usual "coupon" conditions, as printed on the membership certificate. LIFE MEMBERS Sec. II. All life members and life directors shall be denominated active members and shall enjoy all the powers and privileges of such members without the payment of annual dues. ROLL OF MEMBERS Sec. 12. The names of active, life, and corresponding members only shall be printed in the annual Yearbook, with their respective educational titles, offices, and addresses, and the list shall be revised annually by the Secretary of the Association. NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ARTICLE II— OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES Section i. The President, Vice-Presidents, Directors, and Treasurer shall be chosen by the active members of the Association by ballot, unless otherwise ordered, on the third day of each annual session, a majority of the votes cast being necessary to a choice. They shall continue in office until the close of the annual session subsequent to their election and until their successors are chosen, except as hereinafter provided, COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS Sec. 2. At the first session of each annual meeting of the Association the President shall appoint a Committee on Resolutions. COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS Sec. 3. At the third session of each annual meeting of the Association there shall be appointed by the President a Committee on Nominations, consisting of one member from each state and territory represented. Such a committee shall be appointed by the Presi- dent on the nomination of a majority of the active members from such state or territory present at the meeting called for the purpose of making such nomination; provided, how- ever, that such appointment shall be made by the President without such nomination, when the active members in attendance from any state or territory shall fail to make a nomination. Sec. 4. The meetings of the active members of the several states to nominate members of the nominating committee shall be held at 5:30 p. m. on the first day of the annual meeting of the Association, at such places as shall be announced in the general program. ARTICLE III— DUTIES OF OFFICERS THE PRESIDENT Section i. The President shall preside at all meetings of the Association and of the Board of Directors, and shall perform the duties usually devolving upon a presiding officer. In his absence the first Vice-President in order, who is present, shall preside; and in the absence of all the Vice-Presidents, a pro tempore chairman shall be appointed on nomina- tion, the Secretary putting the question. the secretary Sec. 2. The Secretary shall keep a full and accurate report of the proceedings of the general meetings of the Association and of all meetings of the Board of Directors, and shall conduct such correspondence and transact such other business of the Association as the directors or Executive Committee may assign, and shall have his records present at all meetings of the Association and the Board of Directors. the treasurer Sec. 3. The Treasurer shall receive, and under the direction of the Board of Trustees hold in safekeeping, the current income of the Association; shall expend the same only upon order of said board; shall keep an exact account of his receipts and expenditures, with vouchers for the latter; which accounts, ending the first day of July in each year, he shall render to the Board of Trustees and, when approved by said board, he shall report to the Board of Directors. The Treasurer shall give such bond for the faithful discharge of his duties as may be required by the Board of Trustees; and he shall continue in office until the first meeting of the Board of Directors held prior to the annual meeting of the Association next succeeding that at which he is elected, and until his successor has been elected and has qualified. • AUDITOR OF accounts Sec. 4. It shall be the duty of the President, Secretary, and Treasurer of the Asso- ciation to appoint annually some competent person to examine the securities of the Perma- ACT OF INCORPORATION 7 nent Fund held by the Board of Trustees, and his certificate, showing the ronditi,.n r.f tU- said fund, shall be attached to the annual report of the Board of Trustees. CERTIFICATION OF BILLS Sec. s. The President and Secretary shall certify to the Board of Trustees all bills approved by the Board of Directors. ARTICLE IV— THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Section i. The Board of Directors shall hold its regular annual meeting at the place of the annual convention, and not less than two hours before the assembling of the Associa- tion. Sec. 2. Special meetings may be held at such other times and places as the board or the President shall determine. Sec. 3. Each new board shall organize at the session of its election. ARTICLE V— THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION objects and duties Section i. The National Council of Education shall have for its object the con- sideration and discussion of educational questions of public and professional interest; the proposal to the Board of Directors, from time to time, of suitable subjects for investi- gation and research, and the recommendation of the amount of appropriations that should be made for such purposes; the appointment and general supervision of such special committees of investigation and research as may be provided for and authorized by the Board of Directors of the Association; the consideration, discussion, and recommendation to the Board of Directors for disposition of all reports by such special committees of research as may have been appointed on its recommendation or by its authority; the annual preparation and presentation to the Association at its annual convention of a report on "Educational Progress during the Past Year;" and in other ways shall use its best efforts to further the objects of the Association and to promote the cause of education in general. membership of the council Sec. 2. *The Council shall consist of one hundred and twenty members, selected from the membership of the Association. Any member of the Association identified with educa- tional work is eligible to membership in the Council. Sec. 3. *The Board of Directors shall annually elect ten members, and the Council shall elect ten members, each member to serve for six years, or until his successor is elected. At the meeting of 1908 enough additional members shall be elected in the same manner to make the total number of members one hundred and twenty. The terms of the members so elected shall expire as follows: one-sixth in one year, one-sixth in two years, one-sixth in three years, one-sixth in four years, one-sixth in five years, one-sixth in six years. Sec. 4. The annual election of members of the Council shall be held in connection with the annual meetings of the Association. If the Board of Directors shall fail, for any reason, to fill its quota of members annually, the vacancy or vacancies shall be filled by the Council. Sec. 5. The absence of a member from two consecutive annual meetings of the Council shall be considered equivalent to resignation of membership, and the Council shall fill vacancies caused by absence from the Council as herein defined, as well as vacanci^ caused by death or resignation, for the unexpired term. All persons who have belonged to the Council shall, on the expiration of their membership, become honorary members, with the privilege of attending its regular sessions and participating m its discussions. No state shall be represented in the Council by more than eight members. * As amended at meeting of active members held in Cleveland, Ohio, July i, 1908. NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION BY-LAWS OF THE COUNCIL Sec. 6. The Council may establish by-laws for its government not inconsistent with the Act of Incorporation or of the By-Laws of the Association, provided such by-laws shall be submitted to and approved by the Board of Directors of the Association before they shall become operative. ARTICLE VI— DEPARTMENTS Section i. A department shall consist of those members of the Association who are especially interested in the consideration of a particular group of educational problems. Each department shall be administered by a president, vice-president, secretary, and such other officers as it shall deem necessary to conduct its affairs. Sec, 2. Each department shall hold its annual meeting at the time of the annual con- vention of the Association, except the Department of Superintendence, which may hold its annual meeting in February of each year, or at such other time as may be determined by the officers of said department. Sec. 3. The objects of the annual department meetings shall be the discussion of questions pertaining to their respective fields of educational work. The programs of these meetings shall be organized and conducted by the respective presidents, in conference with, and under the general direction of, the President of the Association. Each depart- ment shall be limited to two sessions, with formal programs, at the time of the annual con- vention, except that a third session for business or informal round-table conference may be held at the discretion of the department ofijcers. Sec. 4. Upon the written request of twenty active members of the Association for permission to establish a new department, the Board of Directors may grant such permis- sion. Such new department shall in all respects be entitled to the same rights and privileges as the departments named in the Act of Incorporation. ARTICLE VII— MEETINGS Section i. The annual meeting of the Association shall be held at such time and place as shall be determined by the Board of Directors. Sec. 2. Special meetings may be called by the President at the request of five directors. Sec. 3. Any department of the Association may hold a special meeting at such time and place as by its own regulations it shall appoint. Sec. 4. No paper, lecture, or address shall be read before the Association or any of its departments, in the absence of its author, nor shall any such paper, lecture, or address be published in the volume of Proceedings, without the consent of the Association, upon the approval of the Executive Committee. ARTICLE VIII— AMENDMENTS Section 1. These by-laws may be altered or amended at any annual meeting by the unanimous vote of the members present; or by a two-thirds vote of the members present, provided that the substance of the alteration or amendment has been proposed in writing at a previous annual meeting. NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION NOW KNOWN AS THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES CERTIFICATE of Acceptance of Charter and Adoption of By-Laws under Act of Congress approved June 30, 1906. , We, the undersigned, Nathan C. SchaefiFer, the presiding officer, and Irwin Shepard. ACT OF INCORPORATION the secretary of the meeting of the National Educational Association held at Los Angeles, California, on the loth day of July, 1907, said meeting being the annual meeting of the Asso^ ciation held next after the passage of an Act of Congress entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Education Association of the United States, " Do hereby certify, that at said meeting held pursuant to due notice, a quorum being present, the said Association adopted resolutions of which true copies are hereto attached, and accepted the Charter of the National Education Association of the United States, granted by said Act of Congress, and adopted by-laws as provided in said act and elected oflficers; and the undersigned pursuant to said resolutions Do hereby certify that the National Education Association of the United States has duly accepted said Charter granted by said Act of Congress, and has adopted by-laws, and is the lawful successor to the National Educational Association. In witness whereof, we have hereunto signed our names this 20th day of August, 1907. (Signed) Nathan C. Schaeffer, Presiding Officer. (Signed) Irwin Shepard, Secretary. VERIFICATION RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED BY THE ACTIVE MEMBERS, JULY lO, 1907 1. Resolved, That the National Educational Association hereby accepts the Charier granted by an act of Congress entitled "An Act to Incorporate the National Education Association of the United States," passed June 30, 1906, and that the President and Secretary of this meeting be authorized and directed to execute and file with the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia a verified certificate showing the acceptance by the Association of the Charter granted by said act. 2. Resolved, That the proposed by-laws of which notice was given at the annual meeting of the Association held on July 6, 1905, which are printed in full in the journal of said meet- ing, be and the same are hereby adopted to take effect immediately. 3. Resolved, That the Association adopt as its corporate seal a circle containing the title "National Education Association of the United States," and the dates "1857-1907." 4. Resolved, That the Association do now proceed to elect officers, and to organize under the Charter granted by the Act of Congress. Filed in the office of the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia, September 4, 1907. CALENDAR OF MEETINGS NATIONAL TEACHERS ASSOCIATION 1857— PHILADELPHIA, PA. (Organized) James L. Enos, Chairman. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. 1858— CINCINNATI, OHIO Z. Richards, President. J. W. BuLKLEY, Secretary. A. J. RiCKOFF, Treasurer. 1859— WASHINGTON, D. C. A. J. RiCKOFF, President. J. W. BuLKLEY, Secretary. C. S. Pennell, Treasurer. i860— BUFFALO, N. Y. J. W. Bulkley, President. Z. Richards, Secretary. O. C. Wight, Treasurer. 1861, 1862 — No session. 1863— CHICAGO, ILL. John D; Philbrick, President. James Cruikshank, Secretary. O. C. Wight, Treasurer. 1864— OGDENSBURG. N. Y. W. H. Wells, President. David N. Camp, Secretary. Z. Richards, Treasurer. 1865— HARRISBURG, PA. S. S. Greene, President. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. Z. Richards, Treasurer. 1866— INDIANAPOLIS, IND. J. P. Wickersham, President. S. H. White, Secretary. S. P. Bates, Treasurer. 1867 — No session. 1868— NASHVILLE, TENN. J. M. Gregory, President. L. Van Bokkelen, Secretary. James Cruikshank, Treasurer. 1869— TRENTON, N. J. L. Van Bokkelen, President. W. E. Crosby, Secretary. A. L. Barber, Treasurer. 1870— CLEVELAND, OHIO Daniel B, Hagar, President. A. P. Marble, Secretary. W. E. Crosby, Treasurer. NAME CHANGED TO NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION 1871— ST. LOUIS, MO. J. L. Pickard, President. W. E. Crosby, Secretary. John Hancock, Treasurer. 1872— BOSTON, MASS. E. E. White, President. S. H. White, Secretary. John Hancock, Treasurer. 1873— ELMIRA, N. Y. B. G. Northrop, President. S. H. White, Secretary. John Hancock, Treasurer. 1874— DETROIT, MICH. S. H. White, President. A. P. Marble, Secretary. John Hancock, Treasurer. 187s— MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. W. T. Harris, President. M. R. Abbott, Secretary. A. P. Marble, Treasurer. 1876— BALTIMORE, MD. W. F. Phelps, President. W. D. Henkle, Secretary. A. P. Marble, Treasurer. 1877— LOUISVILLE, KY. M. A. Newell, President. W. D. Henkle, Secretary. J. Ormond Wilson, Treasurer. 1878 — No session. 1879— PHILADELPHIA, PA. John Hancock, President. W. D. Henkle, Secretary. J. Ormond Wilson, Treasurer. 1880— CHAUTAUQUA, N. Y. J. Ormond Wilson, President. W. D. Henkle, Secretary. E. T. Tappan, Treasurer. 188 1— ATLANTA, GA. James H. Smart, President. W. D. Henkle, Secretary. E. T. Tappan, Treasurer. 1882— SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. G. J. Orr, President. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. H. S. Tarbell, Treasurer. 1883— SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. E. T. Tappan, President. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. N. A. Calkins, Treasurer. CALENDAR OF MEETINGS II 1884— MADISON, WIS. Thomas W. Bicknell, President. H. S. Tarbell, Secretary. N. A. Calkins, Treasurer. 188s— SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. F. Louis Soldan, President. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. N. A. Calkins, Treasurer. 1886— TOPEKA, KAN. N. A. Calkins, President. W. E. Sheldon, Secretary. E. C. Hewett, Treasurer. 1887— CHICAGO, ILL. W. E. Sheldon, President. J. H. Canfield, Secretary. E. C. Hewett, Treasurer. 1888— SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. Aaron Gove, President. J. H. Canfield, Secretary. E. C. Hewett, Treasurer. 1889— NASHVILLE, TENN. Albert P. Marble, President, J. H. Canfield, Secretary. E. C. Hewett, Treasurer. 1890— ST. PAUL, MINN. J. H. Canfield, President. W. R. Garrett, Secretary. E. C. Hewett, Treasurer. 1891— TORONTO, ONT. W. R. Garrett, President. E. H. Cook, Secretary. J. M. Greenwood, Treasurer. 1892— SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y. E. H. Cook, President. R. W. Stevenson, Secretary. J. M. Greenwood, Treasurer. 1893— CHICAGO, ILL. (International Congress of Education.) Albert G. Lane, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. J. M. Greenwood, Treasurer. 1894— ASBURY PARK, N. J. Albert G. Lane, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. J. M. Greenwood, Treasurer. 1895— DtNVER, COLO. Nicholas Murray Butler, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. I. C. McNeill, Treasurer. 1896— BUFFALO, N. Y. Newton C. Dougherty, President, Irwin Shepard, Secretary. I. C. McNeill, Treasurer. 1897— MILWAUKEE, WIS. Charles R. Skinner, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. I. C. McNeill, Treasurer 1898— WASHINGTON, D. C. J. M. Greenwood, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. 1. C. McNeill, Treasurer. 1899— LOS ANGELES, CAL. E. Oram Lyte, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. I. C. McNeill, Treasurer. i9oa-CHARLESTON, S. C. Oscar T. Corson, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. Carroll G. Pearse, Treasurer. 1901— DETROIT, MICH. James M. Green, President. Irwin Shepard Secretary. L. C. Greenlee, Treas rer. 1902— MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. William M. Beardshear, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. Charles H. Keyes, Treasurer. 1903— BOSTON, MASS. CHARLfes W. Eliot, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. W. M. Davidson, Treasurer. 1904— ST. LOUIS, MO. John W. Cook, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. McHenry Rhoads, Treasurer. 1 90s— ASBURY PARK and OCEAN GROVE, N. J. William H. Maxwell, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. James W. Crabtree, Treasurer. 1906 — No session. 1907— LOS ANGELES, CAL. Nathan C. Schaeffer, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. J. N. Wilkinson, Treasurer. NAME CHANGED TO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION. OF THE UNITED STATES 1908— CLEVELAND, OHIO Edwin G. Cooley, President. Irwin Shepard, Secretary. Arthur H. Chamberlain, Treasurer. NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES OFFICERS FOR 1907-8 GENERAL ASSOCIATION Edwin G. Cooley President Chicago, 111. Irwin Shepard Secretary Winona, Minn. Arthur H. Chamberlain. Treasurer Pasadena, Cal. VICE-PRESIDENTS Nathan C. Schaeffer, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Harrisburg, Pa. William H. Elson, Superintendent of Schools Cleveland, Ohio. Charles H. Judd, Professor of Psychology, Yale University New Haven, Conn. H. A. UsTRUD, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Pierre, S. Dak. J. F. Stillwell, Superintendent of Public Schools Phoenix, Ariz. Joseph H. Hill, President of State Normal Schools Emporia, Kans. W. A. Clark, Professor of Psychology, State Normal School Kearney, Neb. Walter M. Kern, President of State Manual Training School Ellendale, N. Dak. Wilbur F. Gordy, Superintendent of Schools Springfield, Mass, J. T. Kingsbury, President of University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah. Elmer Ellsworth Robey, Superintendent of County Schools Kokomo, Ind. James H. Baker, President of University of Colorado Boulder, Colo. BOARD OF TRUSTEES Carroll G. Pearse Milwaukee, Wis Term expires July, 1908 James M. Greenwood, Secretary Kansas City, Mo Term expires July, 1909 Nicholas Murray Butler, Chairman New York, N. Y Term expires July, 1910 Henry B. Brown Valparaiso, Ind Term expires July, 1911 Edwin G. Cooley Chicago, 111 Ex officio EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Edwin G. Cooley President Chicago, 111. Nathan C. Schaeffer First Vice-President Harrisburg, Pa. Arthur H. Chamberlain Treasurer Pasadena, Cal. Nicholas Murray Butler Chairman Board of Trustees New York, N. Y. W. T. Harris Member by Election Washington. D. C. Irwin Shepard. Secretary Winona, Minn. BOARD OF DIRECTORS Directors ex officio Edwin G. Cooley, Chicago, 111. Arthur H. Chamberlain, Pasadena, Cal. Nathan C. Schaeffer, Harrisburg, Pa. Nicholas Murray Butler, New York, N. Y. Irwin Shepard, Winona, Minn. Life Directors Bicknell, Thomas W., Providence, R. I. Board of Education. Nashville, Tenn. Brown, Elmer Ellsworth, Washington, D. C. Butler, Nicholas Murray, New York, N. Y. Canfield, James H., New York, N. Y. *CooK, E. H.. Madison. Wis. Cook, John W., DeKalb, 111. Corson, Oscar T., Columbus, Ohio Eliot, Charles W., Cambridge, Mass. * Deceased. Lyte, Eliphalet Oram, Millersville, Pa. Marshall, T. Marcellus, Stouts Mills, W. Va. Maxwell, William H., New York, N. Y. Parker, Charles I.. Chicago, 111. PiCKARD, Josiah L., Los Angcles, Cal. Pike Joshua, Jerseyville, 111. Schaeffer, Nathan C, Harrisburg, Pa. Skinner, Charles R., Watertown, N. Y. ♦SoLDAN, F. Louis, St. Louis, Mo. DIRECTORS 13 Life Directors— c^5^-oo $22,350 . 00 . From railroads: Southern Pacific $3,812.00 San Pedro, Los Angeles, & Salt Lake Ry 22.00 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Ry 28.00 3,862 .00 Total from Los Angeles Convention $26,212 . 00 From Memberships, Washington Meeting of Department of Superintendence i,354,oo From Secretary's oflSce during the year: Membership fees $ 9,610.00 Enrollment fees 432 . 00 Exchange 11 . 29 Sale of back volumes 585.11 Sale of committee reports, etc 215 . 73 $10,854.13 From interest on Permanent Fund 6,742-60 From Royalty on Sale of Reports of Committees of Ten and Fifteen 56. 75 From interest on deposits in First National Bank of Chicago 238.81 Total receipts for year $47,938 . 72 DISBURSEMENTS Board of Trustees: For investment $10,000.00 For expenses 384 . 28 . . $10,384.28 Executive Committee expenses: President $341-75 Fhst-Vice President 20. 20 Treasurer 373.05 Chairman Board of Trustees 98.35 Member by election 282 . 25 , ^ $1,115.60 General Secretary's office: Salary of Secretary $4,000.00 Postage 2,069-25 Telegrams 187. 10 Freight and express 129. 52 Clerical services 2,339-33 Exchange 3.91 Stationery and office supplies 201 . 35 TraveUng „4.63 *^ent 600.00 Miscellaneous. 46.65 ^ $10,356.74 20 TREASURER'S REPORT 21 Printing: Volumes of Proceedings (8,500 volumes) $6,241 . 34 Yearbook (5,500 copies) gg- .^ Reprints from volume ' ' Special reports, extra editions 187 8 Executive Committee Bulletins 1272 fi Miscellaneous 'c6? 2 $9,920.29 Express and freight volumes and reports jj 267.15 Distribution of volumes and reports 52 686 Miscellaneous Special appropriations: Committee of Seventeen on Preparation of Teachers. Committee on Moral Education Committee on Exceptional Children Committee on Shortage of Teachers Committee on Industrial Education V.30 00 148.81 497 10 180 30 202 02 Stationery $47. 70 Telegrams 14. 19 Miscellaneous 1,624.21 $2,953.68 $1,058.23 Annual Convention: Department expenses $450. 16 State directors and managers 404.59 Clerical services: Registration bureau 920.65 Stenographers and typewriter operators 477 . 28 $2,232.68 Badges for Department of Superintendence, Washington Meeting $ 206 . 25 Printing:' Programs $ 330.00 Miscellaneous 44 • 50 $ 374.50 $1,686.10 Unclassified disbursements: Legal services in re. railroad rates (John B. Pine) $i,i45 • 73 Legal services and expenses attending Los Angeles convention ....'. 1,230. 29 Bonds of Secretary and Treasurer 50.00 Auditing books of Secretary and Treasurer 30.00 Refund to Permanent Fund of premium payments to Treasurer 1,112. 50 Desk room at Lo§ Angeles and validation expenses 1,500. 00 Miscellaneous: Press clippings $56 • 5° Refunds of duplicate payments 78 . 00 Dating stamps 71-75 . Purchase reports Committees of Ten and Fifteen 6- 00 Refund to J. N. Wilkin.son i2-oo 22425 $ 5,274-77 Total disbursements for year S45.581 • la 22 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION SUMMARY Receipts Balance brought forward from the Treasurer's report for year ending June 30, 1907 % 2,480.43 Receipts for year July i, 1907, to June 30, 1908 45,458. 29 $47,938.72 Disbursements Amount transferred to Permanent Fund, as per vouchers Nos. 190, 191 $10,000.00 Total expeiises for the year 3S.s8i . 12 $45,581 . 12 Balance in treasury, June 30, igo8 $2,357.60 We, the undersigned Trustees of the National Education Association, hereby approve the above Report of Arthur H. Chamberlain, Treasurer. Nicholas Murray Butler, Chairman James M. Greenwood Henry B. Brovs^n Carroll G. Pearse Board of Trustees November 18, 1908 Board of Trustees , National Education Association of the United States. Gentlemen: We have audited the books and accounts of the National Education Association of the United States, kept by the Secretary, Irwin Shepard, and the Treasurer, Arthur H. Chamberlain, for the year ending June 30, 1908, and compared them with the relative vouchers and cheques, and find the books to be correct. We compared the Treasurer's records with those kept by the Secretary and find them to be in accord. We annex herewith a statement of the Receipts and Disbursements for the year under review, which we have checked with the books, and we certify it to be in accordance therewith. Yours very truly, The International Audit Company By (Signed) John McLaren ' President (Signed) Robert Nelson Certified Public Accountant Manager i REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES 23 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL EDUCA- TION ASSOCIATION FOR THE YEAR JULY i, 1907, TO JULY i, 1908 Cleveland, Ohio, July i, 1908 To the Board oj Directors of the National Education Association: The Board of Trustees of the National Education Association has the honor to submit the following report on the Permanent Fund of the Association for the year ending June 30, 1908. The amounts collected as income of the Permanent Fund and the disposition made of the income are shown in the following Income Account. The changes in the investments held for the Permanent Fund, including payments received on account of principal and new investments, are shown in the following Principal Account. The present state of the investments held for the Permanent Fund is shown in the following Statement of Securities held for the Permanent Fund. The Permanent Fund amounts at this date to $170,028.00, having been increased during the year under review by $9,928.00, as follows: Amount of the Permanent Fund, July i, 1907 $160,100.00 Transferred from the Treasurer, in accordance with Sec. 7 of the Act of Incorporation $10,000.00 Transferred from the Treasurer to cover adjustments of premiums and discounts on former investments (see Statement B) 1,112.50 $11,112.50 Less Net reduction in inventory value of Securities, result- ing from scheduling them at cost instead of at face value $1,112.50 Expenses incident to investments, charged to principal (see Principal Account) 72 . 00 $ 1,184.50 $9,928.00 Amount of the Permanent Fund, June 30, 1908. . . $170,028.00 The item of $1,112.50 is the result of action taken by the Trustees providing that here- after all securities held for the Permanent Fund shall be entered in the statements of account not at the par value of such securities, but at the price actually paid for the same. Heretofore it has been customary to carry the securities held for the Permanent Fund at their par value and to treat any premium or discount arising in connection with the purchase of securities as either a charge upon, or an addition to, income. The Trustees believe that the policy now adopted is more business-like and sets out the state of the Fund with greater accuracy. In adjusting the statements of account in this regard, it became necessary to recover from the Treasurer, as shown in Statement B, the sum of $1,112.50, being the excess of discounts over premiums heretofore transferred to him by the Trustees. Statement A shows the net income of the property at No. 4762 Lake Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, to which title has been taken by the Trustees under proceedings for foreclosure of mortgage. This property is the item reported in the last annual report as the Hord 24 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Mortgage Certificate, valued at $5,500. The Trustees do not intend to hold the property as an investment, but to offer it for sale whenever satisfactory terms can be had. The operations of the year and the present state of the Permanent Fund are set out in detail in the accounts and statements which follow. INCOME ACCOUNT RECEIPTS $ 7,000 St. Louis and San Francisco R. R. Co. refunding gold bonds, 1951, at 4 per cent.. . $ 280.00 15,000 Terminal Association of St. Louis, general refunding sinking fund gold bonds, 1953, at 4 per cent 600 . 00 20,000 Pittsburgh, Lake Erie and West Virginia System refunding gold bonds, 1941, at 4 per cent *. 800 . 00 10,000 Oregon Short Line R. R. Co. guaranteed refunding gold bonds, 1929, at 4 per cent. 200.00 8,000 City of New York registered gold bonds, 1957, at 4^ per cent 76 . 96 2,500 Village of Morgan Park, Illinois, gold bonds, it)ii * , 1,000 Village of Morgan Park, Illinois, gold bonds, 1913 j 2,000 Lemont, Illinois, school bonds, at 5 per cent ^ 100.00 10,000 Chicago drainage bonds, 1916 ) „, . , . , J r at 4 per cent 2,000 . 00 40,000 Chicago dramage bonds, 191 7 ) 9,000 West Chicago park bonds, 1918 \ ^ ^ , \XT ^ r>^^■ 1 u J h at 4 per cent 760 . 00 10,000. West Chicago park bonds, 1919 ) 5,000 Bond and mortgage on 5136 Hibbard Ave., Chicago (Ritchie), 1908, at 5 per cent. 250.00 5,000 Bond and mortgage on 5603 Madison Ave., Chicago (Lewis), 1909, at 5 per cent. 250.00 11,000 Bond and mortgage on 5239-41 Cornell Ave., Chicago (Dickinson), 1909, at 4^ per cent 495 . 00 Interest to date of payment of principal on bond and mortgage on 5526-28 Jefferson Ave., Chicago, $10,000 at 5 per cent $506.98 Interest to date of payment of principal on Lemont, III., school bonds, $500 at 5 per cent 12 . 50 Interest on cash balances in First Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago 1 78 . 80 Net income of property 4762 Lake Ave., Chicago (see Statement A) 330.24 ^^— ^"^ 1 ,028 . 52 $6,997 98 DISBURSEMENTS Accrued /interest on $8,000 of City of New York 4^ per cent, bonds $ 15.00 Fee of First Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago, 111., on investment of $18,000, i of I per cent , 45 • 00 Annual fee of First Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago, 111., for care of principal of Permanent Fund — J of i per cent 195-38 Net income, paid to the Treasurer of the National Education Asso- ciation 6,742.60 ^^^""■"■" $6,997.98 PRINCIPAL ACCOUNT RECEIPTS Cash on hand for investment, July i, 1907 $ 6,600 . 00 Mortgage on 5526-28 Jefferson Ave., Chicago (Wallace), paid Feb- ruary 15, 1908 10,000.00 Lemont, 111., school bonds, paid December 2, 1907 500.00 Received from Treasurer of the National Education Association, to cover adjustment of premiums and discounts on former investments (see Statement B) 1,112.50 Received from Treasurer of the National Education Association 10,000.00 """•"""■" $28,212.50 DISBURSEMENTS $10,000 Oregon Short Line R. R. Co. guaranteed refunding 4 per cent, gold bonds, 1929, $8,000 at 89 — $2,000 at 88i $8,895 . 00 8,000 City of New York registered 4i per cent, gold bonds, 1957, at io6| $8,510.00 9,000 City of New York 4J per cent, gold bonds, 1957, at 109 9,810.00 Accrued interest on $9,000 New York City bonds 49. 50 Fee of First Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago, 111., on investment of $9,000 — i of I per cent 22 . 50 Cash on hand for investment, June 30, 1908 925 . 50 ""^^mmmm^ $28,212.50 REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES STATEMENT OF SECURITIES HELD FOR THE PERMANENT FUND JUNE 30, 1908 MUNICIPAL AND SCHOOL BONDS Par Value $ 8,000 9,000 2,500 1,000 2,000 Security City of New York registered gold bonds, due November i, 1957 City of New York Gold bonds, due No- vember I, 1957 Village of Morgan Park, 111., gold bonds, due November i, 191 1 Village of Morgan Park, 111., gold bonds, due July i, 1913 Lemont, 111., school bonds, Nos. 22, 24, 30, and 32, payable $500 December i, yearly Sanitary District of Chicago, drainage bonds, Nos. 24,516-24,525, due Decem ber I, 1916 Sanitary District of Chicago drainage bonds, Nos. 24,591-24,625, 24,636- 24,640, due December i, 1917 West Chicago park bonds, Nos. 1,101- i,T09, due April i, 1918 West Chicago Park bonds, Nos. 615, 629- 631, 1,243-1,248, due April 1, 1919.. . Acquired Interest Book Value 9,000 10,000 Feb. 29, 1908 Jime 12, 1908 [1895 1897 XQ05 1904 July 31, 1906 July 31, 1906 4i% May and Nov. 4i% May and Nov. ArWo May and Nov. Arh% Jan. and July 5% June and Dec. 4% June and Dec. 4% June and Dec. 4% Apr. and Oct. 4% Apr. and Oct. 18,510.00 9,810.00 a,soo.oo 1,000.00 2 ooo.oo 10,000.00 40,000.00 9,045.00 10,075.00 891.500 $92,940 00 RAILROAD BONDS Par Value Security Acquired Interest Book Value $ 7,000 15,000 St. Louis and San Francisco R. R. Co. refunding gold bonds, Nos. 47,435. 47,437, 47,537, 49,oi2, 49.670, 57,373, 57,514. due July.i, I95I. •••••; Termmal As.sociation of St. Louis gen- eral refunding sinking-fund gold bonds, Nos. 16,311-16,325 due January 1, Jan. 3, 1907 Jan. 30, 1905 Jan. 13, 1906 Feb. 3. 1908 4% Jan. and July 4% Jan. and July 4% May and Nov. 4% June and Dec. % 5,775 --JO 15,050.00 20,000 Pittsburgh, Lake Erie & West Virginia System refunding gold bonds, Nos. 13,496-13,500, 21,236-21,250, due No- vember 1 1941 19,942.50 10,000 Oregon Short Line R. R. Co. guaranteed refunding gold bonds, Nos. 4,013- 4,017, 4,025-4,027, 4,976, 13.810, due December 1, 1929 8,895.00 $52,000 $49,662.50 REAL ESTATE MORTGAGES Par Value Security Acquired Interest Book Value $ 5.000 Bond and mortgage on 5136 Hibbard Ave., Chicago, 111. (Ritchie), dueNovem- 1899 1900 1904 5% May and Nov. 5% Jan. and July aWo Jan. and July $ 5,000.00 5,000 Bond and mortgageTon 5603 Madison Ave., Chicago, 111. (Lewis), due July 1, 5,000.00 11,000 Bond and mortgage on 5239-5241 Cor- nell Ave., Chicago, 111. (Dickinson), due January 1, 1909 11,000.00 $21,000 $21,000.00 REAL ESTATE $5,500 4762 Lake Ave., Chicago, 111. (Hord property) 1907 Rent $30 monthly Total $170,000 Cash on hand awaiting investment. Total $5,500.00 $925-50 $170,028.00 26 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION STATEMENT A PROPERTY AT 4762 LAKE AVENUE (hORD PROPERTY^ CHICAGO, ILLINOIS RECEIPTS Rents collected by receiver pending foreclosure S590 • 00 Rents collected by First Trust and Savings Bank of Chicago, Illinois 120.00 DISBURSEMENTS Receiver's charges $ 52.68 Attorney for receiver 10 . 00 Master's deed 2 .00 Recording deed i 05 Title guarantee policy, No. 146,964 31 oS Fire insurance policy 24.00 Repairs 43 • So Taxes and special assessments 209.48 Fee of First Trust and Savings Bank on $120 rents collected 6 . 00 Net income STATEMENT B PREMIUM AND DISCOUNT ACCOUNT $710. ©o $379-76 $330.24 Date Item Dr. Cr. January 30, 1905 Premium on $15,000 Terminal Association of St. Louis 4 per cent bonds $ 50.00 January 13, 1906 Discount on $20,000 Pittsburgh, Lake Erie & West Virginia System 4 per cent, bonds $ 57-50 1,225.00 July 31, 1906 January 3, 1907 Premium on $19,000 West Chicago Park 4 per cent, bonds Discount on $7,000 St. Louis and San Francisco R. R. Co. 120.00 Balance 1,112.50 $1,282.50 $1,282.50 Respectfully submitted, Nicholas Murray Butler, Chairman James M, Greenwood Henry B. Brown Carroll G. Pearse Trustees The above and foregoing is a correct statement of the account of the funds of the National Education Association of the United States from July i, 1907, to July i, 1908, as the same appears on the books of this bank. First Trust and Savings Bank By Louis Boisot Trust Officer CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINER OF SECURITIES Chicago, III., June 17, 1908 To the Board of Directors of the National Education Association: Gentlemen: I have this day examined the securities belonging to the permanent fund of the National Education Association in custody of the First Trust and Savings Bank, Chicago, and find all the bonds and securities named above, in their possession. (Signed) Orville T. Bright, Examiner JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE FORTY-SIXTH ANNUAL CONVENTION NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES CLEVELAND, O., JUNE 29— JULY 3, 1908 SUNDAY SERVICES In response to an invitation by the Executive Committee of the National Education Association the following special services on educational topics were held by the pastors of the various churches of Cleveland on Sunday, June 28, as an appropriate introduction to convention week: "The Twentieth Century; A Century of Education" — Rev. Dr. Dan F. Bradley, Pilgrim Congregational Church. "Education and Religion" — Rev. Frank DuMoulin, Dean, Trinity Cathedral (Protestant Episcopal). "Religion in the Public Schools" — Rev. Worth M. Tippy, Epworth Memorial Church. "Mind, as the Servant of Personality" — Rev. Nathaniel M. Pratt, Plymouth Congrega- tional Church. "The School Teacher in the Republic" — Rev. Charles Bayard Mitchell, First Methodist Episcopal Church. "Education as a Factor in National Life" — Rev. Dr. Charles A. Eaton, Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. "Character in Education" — Rev. William McMahon, Saint Bridget's (Roman Catholic) Church. "The Catholic Idea of Education"— Rev. Gilbert P. Jennings, St. Agnes (Roman Catholic) Church. "Moral Education" — Rev. Minot O. Simons, Unity Church. "Religion in the PubUc Schools" — Rabbi S. Margolies, Anshe Emeth Congregation. "The Public School, the Hope of Democracy"— Rev. N. W. Stroup, Windermere Metho- dist Episcopal Church. "The Three H's in Education"— Rev. Charles H. Lemmon, North Congregational Church. "Education, a Power" — Rev. J. J. Tisdall, Crawford Road Christian Church. "Jesus Christ, the Great Educator"— Rev. Lee H. Richardson, Mayflower Presbyterian Church. "Education and Its True Aim"— Rev. E. D. Salkeld, Lakewood Christian Church. "The Value of Knowledge "—Rev. H. C. Hadley, Cedar Avenue Memorial Lutheran Church. "The Quest of Truth"— Rev. O. Badgley, Peari Street Methodist Episcopal Church. "The Highest Education"— Rev. Harvey D. Fleming, Detroit Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. "Hearing as One Who Is Taught"— Rev. Charies L. Parker, First Congregational Church, Collinwood. "The Present Relationship of Educadon and Chrisrianity"— Dr. Charles F. Thwing, President of Western Reserve University and Adelbert College, Euclid Avenue Con- gregational Church. "At the Feet of the Great Teacher"— Rev. E. B. Bagby, Franklin Circle Church of Christ. 27 28 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION "The Relation of the School to Life"— Rev. R. W. Bagnall, St Andrew's Episcopal Church. "Freedom thru Truth"— Rev. Millard Brelsford, East Cleveland Baptist Church. "The Method of the Master Teacher" — Rev. Henry Seymour Brown, First Presbyterian Church, East Cleveland. "Jesus Christ, the Master Mind in Psycho-Physical Development" (morning); "The Bible as a Textbook for Children" (evening) — Rev. R. M. Church, St. John's Protes- tant Episcopal Church. "Educational Ends" — Rev. S. DeMiller, Glenville Disciple Church. "The Missing Factor in Our Public-School System" — Rev. Harold B. Ernsberger, Calvary English Lutheran Church. "True Education, Some Things It Implies" — Rev. George Extence, Kinsman Congrega- tional Church. "Principles of Life Which Education Should Develop" — Rev. Milford W. Foshay, Madi- son Avenue Baptist Church. "The Complete Life, or Education Plus Religion" — Rev. Charles H. Haucr'ir First Methodist Episcopal Church Mission. "Our Educational System the Key to Our National Progress" — ^: . I'. J. Johnson, Methodist Episcopal Church. "Christian Training a Necessar}' Element of True Culture"- -Ke. Orin A. Keach, Lake- wood United Presbyterian Church. "Education in Its Relation to the New Patriotism" — Rev, T. E. Lewis, .\nh\v od Avenue Congregational Church. "The Moral Education of the Child" — Rev. Wilbur C. Mickey, Bethany Presbyterian Church. "The Liberating Power of Knowledge" — Rev. F. J. Monschke, Fremont Street Baptist Church. "Teaching and Training" — Rev. F. W. Mueller, First German Methodist Church. "The Acquiring of Knowledge and Its Use" — Rev. W. A. Myers Scranton Avenue Free Baptist Church. "Education the Basic Principle of Christianity" — Rev. J. H. Neuhauser Bethany Lutheran Church. "The Mind and How to Use It"— Rev. R. H. Park, Second United Presbyterian Church. "The Highest Education" — Rev. Gerard F. Patterson, Church of the Incarnation. "Our Public Schools" — Rev. Luman H. Royce, Westminster Presbyterian Church. "Drawing Some Lessons from the National Education Association" — Rev. W. L. Lemon, Superior Avenue Baptist Church. "The Value of an Education" — Rev, J. Grant Walter, Hough Avenue Reformed Church. "The Public School — Its Triumph and Its Task"— Rev. Thomas C. Lawrence, Fidelity Free Baptist Church, "Some Present-Day Tendencies in Education" — Rev. H, F. Stillwell, First Baptist Church. "Education and the Religious Life" — Rev. R. M. Freshwater, D.D., Woodland Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. "Jesus Christ, the Teacher" — Rev. Albert Ehrgott. Cedar Avenue Bapdst Church. "Necessity of Higher Education to the Enjoyment of Life" — Rev. T. Alfred Fleming, Miles Avenue Christian Church. "The Teacher's Influence in the Church Life of Americans"— Rev. M. L. Buckley, Church of Christ (Disciple), Collinwood "The Banefulness of Ignorance "—Rev. H C. Bailey, Andoch Baptist Church. "Educadon as a Moral and Religious Factor"— Rev. John H. Blackburn, Lakewood Methodist Episcopal Church. "Intellectual Integrity "—Rev. Charies Steele Davidson, St. Mark's Episcopal Church. "The Highest Education" — Rev. Thos. S. Mc Williams, Calvary Presbyterian Church. "The Church and Our Pubhc Schools"— Rev. W. B. Slutz, Franklin Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. "The Religious Element in Education"— Rev. Walter R, Breed, D.D., St.'Paul's Church. JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS 2q OPENING SESSION.— Monday Afternoon, June 29 The forty-sixth annual convention opened in the Hippodrome, at 2:30 p. m., with music by Signor A. Liberati's band. Invocation by Rev. Paul F. Sutphen, D.D., of the Second Presbyterian Church. Hon. Samuel Mather, president of the Citizens' Committee of Cleveland, who pre- sided welcomed the Association. In the absence of Mayor Tom L. Johnson, a welcome on behalf of the city was given by Dr. Harris R. Cooley, director of charities and corrections of the city of Cleveland. Dr. Charles S. Howe, president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce and president of the Case School of Applied Science, extended a welcome on behalf of the business and educational interests of Cleveland. A Boys' Chorus of five hundred voices, under the direction of J. Powell Jones, san^^ the "Soldier's Chorus" from Faust and the "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria Rusticana. Led by the chorus the audience joined in singing "The Light of Learning," a song, words bv William Ganson Rose, music by Albert Ross Davison of Cleveland, dedicated to the National Education Association. In the absence of President Edwin G. Cooley, Nathan C. Schaeffer of Pennsvlvania, first vice-president of the Association, was introduced by Chairman Mather and took charge of the meeting. William O. Thompson, president of Ohio State University, Columbus, was introduced and responded to the addresses of welcome, on behalf of the Association. The following committee on resolutions was appointed by Acting President Schaeffer: COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS Howard J. Rogers, Albany, N. Y. Edgar H. Mark, Louisville, Kv. George M. Philips, West Chester, Pa. David B. Johnson, Rock Hill, S. C. Orviile T. Bright, Chicago, 111. J. E. Dyche, Guthrie, Okla. Charles E. Chadsey, Denver, Colo. The following resolution, submitted to the Association by the Board of Directors, was adopted by unanimous vote: Resolved, that in the enforced absence of their President, Superintendent Edwin G. Cooley, the members of the National Education Association testify to their affectionate regard for him, send him cordial greeting across the sea, and confidently look forward to his complete recovery of health and strength. The remainder of the session being under the auspices of the National Council of Education, the gavel was surrendered to Joseph Swain, Swarthmore, Pa., president of that body. An address on "Educational Progress for the Year" was delivered by Charles F. Thwing, president of Western Reserve University, Cleveland, O. SECOND SESSION.— Monday Evening, June 29 The session was called to order by Vice-President W. H. Elson, superintendent of schools, Cleveland. Invocation by Rev. Charles A. Eaton, D.D., of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. Music by the Ionic Quartet: H. W. Whitney, V. V. Woboril, T. G. Protheroe, B. W. Willard: "Night Witchery" Storch " When the Bird a Pilfering Goes" Kremser "Mammy Loo" C^rtwrighi The annual presidential address was given by Acting President Nathan C. Schaeffer, upon the subject "Education for Avocation." An address on "The Problem of Vocational Education in London" was given by Cloudlesley S. H. Brereton, divisional inspector for the County Council, London, England. 30 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Owing to Mr. Brereton's illness, part of the address was read by Howard J. Rogers, first assistant commissioner of education, Albany, N. Y. Violin solo — "Souvenir de Hayden," by Sol Marcosson, of Cleveland. An address on "Adaptation of the Schools to Industry and Efficiency" was given by Andrew S. Draper, commissioner of education of the state of New York. THIRD SESSION.— Tuesday Evening, June 30 Vice-President James H. Baker, president of the University of Colorado, presided. Invocation by Rev. Gilbert P. Jennings, of St. Agnes Church. Music — Mendelssohn's "Quartet in D Major," by the Philharmonic String Quartet: Sol Marcosson, first violin; Carl Dueringer, second violin; James D. Johnston, viola; Charles Heydler, cello. Acting President Schaeffer announced the following Nominating Committee in accord- ance with sections 3 and 4, Article 2, of the By-Laws: COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS Ben Blewett, of Missouri, Chairman Alabama J. W. Abercrombie Nebraska Geo. L. Towne Arizona A. H. McClure Nevada Romanzo Adams Arkansas Geo. B. Cook New Hampshire H. E. Walker California J. F. Chamberlain New Jersey Miss L. A. Doren Colorado Z. X. Snyder New Mexico (Vacant) Connecticut Chas. H. Keyes New York H. J. Rogers Delaware Bird T. Baldwin North. Carolina J. T. Foust District Columbia . . . W. T. Harris North Dakota Neil C. Macdonald Florida Miss Clem Hampton Ohio J. A. Shawan Georgia C. B. Gibson Oklahoma David R. Boyd Idaho S. Belle Chamberlain Oregon A. E. Breece Illinois W. H. Campbell Pennsylvania M. G. Brumbaugh Indiana R. J. Aley Rhode' Island W. H. Holmes Iowa Wm. Aldrich South Dakota II. A. Ustrud Kansas E. T. Fairchild South Carolina D. B. Johnson Kentucky H. H. Cherry Tennessee H. W. Louis Louisiana Catherine Kelly Texas L. E. Wolfe Maine (Vacant) ' Utah Geo. A. Eaton Maryland. J. H. Van Sickle Vermont (Vacant) Massachusetts Wm. E. Hatch Virginia J. L. Jarman Michigan Luther L. Wright Washington H. M. Shafer Minnesota J. W. Olsen West Virginia A. J. Wilkinson Mississippi M. Rose Wisconsin Chas. McKenny Missouri Ben Blewett Wyoming S. S. Stockwell' Montana W. F. Book Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, was introduced and addressed the convention on the subject of "Conservation of the National Resources of the United States." "The Function of Education in a Democracy" was the subject of an address by Martin G. Brumbaugh, superintendent of schools, Philadelphia, Pa. Music by the Philharmonic String Quartet: "Andante Cantabile" Tschaikowsky " Serenade Badine " Gahriele Marie Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, spoke on "Negro Education and the Nation." FOURTH SESSION. — Wednesday Afternoon, July i The session was called to order at 2:30 o'clock by Vice-President N. C. Schaeffer. Invocation by Rev. Charles Bayard Mitchell, D.D., of the First Methodist Episcopal Church. JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS ,1 Music by the Boys' Chorus: Holy City Adams ^illarney Balse Miss Sarah Louise Arnold, dean of Simmons College, Boston, Mass., read a paper on "Reconcilement of Cross-Purposes in Education of Women." Miss Jane Addams of Hull House, Chicago, spoke on "The School and the Immigrant Child." Violin solo by Louis Rich: "Adoration" Borowski "Zigeunerweisen" Saraste "The School and the Practice of Ethics" was the subject of a paper by Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, principal of Chicago Normal School. FIFTH SESSION.— Friday Morning, July 3 The closing session of the convention was called to order at 9:30 a. m. by Vice-President Schaefifer. Invocation by Rev. Frank DuMoulin, LL.D., of Trinity Cathedral. Violoncello solo by Charles Heydler: Andante from Concerto Golterman Capriccio Goetz Andrew F. West, dean of the graduate school, Princeton University, spoke on "The Personal Touch in Teaching. " Vocal Solo by Miss Delta A. Harris: Der Tod und das Madchen Schubert Blackbird Song Cyril Scott William H. Maxwell, superintendent of schools of New York City, delivered the closing address of the convention, on "The Personal Power of the Teacher in Public-School Work." Vice-President Schaeffer: The last three years have indeed been critical years for the National Education Association. During those three years it has passed thru fire and earthquake, it has faced the perplexities of Congress and of disturbed railroad condi- tions. I rejoice in the fact that Congress has given the Association a new charter guarantee- ing the security of its invested funds and the continuation of its usefulness. The National Council of Education has been rejuvenated and enlarged. The various departments have grown in popularity and effectiveness, and the general sessions of the Association have taxed the capacity of the largest auditoriums. The city of Cleveland has surpassed itself and all of • its former efforts in the hospitality and the provisions for meetings extended to this Asso- ciation. I cannot refrain from expressing my profound gratitude to persons in all parts of the United States for helping us in the last three years to bring the Association thru its critical period into the new era which has just dawned. I have very great pleasure in passing the gavel over to the President-elect, Lorenzo D. Harvey of Menomonie, Wis., and I bespeak for him the same cordial, loyal support that has been accorded to all of his predecessors by the members of the National Education Association. President Harvey: Members of the Association, I wish to express to you as well as I am able, my sense of the honor extended to me as a humble member of this Association, chosen as your servant to render such service as I may during the ensuing year; and I assure you that with the sense of appreciation of the honor is an equal sense of the appre- ciarion of the responsibilities that go with it. This sense of appreciation and of responsi- bility grows out of a somewhat intimate knowledge of the work— the magnificent work done by this Association, by the able men who have preceded me in this position, emphasized by the high standards that have been set at this great meeting of the Association.^ I regard this Association as the most potent influence in the shaping, molding, and directing of the 32 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION educational forces of this country. In its ranks are the men and women who are the leaders of the educational world. In our meetings — in the general sessions, in the departments, in the reports of committees — we have considered, discussed, and brought out conclusions from which come clearer ideas, more definite purposes, higher standards,, better organizations for the educational forces of this country. In such an organization as this, standing for these things, there is no place for private or personal ambition or petty, private interests. It is the individuals who give generous service, and that in the very highest degree, who have made this Association what it is. With such a view of this Association you may understand my sense of responsibility. I beg to say to you that whatever service I may be able to render shall be cheerfully given. And I ask — as I know I shall receive — the hearty co-operation of every member of this Association, during the short time I shall serve you, to further the ends for which it exists. After music by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Acting President Schaefifer declared the forty-sixth annual convention of the National Education Association adjourned. Irwin Shepard, Secretary I MINUTES OF ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING OF ACTIVE MEMBERS CLP:VELAND, OHIO— 12 m., Wednesday, July i, 1908 The meeting was called to order in the Old Stone Church by Vice-President Nathan C. Schaeffer. The minutes of the last meeting of active members were, upon motion, approved, without reading, as printed in the volume of Proceedings for 1907. The report of the Board of Trustees was presented, and on motion, accepted and adopted. The Treasurer, Arthur H. Chamberlain, gave a synopsis of his report. Upon motion, the Treasurer's report was accepted and adopted. Chairman Schaeffer: Consideration of the amendments to the By-Laws, proposed at the meeting of active members, July 10, 1907, is in order. The first amendment is that Article 5, section 2, of the By-Laws be amended to read: Sec. 2. The Council shall consist of one hundred and twenty members, selected from the membership of the Association. Any member of the Association identified with educa- tional work is eligible to membership in the Council. •Joseph Swain, Swarthmore, Pa.: I am in favor of increasing the membership of the Council, but I doubt the wisdom of doubling it. In a body of this character the best work is done, as a rule, with small numbers. But it is true that this Association is much larger than when the present number was determined, and that a larger membership would be more representative. I suggest that the number be either seventy-five or ninety. If we find that the larger number increases the efficiency of the Council in the work of education, a further increase can then be made. If, however, we should find a membership of one hundred and twenty not as efficient as a smaller number, it would not be so easy to decrease, as it is to increase, the number. Carroll G. Pearse, Milwaukee, Wis.: At the time of the formation of the National Council, the National Educational Association had only a few hundred members. As the Association has grown, the Council has remained at the original number. There has been a feeling for a number of years that the Council should include a larger number of the mem- bers of the Association. With this new blood and new strength added, its work can be done more effectively. This work is done thru committees whether the membership is sixty or one hundred and twenty. With the active membership of this Association run- ning into the thousands, I believe that to limit the Council to less than one hundred and twenty is to limit it unnecessarily and unwisely. For these reasons I introduced last year this amendment to double the membership of the Council, and I most earnestly hope it may prevail. I move that the amendment be adopted. Motion seconded. James M. Greenwood, Kansas City, Mo.: I believe that this movement to double the present membership is a wise one. With the larger number divided into committees it will be possible to secure a greater efficiency since more questions can be considered. Grace C. Strachan, Brooklyn, N. Y.: I wish to ask how the present Council is selected, and how the other sixty will be selected. Chairman Schaeffer: At present five are selected by the Councjl and five by the Board of Directors each year. If the number is to be increased, the method of the selection of additional members will have to be determined. The motion to amend Article 5, section 2, was then carried. Chairman Schaeffer: The second amendment is that section 3 of the same article be amended to read: 33 34 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Sec. 3. The Board of Directors shall annually elect ten members, and the Council shall elect ten members, each member to serve for six years, or until his successor is elected. Moved to adopt the amendment; seconded. Chairman Schaeffer: I should like to call attention to the fact that this amendment if adopted will increase the number gradually and that we would not at once have the full one hundred and twenty. Is this the purpose of the motion to amend ? After discussion by several members Mr. Pearse moved to amend the amendment by adding the words: At the meeting of 1908 enough additional members shall be elected in the same manner to make the total number of members one hundred and twenty. The terms of the members so elected shall expire as follows: one-sixth in one year, one-sixth in two years, one-sixth in three years, one-sixth in four years, one-sixth in five years, one-sixth in six years. Seconded. John W. Cook, DeKalb, 111.: I do not believe the motion to amend the proposed amendment is in order. According to the By-Laws it is necessary to give notice of a new amendment one year in advance. An amendment thus previously proposed cannot be changed without making it substantially a new amendment. Mr. Greenwood: It is not necessary to give notice of a change in an amendment. An amendment proposed in a previous year may be changed in any way desired by the majority of active members not contrary to the original intention and may then be adopted. Chairman Schaeffer: The chair rules that Mr. Greenwood's position is correct. Any other interpretation would enable any member by offering an amendment to prevent action for a year on an amendment duly proposed. The motion was then carried. The amendment to Article 5, section 3, as amended, was then on motion adopted. Chairman Schaeffer: The next item on the docket is a report of progress by the Committee on the Establishment of a National University in Washington, D. C, by Presi- dent Charles R. Van Hise, a member of the Committee. President Van Hise: Since President Wheeler, the chairman, and President Angell of the Committee are not present, it devolves upon me to make this report. The National Association of State Universities appointed a similar committee for a like purpose, which committee consists of President James, of Illinois State University, President Thompson, of the Ohio State University, and President Baker, of Colorado State University. It was obvious that it would be an advantage for these two committees to co-operate. They there- fore met together in Washington and agreed upon a bill, of which 1 shall read a part. (Reads sections i to 7 inclusive of Bill H. R. 19,465.) Sections 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 are concerned with the method of government under the Advisory Council and the trustees. I need not read those sections for I can state the points in a moment. The trustees are the active corporation and they will control the university. The Advisory Council has the vetoing power to the extent of suspending the action of the trustees unless the trustees again pass the same ordinance by a three- fourths vote. By this method the whole authority is finally vested in the trustees, but these trustees may be checked for a time by the Advisory Council, and the Council may bring measures before them for their instruction. It is believed that full authority should remain in one body but that great advantage could be obtained from having an Advisory Council which would represent every state in the Union. The two features in this bill to which I need to call your especial attention are that no student shall be admitted until he shall have received the degree of Master of Arts or Science, or an equivalent training. It is the purpose to create strictly a graduate university. It is believed that there is at the present time no necessity for the national government to undertake the maintenance of an undergraduate university. It is well understood by your committee that there are a num- I ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING ber of universities in this country that can maintain graduate schools. It is believed that by far the larger number of colleges and universities should not undertake to maintain graduate schools. Therefore it is proposed to make this university an advanced institution which will take the students from the colleges and universities of the country, wherever they may be, to do the advanced work. No degree, however, is to be granted. It is the purpose to encourage the local universities and the colleges and universities by giving them the oppor- tunity to confer the higher degrees, such as Doctor of Philosophy, upon their own students. For instance, if there is a college in Illinois or Ohio, let them maintain work to the point of giving training to the Master of Arts degree; let that student go to the National University and get the training which will entitle him to the degree of Master of Science, the National University will certify back to the original institution from which the student came, and the institution will grant the degrees. There is a concurrence on the part of a very large num- ber of institutions in this plan. Some few institutions that maintain strong graduate schools are doubtful about it. Chairman Schaeffer: What action do you recommend us to take today ? President Van Hise: It seems to me that the number of students for advanced work will become greater, if the great opportunities at Washington may be taken advantage of for this work. We now have students by the hundreds doing the work for Doctors of Philos- ophy, but we ought to have students by the thousands. If this bill meets with the approval of the active members present it should be approved in its principles, and the committee continued. I make that suggestion; but as a member of the committee I do not feel like making a motion. E. O. Vaile, of Illinois: I move we approve the principles of that bill and continue the committee to work in its behalf. Seconded and carried without discussion. The report of the Committee on Nominations was then presented by its chairman, Ben Blewett, of St. Louis, Mo. Mr. Blew^ett: The nominating committee met at the time appointed, 44 members being present. The following mode of procedure was agreed upon: that, credentials hav- ing been established, the roll of states should be called for nominations to the presidency and other offices; that a majority of those voting should decide the nomination; that, should more than two names be presented for any office, after a second ballot the name having the lowest number of votes should be withdrawn. Three states presented names for the presidency. On the fourth ballot, one name received a majority of the votes. Imme- diately, upon motion of the other states presenting candidates, the nomination was made unanimous. In all other cases the action of the committee was by unanimous vote. I have the honor to present the following nominations for your consideration: REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS President L. D. Harvey Menomonie, Wis. First Vice-President Edwin G. Cooley Chicago, 111. Vice-Presidents John C. Byrnes New York, N. Y. Arnold AS H. McClure Yuma, Ariz. Carleton B. Gibson Columbus, Ga. Joseph Rosier Fairmont, W. Va. Jasper L. McBrien Lincoln, Neb. George N. Philips West Chester, Pa. Benjamin F. Moore Marion, Ind. Charles Evans Ardmore, Okla. James A. Edwards Dubuque, la. Ge;orge H. Martin West Salem, Mass. Katherine L. Craig Denver Colo Treasurer Arthur H. Chamberlain Pasadena, Cal. 36 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION STATE DIRECTORS Alabama John W. Abercrombie University Arizona A. J. Matthews Tempe Arkansas George B. Cook Little Rock California Duncan MacKinnon Stockton Colorado Charles E. Chadsey Denver Connecticut Charles H. Keyes Hartford Delaware George W. Twitmyer Wilmington District of Columbia W. T. Harris Washington Florida Miss Clem Hampton Tallahassee Georgia Carleton B. Gibson Columbus Idaho Walter R. Siders Pocatello Illinois Walter R. Hatfield Chicago Indiana Thomas A. Mott Richmond Iowa Frank L. Smart Davenport Kansas John MacDonald Topeka Kentucky W. H. Bartholomew Louisville Louisiana Warren Easton New Orleans Maine Payson Smith Augusta Maryland N. Bates Stephens Annapolis Massachusetts Irving O. Palmer Newtonville Michigan David McKenzie Detroit Minnesota S. L. Heeter St. Paul Mississippi E, E. Bass Greenville Missouri John R. Kirk Kirksville Montana S. D. Largent Great Falls Nebraska Albert A. Reed Lincoln Nevada Romanzo Adams Reno New Hampshire Henry C. Morrison Concord New Jersey. John Enright Freehold New Mexico R. R. Larkin Las Vegas New York Augustus S. Downing Albany North Carolina Isaac C. Griffin SaHsbury North Dakota B. A. Dunbar Park River Ohio William McK. Vance Delaware Oklahoma E. D. Cameron Guthrie Oregon J. H. Ackerman Salem Pennsylvania Reed B. Teitrick Harrisburg Rhode Island Herbert W. Lull Newport South Carolina David B. Johnson Rock Hill South Dakota Freeman H. Hoff Mitchell Tennessee I. C. McNeill Memphis Texas Cree T. Work Denton Utah William Allison Ogden Vermont Mason S. Stone Montpelier Virginia Joseph L. Jarman Farmville Washington Edward T. Mathes Bellingham West Virginia Robert A. Armstrong Morgantown Wisconsin Charles P. Gary Madison Wyoming Archibald D. Cook Cheyenne Upon motion the Secretary was instructed to cast the ballot of the Association for the candidates named. The ballot was so cast and the nominees declared elected. The report of the Committee on Resolutions was presented by the chairman, Howard J. Rogers, Albany, N. Y., who moved its adoption. DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES The National Education Association, now holding its Forty-sixth Annual Convention in Cleveland, and representing teachers and friends of education in every state in this Union, makes the following declaration of principles and aims: I. Fully realizing that trained and skilled labor is a primary essential to the industrial and commercial welfare of the country, we cordially indorse the establishment by municipal boards of education of trade schools, industrial schools, and evening continuation schools; and further recommend that the instruction in these schools be practical and ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING _ — . ^___ "Z efficient, and have the advice and the approval of the trade interested, to the end that graduates of these schools may at once become advanced apprentices or joumevmen 2. We recommend the subordination of highly diversified and overburdened courses of study in the grades to a thorough drill in essential subjects; and the sacrifice of quantitv to an improvement m the quality of instruction. The complaints of business men that pupils from the schools are inaccurate in results and careless of details is a criticism that should be removed. The principles of sound and accurate training are as fixed as natural laws and should be insistently followed. Ill-considered experiments and indiscriminate methodizing should be abandoned, and attention devoted to the persevering and continu- ous drill necessary for accurate and efficient training; and we hold that no course of study in any public school should be so advanced or so rigid as to prevent instruction to any student, who may need it, in the essential and practical parts of the common English branches. 3. We assert that the individuality of the pupil should be carefully considered, to the end that he may be instructed in the light of his limitations and capacity; and we commend to all local authorities the necessity of greater care in the arrangement of courses of .studv that they may be adapted to the pupils to be instructed, rather than that pupils should be adapted to fixed courses of study and an inflexible system of grading. 4. There is concededly a grave moral depression in our business and social atmosphere. The revelations of the financial and legislative world for the past two years denote a too general acquiescence in questionable practices and standards. We earnestly recommend to boards of education, principals, and teachers the continuous training of pupils in morals, and in business and professional ethics, to the end that the coming generation of men of affairs may have a well-developed abhorrence of unfair dealing and discrimination. The establishment of the honor system in schools, the ostracism of the dishonest or unfair pupil, the daily exemplification in the routine life of the school of the advantage of honest and truthful methods, are commended to the especial attention of teachers as a partial means to this end. 5. The Bureau of Education at Washington should be preserved in its integrity and the dignity of its position maintained and increased. It should receive at the hands of Congress such recognition and such appropriations as will enable it not only to employ all expert assistants necessary, but also to publish in convenient and usable form the results of investigations; thus making that department of our government such a source of infor- mation and advice as will be most helpful to the people in conducting their campaigns of education. We are of the opinion that the importance of the subject under its control, and the dignity of this country require that this Bureau be maintained as an independent department of the government. 6. The National Education Association notes with approval that the qualifications demanded of teachers in the public schools are increasing annually, and particularly that in many localities special preparation is demanded of teachers. The idea that anyone with a fair education can teach school is gradually giving way to the correct notion that teachers must make special preparation for the vocation of teaching. The higher standards demanded of teachers must lead logically to higher salaries for teachers, and constant efforts should be made by all persons interested in education to secure for teachers adequate compensation for their work. 7. It is the duty of the state to provide for the education of every child within its borders, and to see that all children obtain the rudiments of an education. The constitu- tional provision that all tax-payers must contribute to the support of the public schools logically carries with it the implied provision that no persons should be permitted to defeat the purposes of the public-school law by forcing their children, at an early age, to become bread-winners. To this end the child-labor and truancy laws should be so harmonized that the education of the child, not its labor, shall be made the chief concern. 8. The National Education Association indorses the increasing use of school build- ings for free vacation schools and for free evening schools and lecture courses for adults, and for children who have been obliged to leave the day school prematurely. We also approve of the use of school grounds for playgrounds and the use of school gymnasiums and bathrooms for the benefit of the children in the crowded districts during summer. 9. Local taxation, supplemented by state taxation, presents the^ best means for the support of the public schools, and for securing that deep interest in them which is necessary to their greatest efficiency. State aid should be granted only as supplementary to local taxation, and not as a substitute for it. 10. The National Education Association observes with great satisfaction the tendencv of cities and towns to replace large school committees or boards which have exercised executive functions thru subcommittees, by small boards which determine general policies, but intrust all executive functions to salaried experts. 38 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ir. We cannot too often repeat that close, intelligent, judicious supervision is necessary for all grades of schools. 12. The rapid establishment of rural high schools and the consolidation of rural dis- trict schools are most gratifying evidences of the progress of education. We believe that this movement should be encouraged until the children of rural communities enjoy the benefits of public education to an extent approximating as nearly as practicable the educa- tion furnished in urban communities. 13. The National Education Association wishes to record its approval of the increas- ing appreciation among educators of the fact that the building of character is the real aim of the schools and the ultimate reason for the expenditure of millions for their maintenance. There are in the minds of the children and youth of today a tendency toward a disregard for constituted authority, a lack of respect for age and superior wisdom, a weak appreciation of the demands of duty, a disposition to follow pleasure and interest rather than obligation and order. This condition demands the earliest thought and action of our leaders of opinion and places important obligations upon school boards, superintendents, and teachers. 14. It is apparent that familiarity with the English Bible as a masterpiece of literature is rapidly decreasing among the pupils in our schools. This is the direct result of a concep- tion which regards the Bible as a theological book merely, and thereby leads to its exclusion from the schools of some states as a subject of reading and study. We hope for such a change of public sentiment in this regard as will permit and encourage the reading and study of the English Bible, as a literary work of the highest and purest type, side by side with the poetry and prose which it has inspired and in large part formed. 15 The National Education Association wishes to congratulate the secondary schools and colleges of the country that are making an effort to remove the taint of professionalism, and other abuses, that have crept into students' sports. This taint can be removed only by leading students, alumni, and school faculties to recognize that inter-school games should be played for sportsmanship and not merely for victory. 16. It is important that school buildings and school grounds should be planned and decorated so as to serve as efifective agencies for educating, not only the children, but the people as a whole, in matters of taste. The school is becoming more and more a com- munity center, and its larger opportunities impose new obligations. School buildings should be attractive as well as healthful, and the adjoining grounds should be laid out and planned with appropriateness and beauty. 17. The highest ethical standards of conduct and of speech should be insisted on among teachers. It is not becoming that commercialism or self-seeking should shape their actions, or that intemperance should mark their utterances. A code of professional conduct clearly understood and rigorously enforced by public opinion is being slowly developed, and must one day control all teachers worthy of the name. 18. In teaching, as in every other kind of work, the best service is secured by finding the individual best fitted to the particular place as indicated by training, experience, and meritorious service; the National Education Association therefore heartily approves a merit system of promoting teachers and filling vacancies. We assert, furthermore, that the grounds upon which a teacher may apply for a position are preparatory training, experi- ence, and meritorious service — in a word, professional fitness, alone; and that the use of other personal and political arguments to secure appointment is deplorable in the teacher and a serious menace to a high professional standard. The foregoing principles and aims have been fully considered by the committee and unanimously recommended to the Active Members of the National Education Association for adoption. Respectfully submitted, Howard J. Rogers, of New York, Chairman Orville T. Bright, of Illinois Charles E. Chadsey, of Colorado Edgar H. Mark, of Kentucky George M. Philips, of Pennsylvania David B. Johnson, of South Carolina Committee on Resolutions The motion to adopt the declaration of principles was seconded and carried. The following resolutions were also presented by the Committee on Resolutions for the consideration of the Association: I. Resolved: That the thanks of the National Education Association are due and are hereby most cordially tendered to the residents of Cleveland for their courteous recep- tion and generous hospitalit)J; and to the teachers of Cleveland and the stale of Ohio for their splendid support and entertainment. ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING 3^ 2. Resolved: That the thanks of the National Education Association be tendered the following gentlemen for their active and efficient interest in the welfare and entertainment of the Association: F. F. Prentiss, chairman Executive Committee, Cleveland Local Organization; Samuel Mather, president Citizens Committee; E. H. Baker, chairman Committee on Publicity; S. M. Bond, chairman Committee on Halls and Headquarters; Rev. Dan F. Bradley, chairman Committee on Reception; N. D. Chapin, chairman Committee on Transportation; William H. Elson, chairman Committee on Membership; F. H. Haserot, chairman Advisory Committee; William H. Hunt, chairman Entertain- ment Committee; George W. Kinny, chairman Committee on Decorations and Badges; Thomas P. Robbins, chairman Committee on Accommodations; Col. J. J. Sullivan, chairman Committee on Finance; and also to William G. Rose, executive secretary of the Local Executive Committee, and his able corps of assistants. 3. Resolved: That the thanks of the Association be tendered to First Vice-President and ex-President Nathan C. Schaeffer, of Pennsylvania, Superintendent William H. Elson, of Cleveland, and James H. Baker of Colorado, for presiding over the meetings of this Association in the absence of our esteemed President, Edwin G. Cooley, to whom the greetings and good wishes of our members have already been cabled. 4. Resolved: That the public high schools should not be chiefly fitting schools for higher institutions, but should be adapted to the general needs, both intellectual and industrial, of their students and communities, and we suggest that the higher institutions may wisely adapt their courses to this condition. We also suggest to school boards and superintendents the importance of securing for their high schools teachers who have not only abundant scholarship but also successful experience in teaching or efficient and practical training in pedagogy. Upon motion the resolutions were adopted. The following telegram was read: Santiago, Chile, S. A. President Cooley, Cleveland, O.: Cordial greetings Chilian National Education Association. Dr. Fernandez The chairman was on motion directed to make suitable reply. E. B. Cox, Xenia, Ohio: The published minutes of last year's meeting show that in the report of the Committee on Resolutions there was one resolution which was adopted by the Association by standing vote by a large majority— 209 to 23 I believe— the legality of the vital part of which was questioned. It was the resolution approving the work of the Simplified Spelling Board, and directing that the simplified spellings contained in its first recommendation be used in the publications of this Association. The Secretary did not feel bound by the direction expressed in this resolution. The action was taken at one of the general sessions. The question was raised whether it was in accordance with the constitution of the National Education Association for the Association in a general session to pass such amendatory resolution. I do not rise to touch this question at all, but simply to submit in substance the mandatory part of last year's resolution to this regular and formal meeting of active members in order that the evident sentiment of a clear majority of this organization may be expressed with such legality and supreme authority that the Secretary will feel obliged to obey it. Therefore 1 submit this resolution: Resolved: That the Secretary is hereby directed to use in the publications of this Association the simplified spellings recommended by the Simplified Spelhng Board m us circular of March 21, 1906. It was moved, seconded, and carried, that the resolution be laid on the table. Chairman Schaeffer: The committee, appointed at the Los Angeles meeting, on the Juvenile Educational Conference has submitted a report with the request that it be printed, but not read. If there is no objection this will be done. REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON JUVENILE EDUCATIONAL CONFERENCE Your committee appointed at the Los Angeles meeting begs leave to submit the """ToTth? better harmonizing of the child-labor and the truancy laws of the several states and of the country, so thtt the education of the child rather than its labor should 40 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION be made the chief end of such statutes, an informal conference was held at Middle Bass Island, Lake Erie, August 17, 1907. The resolution under which the conference was held had been adopted by the Ohio School Improvement Federation, the Ohio Teachers' Association, and the National Education Association, and representatives of these and of other organizations took part in the meeting. The members of the conference were C. J. Bell, a former governor of Vermont, now a member of the Executive Committee of the National Grange, E. B. Norris, of New York, chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Grange, George P. Hampton, of New York City, F. A. Derthick, master of the Ohio State Grange, Mrs. Mary E. Lee, Grange correspondent of agricultural papers, Mrs. Sarah E. Hyre, a member of the Board of Education of Cleveland, Ohio, George E. Pomeroy, president of the Ohio State Board of Commerce, C. D. Forestone of the Carriage Builders' National Association, Mrs. Mary C. Snyder, secretary of the National Tax Association, and Walter D. McKinney, commissioner of the Columbus Industrial Alliance of Columbus, Ohio. E. G. Cooley, superintendent of the public schools of Chicago, and W. H. Elson, super- intendent of the public schools of Cleveland, who had been appointed delegates to the con- ference by the National Education Association, were unable to attend because of their absence in California. James W. Van Cleave, president of the National Manufacturers' Association, also was unable to attend the conference but sent a letter saying that there is no doubt of the fact that "industrial education for the American boy is one of the greatest, if not the greatest problem, that confronts the republic at this time. " In explaining the purpose of the conference it was stated that unrelated action had been taken at dififerent times by the National Grange, the National Education Association, and the National Manufacturers' Association favoring measures for the improvement of the common-school system of the country with the direct purpose of enabling all children, during their school age, to acquire the particular kind of education that will best fit them to follow their naturally selected vocations and secure engagements in profitable employments. To this end, as far as possible, efforts should be made to combine the employment of children, during out-of-school hours, vacation time, and the habit-forming period from 14 to 18 years of age, with the school system in a way to make employment as well as study a part of the educational system by placing all children, when employed as well as when in school, under the supervision of a school-district officer. After full and careful con- sideration, the conference adopted the following: 1. It is the sense of this conference that a permanent co-operative conference com- mittee should be formed composed of three delegates each, representing the National Grange, the National Manufacturers' Association, the National Education Association, the National Tax Association, the Carriage Builders' National Association, for the purpose of supplying a medium through which said organizations can co-operate to secure practical results in line with their desires to make the education of children of a character that will best fit them for the vocations they are most likely to desire to follow, and for profitable employment. 2. That the common-school system should be employed to provide, as far as possible, for the teaching in all elementary schools of the mechanical, agricultural, and domestic arts and sciences, with the direct purpose of fitting children as fully as possible for profitable employment in the vocations they are most likely to follow. 3. That the taxation systems of the states should be revised with the purpose of furnish- ing ample support and facilities of every necessary kind for making effective the purposes in view, and especially with the view of so providing for schools in poor districts that they will be as well equipped and effective as the schools in districts having greater wealth. 4. That the persons participating in this conference submit these propositions to their various organizations, at the next annual meeting of the same, with the view of securing action that will enable such organizations to be represented officially in a permanent co- operative conference committee designed to secure necessary legislative action to carry its propositions into practical effect. 5. That such other organizations having similar ends in view, as may be approved by the Committee on Preliminary Organization, be invited to be represented in this permanent Co-operative Conference Committee. The following resolution relating to a preliminary committee on organization was adopted: Resolved. That a Preliminary Committee on Organization, composed of five members, be created with power to have full charge of the work to be undertaken until the permanent Co-operative Conference Committee is organized. The following persons were elected members of the Preliminary Committee on Organi- zation: Allen Ripley Foote, President of the National Tax Association, Chairman; E. B. Norris, chairman of the Executive Committee, National Grange; W. H, Elson, super- ANNUAL BUSINESS MEETING 41 intendent of Public Schools, Cleveland, vice-president of the National Education Asso- ciation; C. D. Firestone, treasurer of the Ohio Board of Commerce and member of the Carriage Builders' National Association; James W. Van Cleave, president of the National Manufacturers' Association, or to be named by him. RespectfuUv submitted, ' W. H. Elson Representing the National Education Association Suggestions were made expressing the desire of the members that, in the choice of additional members of the National Council, the disparity in the proportion between men and women members be reduced. The meeting then adjourned. Irwin Shepard, Secretary Nathan C. Schaeffer First Vice-President, presiding MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS FOR 1907-1908 Cleveland, Ohio, June 29, 190S The annual meeting of the Board of Directors was called to order in the Cleveland Coal Club room, Hollenden Hotel, at 11:00 A.M. by Acting President Nathan C. Schaefifer. Thirty -one directors responded to roll-call. The reading of the minutes of the last meeting, held July 12, 1907, was dispensed with and the nunutes were approved as printed in the volume of Proceedings of the Los Angeles meeting. The resignations of three directors were received and upon their nomination the following were appointed to fill the unexpired term: Romanzo Adams, of Nevada, to succeed J. E. Stubbs, resigned. L. L. Friend, of West Virginia, to succeed Thomas C. Miller, resigned. Harry M. Schafer, of Washington, to succeed E. T. Mathes, resigned. The following resolution presented by Nicholas Murray Butler was on motion approved and recommended for adoption by the Association at its first general session : Resolved, that in the enforced absence of their President, Superintendent Edwin G. Cooley, the members of the National Education Association testify to their affectionate regard for him, send him cordial greetings across the sea, and confidently look forward to his complete recovery of health and strength. The Annual Report of the Board of Trustees for the year July 1, 1907, to June 30, 1908, was presented by Nicholas Murray Butler, chairman of the Board of Trustees, and printed copies of the same were distributed to the directors. Chairman Butler called attention to certain changes adopted by the Board in the form of the annual report providing for a distinct classification of all receipts and disburse- ments under "Income" and "Principal" accounts, the addition of a "Premium and Dis- count" account, and also a method of entry by which the' par value and the book value of each security is shown. The report showed that $10,000 had been added to the permanent fund during the year from the proceeds of the Los Angeles meeting. The report was on motion adopted and ordered printed in the annual volume of Proceedings. The report of the Treasurer, A. H. Chamberlain, of Pasadena, Cal., for 1907-8 was presented and printed copies of the same were distributed. On motion this report was received and referred to the Board of Trustees for audit and approval. The following communication was presented by J. M. Greenwood, chairman of the Committee of the National Council on Investigations and Appropriations. To the Directors of the National Education Association: The Committee on Investigations and Appropriations recommends the adoption of the following resolutions by the Board of Directors: 1. Resolved, that in view of the present unsettled condition of the finances of the National Education Association, due to the confusion which has arisen from a change of policy by the railroads of the country regarding convention rates, the policy of the National Education Association in granting appropriations for the investigation of special educa- tional problems shall be and hereby is discontinued. 2. Resolved, that the President of the National Education Association be authorized and ernpowered to appoint a special committee to memorialize the Congress of the United States in favor of granting the request of the Commissioner of Education, approved by the Secretary of the Interior, for an annual appropriation to meet the cost of educational investigations under the direction of the Bureau of Education. 42 MINUTES OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS 43 3. Resolved, that upon the favorable report of the Committee on Tnvestiirations and Appropriations the Board of Directors will consider and if approved will recommend to the Commissioner of Education projects for educational investigations brought forward bv any department or committee of the National Education Association. Respectfully submitted, James M. Green^^^ood, Chairman Nicholas Murray Butler Frank A. Fitzpatrick Augustus S. Dovi'ning J. H. Phillips L. D. Harvey After brief discussion the above resolutions were on motion adopted by a unanimous vote. Director Charles H, Keyes presented a brief report from the Committee on Manual Training Courses in Public Schools, for the expenses of which an appropriation of $500 was made by the Board of Directors at its meeting in Los Angeles, July 12, 1907. For reasons which were stated the committee had not been organized until February, 1908, and had, as yet, only determined upon its plans for investigation of the subjects referred to it. Director Keyes stated that very little of the appropriation for expenses had been ex[>ended and requested t^at special action be taken extending the time by one year within which the appropriation might be available. On motion it was so ordered. Secretary Irwin Shepard then made a brief statement regarding the difficulties which had arisen in securing the usual reduced rates and ticket conditions for the Cleveland con- vention. In view of the fact that the railroads had declined longer to continue the policy of limiting convention rates to bona fide members of the Association holding the conven- tion, it was urged that the board of Directors and the officers of the Association, co-operat- ing with the active members, should take steps to increase the active membership of the Association rather than to depend for revenue uppn the fees of associate members attend- ing the annual conventions. This subject was discussed at some length and a general agreement expressed favoring the policy proposed, altho no definite action was taken by the Board of Directors. There being no further business the Board of Directors adjourned. Irwin Shepard, Secretary MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF THE NEW BOARD OF DIRECTORS FOR 1908-1909 Cleveland, Ohio, July 2, 1908 The meeting of the new Board of Directors of the National Education Association for the year 1908-9 was called to order by President-elect L. D. Harvey at 4:30 P.M., in the room of the Cleveland Coal Club, HoUenden Hotel. Thirty-seven directors responded to the call of the roll. Directors Charles H. Keyes of Connecticut, J. M. Greenwood of Missouri, and I. C. McNeill of Tennessee were appointed a Committee on Nominations to Membership in the National Council. The report of the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations, recommending the discontinuance of the policy of granting appropriations for committees of investigation which was unanimously adopted by the former Board of Directors on June 29, 1908, was read by Director Greenwood, with recommendation for its adoption by the present Board. On motion it was so ordered. For the text of the report see the minutes of the meeting of the Board of Directors for 1907-8, p. 42. Mr. Greenwood read the following report of the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations concerning the establishment of National Education Association traveling scholarships. REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND APPROPRIATIONS To the Directors of the National Education Association: The Committee on Investigations and Appropriations recommends the adoption of the following resolutions by the Board of Directors: A. Resolved, That, beginning July i, 1909^ and until further action by the Board of Directors be had, provided the financial condition of the National Education Association will justify it, there be established three annual traveling scholarships to be awarded in accordance with the following rules: 1. Applications for appointment shall be filed, together with such documents as the candidate may desire to submit in support thereof, with the Secretary of the National Education Association on forms provided for the purpose, not later than April i of the year preceding that for which the appointment is asked. 2. No application shall be received from any person not an active member of the National Education Association in good and regular standing. 3. The applications and documents accompanying the same shall be transmitted by the Secretary to the Chairman of the Committee of the Council on Investigations and Appropriations as soon as practicable after April 15 in each year, and, after consideration of the applications and accompanying papers, the Committee on Investigations and Appro- priations shall nominate to the Executive Committee of the National Education Associa- tion the names of the persons to be appointed as incumbents of the traveling scholarships for the year beginning July i next ensuing. The term of the scholarships shall be from July I until June 30 the year following. 4. So far as possible, one appointment each year shall be given to a principal or teacher in a normal school or teachers' training class; one to a state, city, county, or district superintendent or supervisor of schools, and one to an elementary school principal or teacher. Where no satisfactory candidate appears under one or more of the three classes above named, the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations may, at its discretion, nominate two or, if necessary, three traveling scholars from one and the same class. 5. The annual stipend of each traveling scholarship shall be $1,000, payable in four equal instalments on the first days of July, October, January, and April. 6. In making application for appointment as traveling scholar, each candidate shall submit in connection therewith a plan of travel and study, and shall, if appointed, faithfully follow such plan under such limitations and directions as the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations may prescribe. 7. Before the expiration of the year for which a traveling scholar is appointed, each MINUTES OF THE NEW BOARD OF DIRECTORS 45 scholar shall file with the Secretary of the National Education Association a report on his observations and educational work during the year. 8. The names and official station of all persons appointed to be traveling scholars shall be published annually in the Yearbook of the National Education Association. B. Resolved, That the plan for three annual traveling scholarships as provided in the foregoing resolution shall not take effect for the year beginning July i, 1909, unless the Board of Trustees shall on or before December 31, 1908, certify to the Secretary of the National Education Association that sufficient funds from current income are available for the maintenance of said scholarships as provided. Respectfully submitted, James M. Greenwood, Chairman Nicholas Murray Butler Frank A. Fitzpatrick Augustus S. Downing John H. Phillips Lor£nzo D. Harvey Dated, July i, 1908. It was moved and carried that this report should be adopted. Upon recommendation of the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations the following resolution was adopted: Resolved, That the President of the National Education Association be authorized to appoint the following members to be official representatives of the National Education Association at the First International Moral Education Congress to be held at London, England, September 25 to 29, 1908: Edwin G. Cooley, superintendent of Schools, Chicago, 111.; Samuel T. Black, president State Normal School, San Diego, Cal.; David B. Johnson, president Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, Rock Hill, S. C; Clifford W. Barnes, Chicago, 111. The next order of business was the election of a member of the Board of Trustees to succeed Carroll G. Pearse whose term expired with this meeting. Director Keyes moved that the Secretary be instructed to cast the ballot of the Board for Mr. Pearse to succeed himself. The ballot was so cast and Mr. Pearse declared elected as trustee for four years. The next order of business being the election of a member of the Executive Committee for one year, a letter was read from W. T. Harris, requesting that he be not re-elected. E. E. Brown of Washington, D. C, and J. H. Phillips, Birmingham, Ala., were nominated. A ballot resulted in the election of J. H. Phillips. Invitations for the convention of 1909 were then received. Director Charles E. Chadsey, superintendent of schools, Denver, Colo., presented an invitation for the association to meet in that city. This invitation was indorsed by Director Cree T. Work of Texas. An invitation from Chicago for the meeting of 1909, or a succeeding year, was extended by Curt M. Treat of the Chicago Association of Commerce. An invitation from Atlantic City, N. J., was presented by George S. Lenhart, secretary- director of the Atlantic City Publicity Bureau. A telegram was read inviting the Association to meet in Seattle. Upon motion the following resolution was adopted: Resolved: That it is the opinion of this Board of Directors that the next meeting of the National Education Association should be held in the city of Denver, Colorado, provided arrangements be made satisfactory to the Executive Committee. The Committee on Nomination of Members of the National Council reported as follows: To Board of Directors: ^ ■ a • Your committee on nominations would report the following recommendations: Oscar J. Craig, Missoula, Mont., to succeed himself for term ending 1914. David Felmley, Normal, 111., to succeed himself for term ending 1914. John R. Kirk, Kirksville, Mo., to succeed himself for term ending 1914- David B. Johnson, Rock Hill, S. C, to succeed himself for term ending 1914. W. C. Martindale, Detroit, Mich., to succeed J. F. Millspaugh, term ending 1914. 46 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION E. B. Craighead, New Orleans, La., to succeed R. H. Halsey, deceased, term ending 1910. David R. Boyd, Norman, Oklahoma, to succeed F. Louis Soldan, deceased, term ending 1910. For Members under New Amendment One Year, Term Ending igoQ John MacDonald, Topeka, Kans. Morris Elmer Daily, San Jos6, Cal. Alma L. Binzel, Menomonie, Wis. S. L. Heeter, St. Paul, Minn. Charles McKenny, Milwaukee, Wis. Two Years, Term Ending igio Henry Snyder, Jersey City, N. J. Edwin E. Sparks, State College, Pa. Katharine E. Dopp, Chicago, 111. Henry Suzzallo, New York, N. Y. Henry C. Morrison, Concord, N. H. Three Years, Term Ending igii EsTELLE Reel, Washington, D. C. Julius I. Foust, Greensboro, N. C. Theo. B. Noss, California, Pa. W. T. Carrington, Springfield, Mo. John J. Doyne, Little Rock, Ark. Four Years, Term Ending igi2 Sarah Louise Arnold, Boston, Mass. Edward T. Fairchild, Topeka, Kans. James A. MacLean, Moscow, Idaho Alfred Bayliss, Macomb, 111. Ernest C. Moore, Los Angeles, Cal. Five Years, Term Ending igij Ida C. Bender, Buffalo, N. Y. William O. Riddell, Des Moines, la. Henry B. Brown, Valparaiso, Ind. A. C. Nelson, Salt Lake City, Utah Reed B. Teitrick, Harrisburg, Pa. Six Years, Term Ending igi4 Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, Boston, Mass. M. Bates Stephens, Annapolis, Md. Arthur H. Chamberlain, Pasadena, Cal. J. A. Shaw an, Columbus, Ohio. James W. Crabtree, Peru, Neb. Respectfully submitted, Charles H. Keyes I. C. McNeill J. M. Greenwood Committee On motion of Director Mott of Indiana the report was accepted and adopted. A special committee of the National Council, consisting of James H. Baker, chairman, William O. Thompson, and Augustus S. Downing, appeared before the Board of Directors to present a request from the Council that the several preliminary reports of the special committee appointed at the Los Angeles meeting should be published and should if possible be included in the annual volume of Proceedings. Chairman Baker urged that while these reports are preliminary and incomplete, the matter submitted had been carefully prepared and is in permanent form. Additions may be made later which will not necessarily change the form of the report already made, but will be supplementary thereto. The publication of these reports is especially important since they include matter which will be needed to guide future investigations and which should be widely distributed for this purpose. He especially urged that they be included in the annual volume of Proceedings if it should be found possible to do so without exceeding the limits of space. But if not published in the volume, they should be printed in sufi&- ciently large editions to supply the general demand of those interested in the several lines of investigation. Mr. Baker referred especially to a preliminary report on the subject of "The Culture and Time Element in Education, " which he had been requested to make as preliminary to a complete report on this subject. This report included a valuable classified bibliography on this subject which would be exceedingly helpful and indeed necessary for the formula- tion of a complete report. A. S. Downing of the same committee urged the publication of the several reports MINUTES OF THE NEW BOARD OF DIRECTORS referred to in ftie annual volume of Proceedings, even tho it should be necessary to eliminate, or print in abstract only, many of the papers presented at the various department meetings. He urged that reports of the nature referred to were the results of extensive study of the subjects, had been carefully prepared, and were, therefore, of more value than the usual convention papers and discussions. In addition, Mr. Downing urged that apart from the question of publishing these reports, the volume could be reduced in size by the elimination of much of the matter now published and by printing only abstracts of the various papers read before the Association. A motion was made by Chairman Baker and seconded by Director Cree T. Work of Texas that the Secretary of the Association be instructed and authorized to condense the papers and discussions of the various departments sufficiently to make it possible to publish in the annual volume all of the reports made to the Council of Education for the current year; this with the understanding that the Secretary should call upon the president of each department for assistance in this work. Secretary Irwin Shepard, in speaking on this motion, said that the plan suggested of making abstracts of the papers of the various departments for the purpose of reducing the size of the annual volume was far more difficult than might appear at first thought. There are twenty-one different departments of the Association, representing twenty-one separate departments of educational work and interests. While it is true that few papers appearing in the volume are equally interesting to all teachers, it is believed that all papers are of value and interest for those especially connected with the work of the department in which they were presented. The members of the Department of Music Education would deem it important that all of the papers in that department be published in full in the volume of Proceedings, even tho it might be necessary to condense the papers read before the Depart- ment of Technical Education; while the members of the Department of Technical Educa- tion would probably take quite a different view. While it cannot be denied that there is a great difference in the excellence of the various papers, with rare exception all are valuable and are deemed important for publica- tion in the volume by certain, altho possibly different, classes of members. It would seem impossible to satisfy the members of the Association unless the papers were printed in full, since the members look forward to the annual volume as a complete record of the pro- ceedings of the convention, while many active members who cannot attend the meetings keep up their membership because it secures to them a full record of the convention papers and discussions. The Association is under great obligations to those who accept appointments on the various programs, prepare the papers, come to the conventions, oftentimes from long distances, paying their own expenses, for the purpose of contributing to the discussions of the convention. Should we decline to publish the papers carefully prepared for the con- ventions and kept within the limits required, we might soon find it difficult to secure speakers for the convention programs. Certain limits to papers have been fixed, namely, 3,000 words for formal papers and 1,000 words for discussions. These limits should be strictly observed and papers and discussions which exceed these limits should be returned to the writers that abridgment may be made. It is doubtful whether the Secretary or any other person ought to be authorized to make these abridgments. Director William H. Maxwell said that it was evident that the abridgment of the papers presented at the annual conventions was a matter of great difficulty and perplexity and that it was doubtful whether the Association could fairly adopt any absolute rule of instructions to this end. Mr. Maxwell then moved as a substitute for the pending motion that the matter of abridging the addresses made before the Association and of publishing the reports presented to the Council of Education be referred to the Executive Committee and the Secretary of the Association. The motion was seconded. Director James M. Greenwood, in speaking on the substitute motion, urged that speakers on the various programs of the Association be requested to make abstracts of their 48 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION various papers to be submitted with the complete papers themselves so that if the volume of Proceedings would not contain all the papers the abstracts might be used instead. Director Cree T. Work urged that the presidents of the respective departments should be requested to assist the Secretary of the Association in editing the proceedings of each department with a view of keeping them within the available limits of the annual volume. The substitute motion by Director Maxwell was then put to vote and carried. Charles R. Richards of the Committee of Investigations on Manual Training Courses in the Public Schools presented to the Board of Directors request for authority to increase the number of their committee from the present number of eight to not less than fifteen or more than twenty, in order that all departments of the subject might find repre- sentation upon the committee of investigation, with a view of securing a more valuable and complete report on the subject in hand. On motion the request of Mr. Richards was granted and authority given to the committee already authorized to increase its number to not less than fifteen nor more than twenty members. Mrs. Frances W. Leiter of Ohio presented to the Board of Directors the following communication: questions presented to the board of directors of the N. E. a. by MRS. FRANCES W. leiter (ACTIVE MEMBER) 1. In creating the Educational Department of National Organization of Women, was it intended that these societies petitioning for same should appear at the National Education Association sessions in their organized capacity; or, in the individual capacity of their members who are active members of the National Education Association ? 2. Was it intended that all, or part, of the national organizations of women who were instrumental in petitioning for creation of the department should have power, in effect, to make this National Education Association Women's Educational Department exclusive, so far as other national societies of women are concerned, which also have educational bearing and have representation in the National Education Association by active member- ship ? 3. Was it intended that the societies taking an initial step toward this -department should, because of this initial step, continue to have controlling power in, and jurisdiction over, the department, so far as plans, policies, and elections are concerned ? 4. Does it not come under the constitutional law of the National Education Associa- tion that any national organization of women, with active National Education Association membership, by virtue of these active members, may voluntarily become a part of this de- partment— its active members having equal power with active members of all other similar societies of vote and discussion — whether in the list of initial organizations or not ? 5. Where a national society has an educational department, are superintendents or committee members of the same department, in state and local capacity, eligible to active membership in the National Education Association ? On motion it was ordered that a committee of three be appointed to whom Mrs. Leiter's communication should be referred, the said committee to report at the next meeting of the Board. The President then appointed the following committee on Mrs. Leiter's communica- tion: Nathan C. Schaeffer, of Pensylvania, Chairman. Augustus S. Downing, of New York. Edwin G. Cooley, of Illinois. There being no further business the Board of Directors adjourned. Irwin Shepard, Secretary GENERAL SESSIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION ADDRESSES OF WELCOME SAMUEL MATHER, PRESIDENT OF CITIZENS' COMMITTEE, CLEVELAND O. Ladies and Gentlemen, Members oj the National Education Association: It has become my fortunate lot, as president of our Citizens' Committee, to have the honor of presiding at this opening meeting of your great Association* and, therefore, to have the first oppportunity of giving utterance to those words of heartiest welcome which are in the hearts and on the tongues of all the citizens of Cleveland. This is not the first time that Ohio has welcomed your convention. It is interesting to recall the fact that after your first organization meeting in Phila- delphia in 1857, your first annual meeting was held in Cincinnati in 1858— just fifty years ago; and that it was in Cleveland in 1870— thirty-eight years ago— that your original name, the National Teachers Association, was changed under your new constitution to that of National Educational Association. It was here also, and in that year, that you may be said, perhaps, first to have exhibited, by your absorption of the National Association of School Superin- tendents and of the American Normal School Association, that wonderful power of growth which has increased your numbers from two or three hundred in the early sixties to twenty-seven hundred in 1884 and thirty thousand and upward in 1905; increasing also your departments from three in 1870 — those of superintendents of elementary education and of higher education — to ten in 1879, and, if I am not mistaken, to twenty-one at this present time. It is interesting, also, to note the fact that in Cleveland today you have again, as in 1870, met for the first time together under a new constitution and a new name. In 1870 your National Teachers Association had merged into the National Educational Association. Here in this year you have slightly abbre- viated that name by striking off the ''al," becoming therefore the National Education Association; although a glance at your swollen membership list might suggest the idea that you might with equal propriety have aflSxed "c/ al. ' But how could any association fail to grow and increase in numbers and in influence that held fast to the spirit of that original call in 1856, inviting all practical teachers from North, South, East, and West, who are willing to unite in an earnest effort to promote the general welfare of our country by concentrating the wisdom and power of numerous minds, and by distributing among all, the accumulated experiences of all who are ready to devote their energies and their means to advance the dignity, respectability, and usefulness of their calling. How could those teachers and friends of education who met in Philadelphia in the following year to organize, in answer to that call, have failed to respond to the words of Prof. William Russell of Massachusetts, when he said, 49 50 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General Fellow teachers, we are met on a great occasion. This event is a most auspicious one as regards the intellectual and moral interests of the whole community of which as citizens we are members. In forming a national association of teachers we may hope for great national benefits. We have at length recognized our peculiar duty to come forward and take our proper place as the immediate agents of whatever measures are best adapted to promote the highest interests of society by the widest diffusion of human culture. Of our acknowledged defective moral education it is unnecessary to speak. Throughout our country the parent is appealing to the teacher and the teacher to the parent for efficient efforts which may bring about a better state of things. The cry for more helpful, more inspired, more effective and more ethical modes of education comes up from all classes of societv on behalf of the young, who are its treasured hope. Organized by such leaders and inspired by such teaching, it is small wonder that you have grown so largely in numbers, and are everywhere recognized as having already accomplished so much of good in the cause of education. Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish not only to extend to you our heartiest welcome, but also to express our appreciation of the great benefits that may be derived by our community from the presence of such a body of educators in our midst, by having the opportunity of listening to your papers and dis- cussions, and of personally knowing and meeting you. While possessing, in common with all American cities, the blessing of our splendid public -school system, and while not without the advantage of higher institutions of learning and that sound tradition of esteem for culture which is our New England heritage, yet we are still essentially a busy commercial city, though not so busy since October last as we might wish to be. It is unneces- sary to speak to such an audience as this of the more limited horizon, the narrower outlook on life, that threatens any community from too much com- mercialism. We expect, therefore, to receive from you more than we shall be able to give to you, eager as may be our hospitable intent; but here stands our fair city, with outstretched hands, bidding you warm welcome: may I not say, in the language of our Spanish neighbors to the south of us, "She is yours. " HARRIS R. COOLEY, DIRECTOR OF CHARITIES AND CORRECTION Ladies and Gentlemen oj the National Education Association: I regret very much that Mayor Johnson is not able to be present in person, but I trust that during the week he may attend some of the sessions of your association. In his behalf, and in behalf of our municipality, I am glad to extend to you the keys of the city of Cleveland. This is no formal matter; for there is a civic consciousness, a civic feeling. Of all its characteristics, I trust that hospitality is one of the leading ones of Cleveland. So in behalf of the five hundred thousand men, women, and children of our city I bid you welcome to Cleveland. I am sure that the children are always glad to see their teachers — ^in vacation time. Moreover, I welcome you for what of thought and feeling you bring to our city. The marvelous development of material things has so focused our i^ssionsl ADDRESSES OF WELCOME attention that we are in danger of forgetting the things which are behind them. We rejoice in our railroads and steamships, in our magnificent buildings and workshops, and we forget that the brains that conceived them and the hands that made these things are greater than the things themselves; that thoughts and purposes and ideals are fundamental to all growth and all progress. All that we have achieved in the material world is simply the result of the applica- tion of truth and thought to the affairs of our human life. We are glad because you bring to us that spirit of truth which is the hope of the future. Upon one of the great arches in the Chicago Exposition were the words: " Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." The truth has transformed the canoe into the great steamship, the stage coach into the Pullman train. The truth is the inspiration of literature and art. The seeking and giving of truth is the hope of the future. Upon the archway of human progress are still the words: '* Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. " We are glad to welcome you for the power and the promise of the future. I see the great multitudes coming to our shores from the lands of the old world, until some of our timid ones grow faint-hearted. I see their children go to our schools and growing up into citizenship and love of country. I see them bring- ing their different traditions, abilities, and ideals, and working out with us a better and higher civilization than the world has yet known. I thmk it is wisest for us to keep our gates open and then give special attention to instruction and teaching in the spirit of truth and liberality and fellowship, giving to these chil- dren the equal opportunities of the schools of our land. They are the promise of the coming commonwealth. Josiah Strong has said that this land of ours could support in comfort a thousand million people. In the last hundred years the use of the steam engine and of machinery has increased our powers of production fifty fold. Two hundred thousand Indians formerly lived east of the Mississippi River, and they thought that the country was full. Forty millions of people are living today in the same territory, in luxury and comfort of which the Indians never dreamed. Under juster conditions four hundred millions of people could live in that same territory with opportunities for culture and knowledge of which we do not dream. When we think of what our own civilization may be — of its conserving influence on the civilization of the whole world — is it any wonder that we should feel that teaching in itself is a profession — a, sacred profession ? We are glad to welcome you for what you are. People who are engaged in such great service for their fellow -men must by reflex action develop power and strength in themselves. We are glad that you have come into our midst as the aristocracy of service and of real culture. We are proud of our city. We have beautiful homes and clean streets, magnificent schools, parks, and playgrounds, but we have no feeling of com- pletion. We are a city growing, finding itself. We are forgetting the things which are behind and pressing forward toward the things which are before us. 52 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General We will be glad if Cleveland shall help to solve the great questions of muni- cipal government in the United States. Emerson has somewhere said: ''Happy is the house that shelters a friend. It might well be built like a festal bower to entertain him a single day. " Some- times when we have entertained our friends, there has come to us, when they have gone, a consciousness that they have left behind associations which it is a pleasure to remember. Our homes are richer because they have been our guests. It is with that feeling we welcome you today, the feeling that because you have been with us, our city will be richer in Hfe, in high purposes, in con- sciousness of power, in faith in the future of our country and its civilization, richer in the elements that go to make up its very life. We trust that your days here may be full of profit and good fellowship and gladness, and that you may bear with you when you go away from us pleasant memories of our fair City by the Lake. Again, in behalf of Mayor Johnson and the municipality, I bid you a hearty welcome to Cleveland. CHARLES S. HOWE, PRESIDENT OF CLEVELAND CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND PRESIDENT OF CASE SCHOOL OF APPLIED SCIENCE Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen oj the National Education Association: Dr. Cooley, on behalf of the mayor of the city, has extended to you the official welcome into our midst, and it becomes my very pleasant duty, on behalf of the business interests of our city, to cordially endorse that welcome. Cleveland is a hospitable city. It is always glad to see strangers, whether they come on business or on pleasure. It is especially glad to see them when they come in organizations which have accepted our invitation to meet here. It is still more glad to welcome a great organization of this kind, for we believe in the work which you are doing. We trust that this meeting in our city will be as successful, or even more successful than meetings which you have held in the past. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce is made up of about two thousand manufacturers, business, and professional men. It is not only interested in the commercial prosperity of the city, but in every question which is for the advantage of the community, the state, or the nation — ^whether civic, educa- tional, or commercial. So this great organization which I represent can under- stand something of the work which you are doing, and it is especially glad to see you here. The business man pays a large share of the taxes which are levied for school purposes, but he has never considered this tax a burden; rather he has considered it an investment which is paid back to him and to the community more than a hundred fold in the increased intelligence of the working man, in enlightened citizenship, and in a contented and happy people. Moreover, the business man hopes that this tax for educational purposes will be increased until the teacher is paid a salary which is commensurate with the time which he Sessions) ADDRESSES OF WELCOME — — ^^^ 0S'FURFOSES IN EDUCATION OF WOMEN 97 I importance that the college woman, with her far-reaching influence, should, from the beginning, conceive the true proportions of a woman's education; that her standard of liberal education for woman should include adequate preparation for her sacred and imperative task. But is it not true today that the girl may complete her prescribed course in the academy or college, receiv- ing with credit the diploma and degree, and yet may not have heard within the school or college walls any reference to the tasks and responsibilities which her home will bring to her ? Here are ''cross-purposes " indeed; for does not this very fact, this exclusion of such reference — and with it the ignoring by common consent any study of subject which would fit her for her essential function- establish a trend away from the proper consideration of such duties and respon- sibilities ? In our efforts to secure a generous education for women have we not come to overemphasize and overestimate scholastic ability? to see it out of proportion to its advantage? to magnify schooling, and to minimize the value of the qualities and of the knowledge which are essential to fullest development — and particularly that knowledge and those qualities upon which her success in her home administration will depend ? This deficiency in the training of our most intelligent women leads us all along the line to false esti- mates. We cannot expect the average parent to take much pains to insure in his daughter's education the thing which the college despises. When public sentiment demands of the college woman the same consideration of and preparation for her greatest life work that the business man gives to his task, and the craftsman to his apprenticeship, it will not be diflScult to secure the establishment of rational ideals in the elementary training. But so long as preparation for this highest function is incidentally secured, as we say in school, so long must we expect appropriate instruction to be postponed, and the school task to assume greater importance than the life work. The conflict of ideals is also evident in our discussion of industrial training. We are in complete sympathy with its immediate purpose. Both men and women must be fitted for achievement. They must be "not simply good, but good for something. " Independence and freedom of action, as well as the satisfaction of material needs may depend upon the power of self-mainte- nance. Furthermore, the care of the family may fall upon the woman as well as the man. Hand and brain must be prepared for the world's work. Again, the woman, from her home associations, must share in business interests; her intelligent contribution to the family welfare often demands a clear comprehension of the principles involved in business and trade. She, as well as her brother, must learn the meaning of labor— must secure a just measure of vakcs— and judge fairly of adequate compensation for service rendered. On the other hand, success in business in these days often seems to depend upon qualities which are not in keeping with woman's highest service. If competition in trade means disregard of the rights and privileges of others, she has something to lose in becoming accustomed to its atmosphere. The scramble for material success, the full working-days, without margin 98 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General for thought or repose, the necessary contact with the crowd, are more costly than we realize. Often the free earning and free spending, with the accom- panying independence, lead to a false measure of the necessities of life and unwillingness to enter upon the conditions of the simple home supported by a small income. Further, the quiet and the essential limitations of the home often seem insupportable to the woman who has been dependent upon the excitement of the more public life, the coming and going, the frequent meeting of strangers, the so-called ''society." Does this not call for clear vision, wise choosing, and ready renunciation of the lesser good ? At best, women cannot prepare for their life work as men prepare for theirs. For the fact cannot be ignored that this work may be abandoned after a brief service for the administration of the home. If the term of service is short and the workers must be frequently replaced, must we not assume logically that the compensation will be limited by the instability of tenure ? And further, in her relation to business interests, where the need of the individual is forgot- ten in the demands of the common work, the woman's nature meets a serious problem. Accustomed to share in the family life, to devote herself to its interests, she carries a double burden. Illness or hardship in the home arouses her sympathy and seems to demand her personal service. The con- tract obligation holds. She goes from home with an aching heart and fulfils her daily task under the deepest tension. The more womanly her instincts, the more bitter this strife between the two obligations. The essential service of mother, sister, or wife may be thus frequently at war with the business obligation. Which is the more binding upon the woman? How can this problem be solved ? Can it be deliberately ignored ? It may be that the wage-earning woman will make clear to us that the home-maker is likewise self-maintaining and not dependent. We shall learn, perhaps, to measure her service in the home at its true economic value. We may learn also, in dispensing charity, to enable the mother to care for her children in her home, instead of providing the day nursery to care for them while she scrubs at the wash board or toils in the factory. When the wage- earning and the home-making clash, to which side shall we send reinforce- ments ? We shall agree, I am sure, that the characteristics which are essential to successful home-making must not be forfeited for success in wage-earning. Advantage in business must not cause the woman to forget the rights and privileges of others. The lure of public life must not blind her to the higher privileges of the family circle. The strife for material gain must not crowd out the '^spirit which giveth life." Personal ambition must with her yield place to the joy of self-sacrifice. May this not mean that she must consent to a second place in business, in order to maintain the first place in the home ? that she must abandon certain privileges in the administration of the world's afiairs, in order to hold fast the still greater privilege, won by the complete devotion of wife and mother ? Sessions] PUBLIC SCHOOL AND IMMIGRANT CHILD When we sufficiently honor the service which every good home renders to the community; when we measure rightly the large opportunity for civic service which the home confers upon the educated woman, shall we not gladly sacrifice immediate personal advantage and ambition for the privilege of the greater service ? Accepting this standard, the school must necessarily provide suitable opportunities for appropriate training: for the poor girl in the tenement-house district, house-keeping centers, where she may learn how a similar home may be economically and wholesomely administered. For the grammar school, a strand of elementary science and technical training which will make her familiar with the household arts, and so far as may be, the principles under- lying them. Technical schools of household arts, for more complete training and related courses of science and art for high school and college which will provide not only for preparation for home-keeping, but will also secure ade- quate provision for teachers of household science and art. And with these such study of the relation of the home and its administration to the problems of economics and sociology as will set a finer standard and bring back into the home the enlightened service of our most intelligent women. With this clearer conception of woman's supreme service, and with this significant contribution from school and college, will disappear the present cross-purposes in the education of women. THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE IMMIGRANT CHILD JANE ADDAMS, FOUNDER OF HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO, ILL. {Stenographic report] I am always diffident when I come before a professional body of teachers, realizing as I do that it is very easy for those of us who look on to bring indict- ments against results; and realizing also that one of the most difficult situations you have to meet is the care and instruction of the immigrant child, especially as he is found where I see him, in the midst of crowded city conditions. And yet in spite of the fact that the public school is the great savior of the immigrant district, and the one agency which inducts the children into the changed conditions of American life, there is a certain indictment which may justly be brought, in that the public school too often separates the child from his parents and widens that old gulf between fathers and sons which is never so cruel and so wide as it is between the immigrants who come to this country and their children who have gone to the public school and feel that they have there learned it all. The parents are thereafter subjected to certain judg- ment, the judgment of the young which is always harsh and in this instance founded upon the most superficial standard of Americanism. And yet there is a notion of culture which we would define as a knowledge of those things which have been long cherished by men, the things which men have loved because thru generations they have softened and interpreted life, and have lOO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General endowed it with value and meaning. Could this standard have been given rather than the things which they see about them as the test of so-called suc- cess, then we might feel that the public school has given at least the beginnings of culture which the child ought to have. At present the Italian child goes back to its Italian home more or less disturbed and distracted by the contrast between the school and the home. If he throws off the control of the home because it does not represent the things which he has been taught to value he takes the first step toward the Juvenile Court and all the other operations of the law, because he has prematurely asserted himself long before he is ready to take care of his own affairs. We find in the carefully prepared figures which Mr. Commons and other sociologists have published that while the number of arrests of immigrants is smaller than the arrests of native born Americans, the number of arrests among children of immigrants is twice as large as the number of arrests among the children of native born Americans. It would seem that in spite of the enormous advantages which the public school gives to these children it in some way loosens them from the authority and control of their parents, and tends to send them, without a sufficient rudder and power of self-direction, into the perilous business of living. Can we not say, perhaps, that the schools ought to do more to connect these children with the best things of the past, to make them realize something of the beauty and charm of the language, the history, and the traditions which their parents represent. It is easy to cut them loose from their parents, it requires cultivation to tie them up in sympathy and understanding. The ignorant teacher cuts them off because he himself cannot understand the situation, the cultivated teacher fastens them because his own mind is open to the charm and beauty of that old-country life. In short, it is the business of the school to give to each child the beginnings of a culture so wide and deep and universal that he can interpret his own parents and countrymen by a standard which is world-wide and not provincial. The second indictment which may be brought is the failure to place the children into proper relation toward the industry which they will later enter. Miss Arnold has told us that children go into industry for a very short time. I believe that the figures of the United States census show the term to be something like six years for the women in industry as over against twenty- four years for men, in regard to continuity of service. Yet. you cannot disregard the six years of the girls nor the twenty-four years of the boys, because they are the immediate occupation into which they enter after they leave the school — even the girls are bound to go thru that period — that is, the average immigrant girls are — ^before they enter the second serious business of life and maintain homes of their own. Therefore, if they enter industry unintelligently, without some notion of what it means, they find themselves totally unprepared for their first experience with American life, they are thrown out without the proper guide or clue which the public school might and ought to have given to them. Our industry has become so international, that it ought to be easy to use the Sessions] PUBLIC SCHOOL AND IMMIGRANT CHILD loi materials it offers for immigrant children. The very processes and general principles which industry represents give a chance to prepare these immigrant children in a way which the most elaborated curriculum could not present. Ordinary material does not give the same international suggestion as industrial material does. Third, I do not believe that the children who have been cut off from their own parents are going to be those who, when they become parents them- selves, will know how to hold the family together and to connect it with the state. I should begin to teach the girls to be good mothers by teaching them to be good daughters. Take a girl whose mother has come from South Italy. The mother cannot adjust herself to the changed condition of housekeeping, does not know how to wash and bake here, and do the other things which she has always done well in Italy, because she has suddenly been transported from a village to a tenement house. If that girl studies these household conditions in relation to the past and to the present needs of the family, she is under- taking the very best possible preparation for her future obligations to a house- hold of her own. And to my mind she can undertake it in no better way. Her own children are mythical and far away, but the little brothers and sisters pull upon her affections and her loyalty, and she longs to have their needs recognized in the school so that the school may give her some help. Her mother complains that the baby is sick in America because she cannot milk her own goat; she insists if she had her own goat's milk the baby would be quite well and flourishing, as the children were in Italy. If that girl can be taught that the milk makes the baby ill because it is not clean and be provided with a simple test that she may know when milk is clean, it may take her into the study not only of the milk within the four walls of the tenement house, but into the inspection of the milk of her district. The milk, however, remains good educational material, it makes even more concrete the connection which you would be glad to use between the household and the affairs of the American city. Let her not follow the mother's example of complaining about changed conditions; let her rather make the adjustment for her mother's entire house- hold. We cannot tell what adjustments the girl herself will be called upon to make ten years from now; but we can give her the clue and the aptitude to adjust the family with which she is identified to the constantly changing con- ditions of city life. Many of us feel that, splendid as the public schools are in their relation to the immigrant child, they do not understand all of the difficulties which surround that child— all of the moral and emotional perplexi- ties which constantly harass him. The children long that the school teacher should know something about the lives their parents lead and should be . able to reprove the hooting children who make fun of the Italian mother because she wears a kerchief on her head, not only because they are rude but also because they are stupid. We send young people to Europe to see Italy, but we do not utilize Italy when it lies about the schoolhouse. If the body of teachers in our great cities could take hold of the immigrant colonies, I02 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General could bring out of them their handicrafts and occupations, their traditions, their folk songs and folk lore, the beautiful stories which every immigrant colony is ready to tell and translate; could get the children to bring these things into school as the material from which culture is made and the material upon which culture is based, they would discover that by comparison that which they give them now is a poor meretricious and vulgar thing. Give these children a chance to utilize the historic and industrial material which they see about them and they will begin to have a sense of ease in America, a first consciousness of being at home. I believe if these people are welcomed upon the basis of the resources which they represent and the contributions which they bring, it may come to pass that these schools which deal with immigrants will find that they have a wealth of cultural and industrial material which will make the schools in other neighborhoods positively envious. A girl living in a tenement household, helping along this tremendous adjustment, healing over this great moral upheaval which the parents have suffered and which leaves them bleeding and sensitive — such a girl has a richer experience and a finer material than any girl from a more fortunate household can have at the present moment. I wish I had the power to place before you what it seems to me is the opportunity that the immigrant colonies present to the public school: the most endearing occupation of leading the little child, who will in turn lead his family, and bring them with him into the brotherhood for which they are longing. The immigrant child cannot make this demand upon the school because he does not know how to formulate it; it is for the teacher both to perceive it and to fulfil it. THE SCHOOL AND THE PRACTICE OF ETHICS ELLA FLAGG YOUNG, PRINCIPAL, CHICAGO NORMAL SCHOOL The nineteenth century was a century of progress. Its progress did not lie, however, in finished achievements. Every type of invention and every form of human endeavor bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the twentieth are but suggestions of possibilities not yet attained. The roll of inventions is long; and because of its length some assume that all the needs of mankind will soon be fulfilled. If the electric car, the phonograph, the X-rays, and all other inventions depended for their future upon mankind's needs only, it might be possible that their history could now be written. The inventor and the builder, however, were not the first in the fields of electricity, acoustics, and radio-activity. They were preceded by the scientists, the theorists who had developed fundamental conceptions of the forces of nature and their modes of action. From these conceptions scientists have thru experimentation been able to standardize nature's forces and state working hypotheses for the ways in which those forces will act. It is the conceptions of the forces of nature, their limitations and possibilities, called the laws of nature, that are Sessions] THE SCHOOL AND THE PRACTICE OF ETHICS 103 back of the marvelous inventions and works in the world of human industry, and of more marvelous ones than have yet been wrought out. The great conceptions are elemental and their suggestions are numberless. In like manner, conceptions of the powers of the human being and the modes of growth of these powers are influencing teachers to new methods and new subjects. These conceptions are far-reaching and they originate in philosophic minds. They contain, imbedded in their general, abstract state- ment, suggestions for the gifted teacher; suggestions of the laws underlying the forces in childhood and youth. It is by the comprehension of these forces and the laws controlling them that we teachers may devise (or as it would be expressed in the industrial world, may invent) that organization of the schoQl which will help to the best solution of the problems of contemporary life. We have not yet so fully grasped the conception of development in child- hood and youth as stated by the nineteenth -century philosopher as the inventors and the captains of industry have grasped the conception of the forces of nature as stated by the scientist. There is one conception in philosophy that will yet influence the social world more than the speculations about electricity, light, and heat have affected the industrial world. I mean the conception that character develops in childhood thru the exercise, the activity, of the ethical judgment. The American home and the American school more than those of any other country stand for independent action in childhood. But conduct may be independent of authority and yet not be ethical. That such is the condi- tion in America is shown in the resolutions adopted by this Association last year at Los Angeles and by the general tenor of editorials in newspapers and articles in magazines. It is my purpose to consider wherein the theory of independent judgment fails, even tho America has taken an advance posi- ,tion in the matter of moral training; to consider the effort within the school to fit children and young people to meet the demands which life will make upon their ethical nature, and in doing this I shall have in mind the conception of character developing in childhood thru the exercise of the ethical judgment. Ethics is the study of conduct from the standpoint of right, of duty, of responsibility, of goodness. Ethical training is the cultivation of the judgment of values in conduct. This judgment of values in conduct is always an expres- sion of the character of the judger. All through this country, questions bear- ing on work, value in conduct, are discussed in the schools. That which is, the actual conduct, is tried, measured, by the children's and by the students' opinions of what ought to be, their ideals of honesty, kindness, generosity. And yet, on every hand, there is adverse criticism and reflection on the train- ing of the young American. There are two standpoints from which the work of the school is judged: one, that from which is weighed the power of the elementary- or the high-school graduate to give valuable service in the field of labor; and the other, that from which is tested the morality, the character, I04 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General and conduct of the young people in assuming responsibility and in interpreting their duties to others. Inspection of courses of study in the various parts of the country shows a gradual disappearance of direct instruction in ethics. Many persons who are not familiar with the public elementary and high schools, except as these schools were a quarter of a century ago or as they are outlined on paper, infer that there is neither religious nor ethical training in them. This is a great mistake. In every public school, there is memorizing of literary selections, of poems, and of addresses that are replete with ethical or religious sentiment. In the upper grades of the elementary school and in the classes in literature in the high schools much attention is given to the discussion of novels, poems, and dramas with the stress laid upon the ethical element involved. So com- mon is the tendency to condense the comprehensiveness of the entire book or poem studied into the ethical lesson taught, that professors of literature in the colleges and universities sometimes complain that literature is analyzed as a vehicle for ethics instead of being *'a work of literary art interpreting life." The order of progression in the use of literature should be, first, the experi- ence, and then the poem or selection that will afford a larger, a richer, and a more suggestive setting for it. In teaching ethics there should be a like method of procedure. There would be the expression of the impulses to selfishness, to greediness, to generosity, and these impulses would be modified by other impulses and motives; but always out of the original emotions should the children be led to the appreciation of the ethical situation; be led to the ideal of the virtue which we would have them embody in' their lives. The wise mother does not teach her four-year old child courage, or generosity, or truthfulness by a word-picture about courage or generosity or truthfulness. She takes the hand of the little one in hers and helps him to a feeling of pleasure in overcoming fear and courageously advancing toward what has been a fearful thing. She allur- ingly sympathizes in the generosity as the little one shares his food or his playthings with another. In this simple way she begins to train the ethical judgment of her child. It is in moral activity, as in intellectual, that our ideas and ideals are developed. ^ js The history of education in the nineteenth century is one of experimentation in devising means in the elementary school for founding knowledge in experi- ence. In the high school, the science laboratory and the manual-training shop have been introduced as means to the end sought. But, if the problem of founding intellectual knowledge of science and art and literature in experi- ence is as yet too deep for the school, what shall one say of the possibility in the school of founding in experience ideals of conduct ? The very conditions underlying the school organization make almost fruitless the conception of character-developing in childhood thru the exercise of the ethical judgment. It is true that changes have been made in the organization which has been passed down to the twentieth century. In America, the relations between teacher and pupils have been materially modified. These changed relations have b Sessions] THE SCHOOL AND THE PRACTICE OF ETHICS iqc been construed by a few writers on education as indicative of what they call mollycoddling. The fact is that the ideal of the good teacher has been influ- enced by the democratic theory that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. So, in a singularly intricate situation, the teacher finds himself constituting the government, with absolutely no reference to the wishes ot those to be governed, and yet under the necessity of maintaining the position that the pupils consent to the government. The democratic theory of government may halt occasionally, confused when a sharp and unexpected regulation arouses a spirit of discontent or opposition; but that the wheels of government are set going thru discussion and explanation of the command or regulation in no way suggests, to one who is familiar with American children or young people, that the government is maintained by mollycoddling. In the idea of the derivation of power from the consent of the governed there is a movement in the direction of founding the social judgment in the emotions and in co-operative action. But immediately upon entering into a consideration of the virtues which are cultivated in the school, we find the theory to be individualistic. Punctuality in attendance, promptness in the performance of duties, honest endeavor to prepare lessons independently of surreptitious aids, application to tasks, are all qualities desirable in large measure in every member of society. Without these qualifications developed in its members society would be in a state of uncertainty as regards what to expect in the way of habitual response to engagements to do or to be. The self- control of the boys and girls who in their school career live up to the standard of conduct fixed by the school should not be underestimated. This standard, however, lacks that subtle element which is indispensable to life — the element of growth. There is prevalent the notion that at the age of forty years or more one*s ideals of honesty, truth, generosity are less true, are more tinctured with self- seeking than in the earlier years, especially the years between fifteen and twenty-five. It may be a mistake to conclude that the earlier ideals were not genuine; but to say that they lacked the vitality which insures growth would not be amiss. How to develop the ethical judgment so that the ideals shall deepen and give true value to the experiences of life is, for the school, a ques- tion of the deepest import. Writers on ethical training usually divide the school in its influence on character-building into two parts; first, the classroom, with its regular, orderly life, in which stress is laid on punctuality, industry, obedience, quiet; second, the playground, with its democratic life, in which are acquired knowledge of human nature, self-reliance, friendship, and a sense of obligation to play fair. In other words, the schoolroom affords opportunity for the individual to acquire power to stand alone, while the school yard or playground presents conditions that facilitate growth in action with other persons. One does not understand those writers to imply that the work in the school- lo6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General room consciously limits the training to things intellectual and to each indi- vidual in isolation, and that the playground purposely trains in a knowledge of the social virtues. They are usually endeavoring to show that the indi- vidual and the social training are secured by means of the two divisions of the school. It is interesting to note that the equilibrium of the children as indi- viduals and as members of society is secured in two distinct situations. In one, "the teacher manipulates the class as a whole. He knows how to bring every part of it to the support of every other part. " In the other situation the children initiate and control the movements of all parts. The assumption that these two divisions provide individual and social training is one of the reasons why the school does not make effective in its classrooms the conception of character developing in childhood thru the exercise of the ethical judgment. Much stress is laid upon the value of class recitation in that the teacher probes the statements of the pupil reciting, and then holds the other members of the class responsible for correction of all mistakes made and for omissions; and also in that the children learn by detecting and correcting the blunders of the dull and the indolent. Outside of school we think a child ill-natured if he calls attention to the flaws in the work of another child, but we admire his character if he studies to assist another who fails to understand a question In school the boys and girls have no responsi- bility for the improvement of one who has not reached the level of the class in behavior or learning. To be good is to ignore his existence. Out of school, he may be a subject for attention and help. The attitude of the school toward the ethical judgment when subjects in knowledge are under consideration is amazing. Knowledge is unlike material things. Two people cannot have the same dollar and each spend it; but they can have Lincoln's address at Gettysburg and each one give it to hundreds of other people. The richness, the depth, the value of the history of the discovery of America may vary in as many degrees as there are children in a class. These variations originate in the different experiences of the different children, in the different predominating types of imagery, and in their powers in thought. An ideal school is not one in which the teacher probes, and children watch the dissection, pouncing upon the mistakes. It is one in which the members gain strength and individuality thru co-operative effort to help make the bit of knowledge the common possession, as full and complete as possible. This united effort is not a shouting of many answers from which the teacher selects the best. That travesty of co-operation gives neither mental nor moral response. In recent years, experiments looking toward the unification of the children and teachers have been made in different places. The experimenting schools have been known sometimes as the school city, sometimes as the self-govern- ing school, sometimes as a school under student control. These experiments have originated in a recognition, by the teachers, of the individualistic training of the school life and of the need for awakening in the children a sense of Sessions] THE SCHOOL AND THE PRACTICE OF ETHICS 107 responsibility in making the school what it should be. The teachers have as I understand the principles underlying the self-governing schools, main- tained the same method of questioning, probing, and dissecting that is common in intellectual work with classes of the old type. The self-governing idea has been in large measure isolated from the classroom instruction. Instead of the children's learning helpfulness, generosity, politeness, "truthfubess, and fair dealing thru interactivity in class, they practice it as responsible members in another part of the school— in the government; the teachers, on the other hand, efface themselves in the management of the yards, halls, or corridors, and in certain prescribed meetings. Official position, voting, punishing by means of committees of children — in short, the machinery of government- would seem to be too prominent. Of course the children get some benefit thereby. The men and women conducting the experiment are in advance of those of us who sit dumbly accepting whatever has been established, whether it be good or bad. But, do not the experiments come under the methods of socialism, ignoring the function of the teacher as a leader in training the conduct of the boys and girls outside the classroom ? That a committee of children shall pick up the scraps of paper is not so valuable in the life of the village, town, or city, as that the teachers and children keep the premises tidy by not creating untidiness. The mild rudeness of high-school boys and girls in the corridors and in the streets when starting in large numbers from the school house are indications, not of the need for pupil monitors, or aldermen, in the school halls and yard, but of the crying need for the association of the teachers with the pupils in a relation that makes the culture and urbanity of the teacher energies that co- operate with the crudity and vivacity of the boys and gurls. For teachers and parents to withdraw from the social gatherings, the debates, the games of the children and young people is to confess to an unsym- pathetic attitude toward the social nature of childhood and youth. More than that, it is to leave the training of the ethical judgment to chance. Not only in work but in amusements also may the ethical judgment and the char- acter be formed. All of our acts involve a recognition of our relation to other people; but those acts are not necessarily ethical. When children and young people find their amusements entirely in the company of those of about their own age and away from adults, many forms of conduct and attitudes toward others are acquired thru imitation of the assertive ways of the leading spirits. They do not consciously carry themselves rudely, insensible to the welfare of others; they conform to the behavior of their set and so behave in the manner congenial to the self-willed leaders. Without direction, without conscious deliberation, the cue is taken from the usual conduct of the crowd, and we have what is known as the American type. It is not segregation of girls as in Turkey that we need. It is not duennas and chaperons whom the young people ofttimes study to outwit, that will refine and elevate the American type. We must make effective the conception Io8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General of character developing thru the exercise of the ethical judgment. Parents and teachers must interest themselves in the activities of the young; not alone by furnishing the means for enjoyment and for work, but by keeping alive, thru participation and association, a relation between the young and the mature. If teachers act as repressive forces at games, clubs, and other forms of social activities of the young people, then the question arises: What is the relation between those teachers and their pupils or students ? In affairs of a truly intellectual nature, we appreciate the final test of the strength of the individual to be the power of judging the conditions that control the subject-matter. If we could get away from the notion that our ideas about things right and wrong are intuitive, and that, altho our conceptions of veracity, justice, compassion, benevolence, are valid in experience, they are yet beyond the realm of experience and knowledge, we should have a responsi- bility in training the ethical judgment similar to that we now appreciate in training the intellectual judgment. There is another reason for our hesitation in recognizing our responsibility for making conditions give play to the ethical judgment. We share the popular belief that the moral judgment is cold and unsympathetic. Feeling that in affairs of life it is necessary that sympathy be aroused if one is to receive his just dues, we try to stir the imagination thru situations outside the experience, hoping to arouse the emotion of sympathy thereby. The fact is, that in genuine situations the emotions would be stirred, and then the imagination and the judgment, and, as we all know, the character, the sum total of the motives and aspirations of the judger, would become a part of the material on which he or she would pass judgment. It is right here that sympathy, the movement of the disposition, the character, along the line of action begins. Such judgment, the result of the character, all that the boy or girl is, deciding upon action that satisfies his or her under- standing of the great principles of honesty, justice, fairness, kindness, purity, will react into the character and make it stronger, more sympathetic, truer. Such training of the ethical judgment can develop only out of work and amusement in which there arise critical situations that command the con- scious and sincere effort of the boy or girl to influence the situation by the activity in judging. Here and there great teachers have lived with the children and young people in the learning and the playing, developing both the scientific and the ethical judgments. How to do it in the fluctuating membership of crowded schoolrooms is the greatest question ever set for us. When our own ethical judgment shall have become surer, thru activity in the life of the school, then shall we find the solution of what now seems to be an unsolvable problem. THE PERSONAL TOUCH IN TEACHING ANDREW F. WEST, DEAN OF GRADUATE SCHOOL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY There are three questions which are the inevitable and fundamental ques- tions in the education of every human being. They are his relation to the world b Sessions] PERSONAL TOUCH IN TEACHING jog he lives in, his relation to his fellow-men, and to his own self. And there arc three great classes of study which predominantly, or more than other studies, aim to provide answers to these questions. Man's place in the world of nature is the problem to which science attempts the answer, and man's place among his fellow -men is the problem to which what we may call history, in the large sense, attempts the answer. And man's own nature, his own expression, his range of thought and feeling and action, is the problem to which what we may call literature, in the large sense, attempts the answer. Yet in all three prob- lems there is just one common element— the man himself; and self-knowledge, whether it be in reference to man's place in nature or among his fellows or directly of himself, remains the one central, deepest knowledge the best educa- tion can give. And when the three problems of education are focused and viewed with reference to this one common element, our human nature, there emerges for every human being, slowly gathering strength with the years, tak- ing tone and deep color with experience, what we may call his philosophy of life, his ascertained general principles of thought and action. When that is done, the work of education is done for him, so far as it can be done. And any other questions unsettled, unsolved — imperious as they are — must be answered from the deeper region of religion. But religion and education, while inseparably connected, are different questions — and the one practical center of everyone's education is the purely human problem, namely, his own self. He must begin with himself and find himself truly, if ever he is to suc- ceed in finding truly his place among his fellow-men and his relation to the world of nature. Education is thus first, last, and always a personal question. And the great teacher is the man of great personality, in whom nobility means more than attainments, and therefore the man whose personal touch upon the student is sure to be quickening and ennobling. Any other teacher than this must be judged a failure, no matter what his scholarly attainments. Not that he should be an ignoramus, for he must know surely and clearly the subjects he is teaching, but he must know even more profoundly and sympathetically the objects he is teaching, namely, the other human beings, his pupils, for whom he is guide and leader. If this be true, as I devoutly believe it is, then the old saying of Pope that "The proper study of mankind is man," the proper knowledge for each of us is self-knowledge, the highest conquest is self-conquest, receives new empha- sis. And should it not be so ? Yet are we not today too much in danger of being diverted from knowing ourselves, our own personalities, our own capa- cities, to the things that are outer, to things that are indeed related to us, but yet are not ourselves. And particularly, to narrow the question sharply down to the domain of school and college and university education,' are we not more and more, with the growth of numbers, with the growth of appliances, with the growth of machinery, with the growth of devices, losing sight of the individual student or teacher, losing sight of the individual human soul, and dealing with it in herds and masses and aggregates ? I think that is true. U there ever no NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General was a country in the world that has shown capacity for organization, in edu- cation as well as outside of it, that country is our own. If there ever was a place where machinery of all sorts, intellectual, social, commercial and physical, was invented and developed and differentiated beyond all expectation of past generations, it is right here. And what I think is happening in our schools and colleges, and has been happening for the last twenty-five years, is that we have become worshipers of organization, worshipers of machinery, worshipers of plans and devices and rules and formulas, instead of discoverers of the individual student, finders of human souls, fishers of men. Let us keep to this theme. If it be true that personality is the be-all and end-all of school education, if it be true that a man's character is more than his attainments, if it be true that it is more important for every boy to become ''his own man" than it is to become anything else, then it seems to me there are a few things we can say in regard to the loss of that personal touch in teaching — or rather, let me say more hopefully, in regard to the reviving, the restoration, and reimposing of that personal touch in teaching — on which the best results must forever depend. Someone will say at once, ''You cannot take every boy and every girl, one by one." Of course, we cannot; it is not desirable that we should. I fully believe that the institution which, for want of a better name, we will call a school — a combination, a body of pupils assembled under teachers with definite rules — ^would be necessary if we had limitless means and teachers of the most perfect power. Why ? Because one of the three problems, as I have said, is not only for the boy to find himself in education, but to find his place among his fellows; and there the school comes in superbly and necessarily as the intermediate training-place between him and the larger society of the world. And so we shall always need schools and classes and a certain mini- mum of machinery; for the class is just as necessary for one part of education as individual instruction is for the other part of education. Let us see how it works. First of all, there are classes of students, according to age and proficiency. There is your student of tenderest years, your boy or girl a little older, your boy or girl in a high school, your student in college — and so on. Then, too, all students of the same age are not naturally "in the same class," either in point of brightness or energy or proficiency. So a second classification is needed among students of like age. We all admit that. Then comes another classification, due to the fact that ev^ery student can take and should take more than one study at a time. I am one of those who believe that very few students can take more than four or five things and do any justice to them; but let us admit, at any rate, that a few things should be studied simultaneously by everyone. So there you come again to the question of classification of students, not only by age and attain- ments, but classification by allotment to the several subjects of study they pursue. But what subjects of study? Only a few of the best things; and these things, in the main, must be chosen for the student — chosen by those Sessions] PERSONAL TOUCH IN TEACHING who do know, not by those who do not know, whkt are and what are not the things of central and fundamental worth. There are things of less worth things of more worth, things of still greater worth, and things of supreme worth' AU studies are not equally valuable, any more than all men are equally sensible! And let us say in passing that this remains true, no matter how insistently certain studies are given equality of space in school programs. CaUing them equal does not make them so. Classification, then, is needed, because schools are needed: classes of students and classes of studies. Have we not done all that ? Have we not "graded" our schools lengthwise and crosswise all the way ''from the gutter to the university," as Huxley put it ? Have we not done all that again and again in finest elaboration ? Has not our country spent lots of money on buildings and playgrounds and salaries and textbooks and every variety and assortment of equipment, useful and useless ? Have we not today a great deal to show for it, a great deal of good ? Indeed, we have— a vast deal of energy, of almost crusading enthusiasm, but with it all an almost pathetic belief in systems of routine, in the outside scaffolding rather than in the inside building. We are working too far on the outside and from the outside, and doing it by machinery. Is the "young idea" to be wakened to literature? Then "carefully graded" selections of "memory gems" are set on his mind to adorn it. Is he to learn numbers ? Behold the colored joss-sticks that are used to teach him to count. His education is laid on him in set patterns, like fresco color in stencil on plaster. The trouble today with our American education, from the kindergarten to the university, is that the tendency of our system is to make the teacher no longer a teacher having individual personal power, but part of a monotonous machine. Thus organization and devices and appliances, and the fads and novelties, which are in fact little more than unreasoned aberrations of discontent with the monotony, become in the eyes of many the be-all and end-all of education. Even the system of classes of scholars and the system of classes of studies, needful as it is, dev^elops its own evil. This evil has been somewhat grimly called the "lock-step" in education; classes turned out all of a pattern, classes turned out with their distinguishing stamp, not the variety of excellence, but flat mediocrity — all alike not merely in the things wherein they ought to be alike, but in the things where- in they ought to be unlike. Now, the things that should be freest, it seems to me, ought never to be made subject to constraint, and among the things that should be freest are the natural actions of the human mind in study. If it is not the pupil's own act, if it is not the pupil's own impulse, then it is outside him, and all the machinery and regulations and rules we make will fail to make it his possession for life; an effective, powerful force in everything he thinks and does. And so I want to plead a moment, if I may, for the introduction of more of the personal touch into the regular class teaching. An easy thing to say, but how hard to do. How can it be done ? Well, to begin with, the very perfection of the 112 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General grading system of our schools, considered as a piece of machinery, suggests at once the way. We are now able in American schools, except the smallest, to have our different sections or divisions of classes homogeneous. Wherever that is secured, and classes of ten, fifteen, or twenty sit before you, each com- posed of pupils of either the highest or mediocre or lower type, you then have an opportunity which you could not have with a mere miscellany before you, because those who sit before you are near enough alike to flock together, to be within hail and call, and to be within measurable reach of whatever instruction is adapted to any particular one in that class. This means a great deal. Under such favorable circumstances, already secured, the thing to do is to change radically the mode of recitation. Of course, we all try to make a recitation something else than simply hearing the pupils say over and over again imperfectly what they do not know. Yet how many recitations have been almost necessarily of that character — ^not because the teacher wanted it so, but because the machinery almost compelled it. Recitation is the oldest art in education. It goes back to the very birth of teaching, and the true father of teaching was the philosopher Socrates. I wonder if his dialectic method is not too much in disregard. Yet it is really the one sure way of teaching. And what is there in it ? Just two things : first, to make clear to a whole class or single pupil what are the things he does not know about a particular subject. Secondly, to make clear to that pupil what is the particular scrap of knowledge he does possess, and then on that little, tiny piece of knowledge rescued out of oblivion, to build other knowledge, and thus out of the pupil's own striving and making to develop still more knowledge. Now it seems to me this cannot be done effectually where the effort is to get up as many pupils as possible in each period and hear them. It cannot be done by sending a whole lot of boys or girls to the blackboard and letting each of them work an example, or a whole string of examples. But it should be done, to a large extent, in this way : By making the whole class which is before you learn by means of the perform- ance of one pupil who is reciting. I don't know how to put this clearly, per- haps, and yet it is something as follows: It means that in a school period very, very few are called up to recite. It means that a pupil is selected for the purpose, is asked to read or explain something, and that his performance is made the center of instruction for all the others. It means that he is to be encouraged to say what it is he does not know, irrespective of marks. It means that, as his self-confessed ignorance comes out, the little implications of knowl- edge he has also come out in his recitation. There are ten, twenty, or thirty other boys or girls seated about, perhaps with notebooks and pencils, taking down points for themselves, or at least on the alert with any question they may have, watching the mistakes the ''other fellow" has made in his attempts to get out his lesson, and suggesting corrections or alterations, catching your remarks '*on the fly," and all on the jump to respond to anything the teacher may say. Now, it seems to me, that method of instruction, which I am told is a very Sessions] PERSONAL TOUCH IN TEACHING ancient one, practiced among the Hindoos ages ago, is sure to be most stimulat- ing. That I, the teacher, act by means of a second person, a pupil, on twenty others, means there is really a little friendly trial for mastery going on. The quick give-and-take, the little responses, the sudden thrills, the wakening start that occasions a questioning in this dull mind here and that sluggish mind there, are all brought out by using the single reciting pupil as the instrument in the hands of the teacher for teaching all the others. Just as a sympathetic artist can take a violin and play on it to the delight of an audience, so can the great teacher in this way, by applying the personal touch in teaching, make out of that individual pupil the instrument on which he shall play and by which he shall move the entire class. But then, there is a second thing in regard to the personal touch in teaching. After all has been done that can be done in the way of class instruction, I am sure we have not done our whole duty, because the varieties of mind are so many and diversities of circumstance, of origin, of opportunity are so endless, that hardly any group of twenty or thirty boys that will sit before us will be, or ought to be, fully homogeneous. This is most true in every school in regard to the newly received pupils. The first few months are needed to get them into shape. They are so different, they are so diverse; they don't quite go together; they don't quite understand each other or the teacher; a common sympathy has not been established; a common consciousness has not been developed. And even after it is developed, there still remain the laggards, those who stray to the side, the eccentric, the fitful, the boy of weak will, the boy of perverse will. The attention we have to give to these irregular students is vastly out of proportion to the number of the other students and the attention they receive. Then, too, there is the boy of rare gifts and high desires. He must not be unnoticed — ^for he may turn out to be worth a hundred others. And so I think the personal touch must be supremely exerted in a second way, and that is by individual instruction after the tutorial method. What is there mysterious about it? Something, I am sure. Suppose you and I talk to each other alone. There are but two of us. Is there anything so intimate in the exchange of thought as that conversation of one person with another, that one-to-one meeting, the face-to-face vision, that closest intimacy of all think- ing, where, as Tennyson says. Thought leaps out to wed with thought Ere thought can wed itself with speech. And so the more we can get to talking or dealing with the individual boy and girl singly, the closer we come to their particular needs; the more intimate, the more sympathetic, the more friendly, the more lasting is the effect. Has it not been so always ? The greatest students in this world have been formed one by one by great masters. It is an old figure, but is it not almost literally true, that the runner carrying the torch of knowledge hands it on to one other, and he to the next, and so on to the next ? And anything that brings the stu- dent close to the teacher, so that he feels that he has an immediate access, not 114 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General as one of a crowd, not as one of a company, but as an intimate trusted younger friend, seems to me is going to double and treble and quadruple the progress of that student. You say, ''Very good, but how is it to be done? It is an enormously expensive thing, and we are doing all we can now." So we are with what we have, in the way we are doing it. But I venture to suggest that an improvement can be made with little or no expense for introducing this tutorial system in the schools. The germ of it is already at work in some of our schools, and most satisfactorily, by the employment of the so-called pupil- teacher. How shall I put it ? Suppose you take any school with its number of weekly exercises. Then let us subtract from those weekly exercises one- fourth. Take the risk. It seems a great risk, but it is not so great as it seems. Hand over those class-periods for this other purpose. You say, **Yes, but where are the teachers ? " Where but in the upper grades ? Where but among those who have already nearly finished their school work with high success ? There will be in a large school of a thousand, let us say, perhaps fifty such boys and girls, in the last year or two of the course, who could be relieved from some of the routine and assigned to some of these defective, irregular students, at any rate. In some schools more could be done. It does seem to me that the chance of doing good is so great that it is well worth while to try that method. We need not hesitate. I have seen the experiment of trying the preceptorial teaching in my own college in the last four years. We cut off about one-fourth of the class exercises and assigned that fourth to this intimate, personal conference; and I do not hesitate to say that the result has been that the lowest part of the class has disappeared, and not by destruction but by its elevation. I can hardly tell you what a transformation it has made in the rank and file of our students to find that they have personal friends to whom they may go, who do not mark them, but who are their guides and their counselors, who reenforce "on the side" the instruction of the classroom. It is that per- sonal nearness which enables the preceptor to fit his counsel and help to the special need of the student. If the fault of purely individual education has been that it overlooks the need of class instruction, the training of men in their great common resem- blances, which must always be a fundamental thing; if at the same time the fault of exclusive class instruction is that it neglects the peculiarities and diffi- culties of individuals — then it seems to me the solution of the question is to have and keep both class instruction and individual instruction, making the class instruction the fundamental thing, animated, toned, and adapted, however, in the class teaching by the close personal mode of recitation, and then make the tutorial teaching the supplementary and reenforcing thing. Thus you will solve the problem of teaching the student in relation to his fellows and in his own self. Then we may remove from the class teaching all the little irritations and difficulties due to the peculiarities of one and another pupil, and transfer them to the proper place for treatment; for hospital treatment, if necessary. Sessions] PERSONAL TOUCH IN TEACHING „- Here it seems to me is the place where the American school education, and college education too, may receive new vitalization. That vitalization is to be gained by fostering strong individuality both in teacher and in scholar— but in the teacher first. I feel more than I can tell, that if we are suffering as a country, notwithstanding all our achievements and exertions, we are suffering from the lack of independent individual strength in men. Men are getting too subservient to public opinion; they are too willing to be run by machines, or to be a part of machinery. They are too willing to be led rather than to lead; they are too willing to take their opinions at second hand rather than at first hand. In things political and things religious, as in things educational, it does seem to be a fact (and let us be our own severe critics in this) that the American people is too much in the way of taking the "lockstep" in every- thing. For the sake of our country is it not a great deal better that every boy in our schools should have the utmost provision made for him, even if it entail vast expense, so that the most sacred thing in all education, his own self, shall be invigorated, lifted, rescued, perfected, and ennobled by that personal touch in teaching ? And so it all comes back to the personality of the teacher. Give me a good teacher, a good man or a good woman of noble nature, and I am comparatively indifferent to his or her scholarly attainments. The attain- ments will follow, like the "other things" added when the Kingdom of Heaven is sought first. Of what use, for educating our boys and girls, would it be to have the most gifted historian or linguist or physicist or teacher of any art, if that teacher is himself a small-natured, mean-natured, close-natured, little- natured soul ? For educational purposes of what use is it in science, in philos- ophy, in anything, that men should make their discoveries, if the men who teach these things to students really amount to very little in themselves ? The main effect on the student is the effect of the man. I do not care much for the scientific conclusions or the philosophical con- clusions or the literary performances of men of poor judgment or bad taste or selfish nature. I distrust them because they are the observations they have made with faulty eyes; and when the eyes are discolored by prejudice or passion or meanness, what difference does it make how great the attain- ments are if the man himself has not attained to being worthy of what he studies ? And so we come back to the old theme. It is the personality of the teacher that counts, not the machinery of the school. Every weak teacher leans on the machinery. Every strong teacher can get along if there is no machinery at all. What a test it is of the nobility of education when a great teacher arises, be it man or woman in the lowest or the highest grade of our education, and needs nothing but his own native power to grasp, enchain, lift and lead any student who may be brought before him. That is what makes the school ; and if that is what makes the school, that is what must make our country. And as in aU teaching, so in all human affairs, the personal power of the man Il6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION IGeneral finally determines the worth of his achievement, and the old- Greek proverb remains true, that **the workman is greater than his work. " These last few days our nation has mourned in reverential sorrow one who supremely illustrates this plain, old-fashioned, indestructible truth. Grover Cleveland's whole career was filled with work, hard work, unrewarded work, intimate personal work. He did not seek great things for himself, but he did great things for us, and he was himself greater than what he did. So I ask every American boy in school to think of him as the great man who has spelled out for each of us personally the meaning of these words: wise, patient, rugged, honest, modest, loving, fearless. Greatheart has crost the River; and as we wait here in the thick of the struggle for the things that are true and honorable, for manhood against machinery, for personal independence against servility, let us hearten ourselves by his example. The words he said, if haply words there were, When full of years and works he passed away, Most naturally might, methinks, refer To some poor, humble business of to-day. " That humble, simple duty of the day Perform, " he bids; "ask not if small or great. Serve in thy post; be faithful and obey. Who serves her truly, sometimes saves the State. " THE PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER IN PUBLIC- SCHOOL WORK WILLIAM H. MAXWELL, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CITY OF NEW YORK One day not long ago in the very heart of the tenement-house region in what is known as the Lower East Side of New York, a young woman who had just left the large school of which she is principal, was slowly picking her way through the crowded street. Her progress was slow for the sidewalks were crowded with people, and the street, except a small driveway in the center, was filled with the pushcarts of peddlers. To an observer it would have been at once apparent that the young woman was a person of great consequence in that Yiddish-speaking crowd, for the children's faces were glad when they saw her, and the large boys touched their caps, and not a few of the long- bearded men standing beside the pushcarts, greeted her with, "Good after- noon. Miss K. " Presently a woman of rather better appearance than the rest, stopped alongside of Miss K. and began to walk with her. With the unmis- takable Yiddish accent she exclaimed, laying a respectful hand on Miss K.'s arm: I cannot help seeing how these children, they love you. You know my Bennie and Rosie ? They're in your school. You are such a help to me at home. Some time Bennie, Sessions] PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER he say he wont. Then he quick stop and he say: "All right, mamma. Miss K says it is right'that I should obey. " Do you know, lady, when you stand on that platform in the school and you say someting it is just like when God speaks. Whether it is because of the repression that existed in the foreign lands from which they are gathered or because of the racial sadness that seems to have been their heritage since they wept by the waters of Babylon, there is no class of people who do so much honor to the teacher, particularly if she is one not of their own race, as do the Jews. Some twenty-five years ago a man became principal of a school in what was then one of the lowest slums of New York. It was in the days before tenement-house reform, and the abodes from which his pupils came were as a rule devoid of those necessities of life— fresh air, light, sufficient space, and sanitary arrangements. The district was crowded with saloons of the lowest class and along the river front were scores of dives frequented by sailors and those who profited by their weaknesses. It was also in the days before the law required that all teachers should be trained and that appointment should be made for merit alone. And so the school like its neighborhood was in sorry condition with a weak corps of teachers, for had not every one of them been a political appointment ? The new principal, however, was not only a man of great force of character, but he had had a broad college and university training. Before the year was out he had routed the politicians and ever afterward not an appointment was made in his school except on his recom- mendation. How did he do it? Not by letters to the newspapers, not by denunciation of the politicians, not by lifting up his voice in lamentation over the degeneracy of the times, but by the simplest course imaginable — he so won the respect of the community that the politicians did not dare to interfere with his school, and soon they were all helping him. Instead of asking for the appointment of their sisters and their cousins and their aunts as teachers, they began to "acquire merit" by offering medals to the pupils for proficiency and by raising money to help along students who, the principal said, had the brains to study in higher institutions. He was a constant visitor in the wretched homes of his pupils. He was a familiar figure in every street and alley. Care- less, negligent parents he threatened or cajoled. He found the means to clothe the child who was naked and feed the child who was hungry. He found employment after school hours for those who could continue in school in no other way. He discovered that so-called athletic clubs were hiring the larger boys in his school to pummel each other into insensibility in the presence of hundreds of brutalized men; but it took only one visit from him to each club to break it up. When with figure drawn up to its full height, tense muscles, and the stern voice of command, he invoked the terrors of the.law if any pupil of his was ever entered again in a boxing bout, there was not a ruffian in the gang who was not cowed. He saw that there were children to whom books did not appeal, and for them he devised hand work. He was, I believe, the first man in the United States to introduce genuine manual training into an ii8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General elementary school. His school became, as every public school ought to be, not merely a place of learning but a social center from which uplifting influences constantly radiated. Today in the humble lives of the laborer and the artisan, in the walks of business and politics, in the ranks of the lawyers, the doctors, the teachers, and the clergymen, there are thousands who attribute their suc- cess in life to the schoolmaster, Henry O'Neil. I have cited these two cases in order to bring before your minds the peculiar conditions under which teaching in New York City must be conducted. The first of these conditions is our vast foreign population. There are more Jews in New York than in Palestine, more Italians than in Rome, and enough foreigners of other nationalities to make a city as big as St. Louis. Of the 75,000 new pupils who enter the New York schools every year, probably two-thirds cannot speak a word of English. In one school I counted children of twenty-nine different nationalities who spoke twenty-nine different languages or dialects. To the other difficulties of school work, must, therefore, be added this, that to the majority of pupils the English language must be taught as a foreign language. The second condition peculiar to New York is the extreme congestion of population in parts of Manhattan Island and Brooklyn. In certain large sections the population is the densest in the world rising as high as 1,000 persons to the acre. They live, on account of extremely high rents, in enor- mous tenement houses; as many as forty families — and the families are always large — ^under one roof. A low plane of living, proneness to disease, particu- larly tuberculosis, and the absence of domestic privacy, are the necessary consequences. From these tenements the children, often insufficiently or improperly fed, weary through lack of sleep, with their nerves on edge, come to the public schools. The third condition, peculiar to New York is the constant shifting of popu- lation. In the tenement districts, because of the continuous migration of families a child seldom spends all of its school years in one school, generally not more than one or two years. Of course, out of 15,000 classes there are thousands in which the ordinary conditions of school life are to be found; but in other centers, the vast foreign population, the congestion of population, and the shifting of population, create conditions of difficulty for the teacher such as are not to be found in the same degree in any other quarter of the globe. In other words the New York City teachers are confronted with the diffi- culty not only of teaching an enormous mass of children — there are 600,000 pupils in the city schools — but of converting, under the most difficult conditions possible, a great horde of foreigners chiefly from the shores of the Mediter- ranean Sea, alien in language, alien in thought, alien in habits, into loyal American citizens. To supplement the work of the day schools the Board of Education has established several other agencies — evening schools, evening recreation centers, vacation schools, and playgrounds, lectures to workingmen Sessions] PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER ng and women, and organized athletic sports— all of which are doing their part vigorously and well; but it is on the regular day schools— elementary and high— our two city colleges and our training schools for teachers that the chief reliance must be placed. The first difficulty with which we are confronted is that of teaching each year tens of thousands of foreign-born children the English language. For such children we have organized hundreds of special classes, in which English is taught by the Gouin method of teaching a foreign language. I often marvel at the quickness with which, in these special classes, our teachers manage to teach our little immigrants to speak and read and write English. In six months after landing on our docks it is no uncommon thing to find little Russians .or Italians able to do all the work of the school, declaiming with tremendous fervor Patrick Henry's apostrophe to liberty or telling in their compositions about the day when their forefathers landed on Plymouth Rock. Some teachers, however, have a more wonderful gift than others in teaching foreign children English. One such teacher I have in mind. In her class children coming from homes of the most squalid surroundings, without a vestige of loveliness, surprise us with the beauty of their thought and expression. One day the principal, the Miss K. of whom I have already spoken, entered this teacher's class — a fifth-year class — and asked the children to write down any thoughts suggested by anything they had learned that day. Here is what one of them, a Russian girl, wrote: "The sky is like the ocean because on a bright summer's day the clouds in it are like white ships. It is like the land also for the clouds sometimes seem like splendid castles. " Such a teacher is not merely skilful in the ordinary sense of the term. Those children who come under the spell of her enthusiasm bring back some touch of poetic radiance on their souls. An even greater difficulty is presented by life in the tenements. Sometimes this life is one of extreme poverty; but extreme poverty, except during a period of trade suspension when men are thrown out of employment in large numbers is the exception rather than the rule. Where extreme poverty does exist, I need scarcely tell you that the teachers, out of their own slender earnings, are the first to come to the rescue. Even when the income of the family is considerable, it is too often igno- rantly and unwisely used or inordinately hoarded. The mother generally works as well as the father, and too often the children before and after school hours are left to shift for themselves. They come to school wrongly rather than insufficiently fed, though insufficient feeding is no uncom- mon thing at all times and especially in such a year as this when employment has been hard to find and the children of the poor have been crying bitterly. The principals and teachers have been untiring in providing relief for cases of extreme and sometimes, I am afraid, of pretended distress. But the evil is too great for individual effort to cope with. Malnutrition among the children of our large cities— the prolific cause of disease— the chief reason for lack of I20 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General progress in school — the fruitful source of intemperance and crime in after years — cries aloud in the name of humanity for relief. The plain fact is that the child who is improperly fed or insufficiently fed cannot do its school work and cannot control its instinctive impulses. To relieve this great suffering, to cure this great evil, it is not necessary that boards of education should provide food without price; it is necessary only that they should provide wholesome, well-cooked food at cost price. While we are waiting for this — ^perhaps the most pressing of all school reforms — the teachers are doing what they can to remedy the disease wrought by the tenement-house life — a life of crowded quarters, of bad air, bad light, and insufficient sleep. Our medical inspection, being provided by the Depart- ment of Health and in no degree under the control of the Board of Education, is quite inadequate. The principals and teachers are untiring in their efforts to induce parents to have remediable defects discovereci by the examining physicians corrected; such as myopia and that most prevalent cause of dis- order and so-called incorrigibility — ^adenoid growths in the throat. Only in about 25 per cent, of the cases, however, do the parents pay any attention to the request of the teachers. Some two years ago we had a remarkable experience which will illustrate the difficulties of this work among a crowded, ignorant, prejudiced, and highly excitable people. In a school in the Lower East Side there were collected a large number of over-age and mentally defective children. A medical examination showed that one hundred and fifty of them were suffering from adenoid growths in the throat. In the case of seventy, the parents had the necessar> operation performed. In the case of eighty, the parents either refused or neglected. The principal obtained the consent of these parents to have the operations performed in school. She secured the services of one of the most famous throat specialists in the country. The operations were successfully performed. Almost instantly a rumor flew like lightning through the neighborhood that the children's throats were being cut. Frenzied mothers and fathers by the thousand besieged the school. For several days if a Health Board physician appeared in the neighborhood of a public school in the ghetto it was the signal for a mob to storm the gates of the school house. Thorough discipline withstood these attacks, just as it has preserved the children's lives in many a serious alarm of fire. The steadi- ness, good temper, and tact of principals and teachers bore down and calmed the frenzy of the mob. Another manifestation of the personality required of the teacher in the New York City schools. Our courses in sewing and domestic science are doing much not only for individual pupils, but to introduce order, economy, and an American plane of living into the home. The good offices of the teachers in this respect are not confined, however, to the teachers of sewing and cooking, as the following story will show. Mr. Y. had among his pupils a boy about thirteen years of age who was quite irregular in attendance, though a fairly good student. As the boy gave Sessions] PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER 121 no satisfactory explanation of his irregularity, the teacher called on the boy's parents and found that they were living in two or three rooms of a miserable tenement. The father, a tailor by trade, was out of work, the mother was sick in bed, and there were four children of whom two were cripples. The rent had not been paid, and the family were on the point of being evicted from the wretched lodgings. The father, who was too proud to appeal to charity, had trudged about the city for many days in search of work, but always in vain. He kept the boy, who was the oldest of the family, home to look after the other children, and the invalid mother; besides, the boy had no proper clothing to wear, especially in inclement weather. To make a long story short, the teacher was shocked at what he saw and heard, paid the rent that was due, obtained a position for the father, and provided the boy with suitable clothing. The boy attended school regularly thereafter, was graduated and obtained a position through the teacher. The family moved out of the neighborhood and the teacher lost all track of them. About eleven years later, Mr. Y., who had since taken a higher position, was sitting in his office one day when a well-dressed and prosperous looking gentleman walked in and said, "Mr. Y., you do not know me ? I am , the tailor, whom you helped in a critical period of his life. I have been trying for a long time to locate you in order to express my gratitude and to repay you, so far as I can, what I owe you." He produced a large roll of bills — some $400 or $500 — ^which he had drawn from the bank, to present ocular proof that he was prosperous. He repaid every cent of the money advanced to him, and stated that he had a little home in another borough and that his family were in good health and circumstances. By dint of steady work and some careful investments he had accumulated what to him was quite a fortune. His boy was in business for himself and had recently married. Mr. Y., who had long ago forgotten the episode, then realized that he had builded better than he knew, and that the teacher's influence may extend far beyond the walls of a classroom and work for good in the larger sphere of life beyond. Another story even better illustrates the influence the tactful teacher may have in the tenement home. One day a girl, ragged, dirty, disheveled, was brought into a class taught by a bright young teacher who had already become noted for her success with foreign children. Leah, for that was the girl's name, could speak no English. She at once manifested, however, a strong liking for her teacher and, drawn by this affection, mastered the intricacies of English speech in an incredibly short time. As soon as she could make herself understood, she would lie in wait for her teacher and walk with her part of the way home. Slowly, at first, more rapidly afterward. Teacher began to drop hints as to how Leah's personal appearance might be improved. Every hint was acted on, and soon Leah began to wash her face and comb her hair, to tie and polish her shoes, and to have her clothes clean and neatly mended and held in place by hooks and eyes instead of pins. One day when they came 122 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Genera to the door of the tenement where Leah lived, Teacher expressed a desire to make a call on Leah's mother. The sight that met her eyes was not a pleasant one. The family contained many children of whom Leah was the eldest, and there were two boarders besides, all domiciled in two rooms. Out of a con- fused mass of bedding, children, rickety furniture, and broken cooking utensils rose the inevitable sewing-machines out of which the family earned a living and was doubtless saving money. In subsequent afternoon walks, Teacher began to throw out suggestions as to how Leah might reform the home. Leah immediately set to work. The mother regarded Leah's doings askance, but nothing could withstand her enthusiasm, and she soon won her father's strong support. The boarders were turned out. Another room was hired. The rooms were cleansed and put in order. Even the small brothers and sisters were subjected, at first greatly to their disgust, to the scrubbing brush, and were obliged to learn how to comb their hair. About this time Teacher loaned Leah an illustrated magazine. It contained a picture of a dinner table set with silver and cut glass and garnished with flowers. By this time Leah had learned to cook in the cooking class. With the picture as her guide, a new and bolder scheme than any yet entertained, entered her little brain. There must be a dinner table with a white cloth and garnished as nearly as possible like the picture. When this triumph was complete, Leah wrote a note which her father signed inviting Teacher to dinner. Teacher accepted the invitation. What a change met her eyes. Instead of the squalor of her former visit she beheld the neatness of a poor but well-ordered home. The father and mother were a bit stiff in their reception, because they had but a few words of English, but they treated Teacher with all the reverence due to a queen. And she was a queen, for was she not to those poor Russian Jews the incarnation of American civilization ? Thousands of teachers, God bless them ! are doing work of this kind in New York City. Perhaps those are doing it best who fill the school with the best spirit of our age — the spirit of social co-operation. One of my District Superintendents furnishes me with an account of a class in which this spirit is abundantly illustrated: Opening the door of the classroom I heard the busy hum of industry. Near the desk sat Miss X., surrounded by a group to whom she was explaining some faults of composition they had made in common. These I learned later were the backward pupils who most needed the teacher's individual help. The rest of the class were working in groups of two each — a bright and a moderate pupil. It was a most animated exercise. Every two pupils were reading and correcting a composition written by one of them. Each in turn had the double benefit of his own criticism and that of his associate. When the teacher became disengaged, a pair of eagerly throbbing hands called for judgment on some disputed point and this would at times involve a second discussion between teacher and pupils. The aim and its success in operation were equally obvious. The pupils were in the modern spirit of social co-operation, striving to find the truth. There was no copying, no suggestion of impertinent monitorial supervision. In aiding, each was learning. When there is such a manifestation of personality in the teacher, the school is not merely a preparation for life. It is life. Sessions] PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER 123 And what a power a principal may be who sets teachers an example in filling the school with the spirit of social co-operation. A gifted principal writes me: I began my teaching career in a school entirely devoid of ideals for anything beyond the hard facts of the textbook. The contrast between this and a school where the child was looked upon as God's choicest gift, revealed to me not alone the dignity of the teacher's calling, but itstremendous responsibility. The tenement home, it is scarcely necessary to say, breeds many bad boys. Nowhere is the teacher's personality more clearly revealed than in dealing with such boys. I asked the principal of a large school attended almost exclusively by Italians — ^a race prolific in unruly boys, at least in America — to write me the characteristics of the teachers who were most successful in dealing with such cases and he writes this: There are at least two characteristics of these teachers. These, if I read them rightly, are a rare degree of sympathy with children and an equally rare sense of justice. Not the sympathy which makes the man reason like the child, but the sympathy by which he is able to see with the child's eyes, and at the same time with his own clearer vision. Not the justice which treats all alike, but the higher justice which makes a difference. How quickly sympathy will act was recently told me by one of my asso- ciates: An incorrigible boy on his return from the truant school to his class struck a classmate in the eye, and fled from the building. At the close of school the principal went to the home of the boy. On approaching the house the boy fled to a proper distance, but on the assurance of the principal that he did not propose to arrest him or punish him, or allow anyone else to do so, the boy led the way to his mother. The mother was exceedingly angry at the boy and urged the principal to give him a sound thrashing, saying that she herself would punish him as soon as the principal left. The principal told her that he should do nothing of the kind; that he would not allow him to be sent to the truant school again, and that if she undertook to punish him he would make trouble for her. He assured the mother that he wished the boy to return to school and promised to do everything that he could to help the boy to be a man. The principal assured the boy that if he would come to school the next day he would receive a very cordial welcome; that he would help him in every way to keep up with his class work. After a further conference in this line the boy agreed to return to school the next day. The attitude of the principal, his assurance that he would help him to be a map, proved the making of the boy. Repression and fear are rapidly being eliminated as.factors of control in the New York schools. The favorite and perhaps the most successful plan of managing a bad boy is when a teacher with sympathetic insight discovers some natural aptitude or liking, finds occupation of that nature, and builds upon the foundation thus laid. I have collected many examples of boys made over through some fitting employment or the acceptance of some responsi- bility which they enjoyed. Myra Kelley's monitor of the goldfish is the type. 124 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General A few days ago an unmistakable son of Italy entered my ofl5ce. He held a parcel done up in paper in one hand; with the other he handed me a note. The note, which was from his principal, told me that the boy had been the worst she had ever met in a long experience — disobedient, violent, and appar- ently incapable of learning. This term, however, he came under the care of a teacher who discovered that Giovanni had a passion for making things. She set him to making baskets. He was no longer troublesome and was learning rapidly. The paper parcel contained a beautiful piece of basketry in vase form which showed the touch of the natural artist. We are only beginning, I believe, to realize the influence athletics may have in reclaiming unruly boys. The great prominence given to athletics during the past few years in the New York schools has given us an opportunity to test this means of school discipline. I have no hesitation in saying that athletics rightly used not only improves the carriage, increases physical power, and develops moral energy, but is a vital force in reducing otherwise unmanage- able boys to terms. This example will suffice: J. H., a boy of fourteen, was known in school parlance as a ** terror. " He had passed from one teacher to another, not by way of promotion, but mainly with the hope of finding the teacher who could pick out and develop his latent ability. In the course of events he came under the guidance of Miss Blank — his last chance. He entered just before recess of the day I visited Miss Blank. At recess the boys were busy with athletics. J. H. stood by with the sneering face he usually presented for things meaning effort. Regardless of this, he was placed in the group of smaller boys for the broad jump. Possibly to show his superiority, he jumped in turn and clearly outclassed every boy in his group. The teacher encouraged this and carefully watched him and every time his work outclassed his group he was placed in the next. He was pro- moted thus until one day he led the group of largest boys. J. H. was very quiet for the rest of the day. In the afternoon he actually tried some of the regular class work. It had been a new experience for him to lead in anything requiring effort. He had neglected his opportunities so long that the possi- bility of surpassing anyone else had never entered his mind. Through this interest the teacher aroused interest in his studies and helped him after school every day. In the spring, a basket-ball team was started at his school and J. H. was elected captain by the team as an expression of their admiration of his athletics. Only once did J. H. backslide. Then his teacher firmly took from him his honors as captain and leader in athletics for one month. He went through the usual *'I don't care," of other days, but he did care, and before the term of punishment was up he was begging his teacher to shorten his banishment by extra good behavior. J. H. was promoted that term. He is now a useful member of society and in business — another living example of a teacher's unselfish work. But boys are not the only offenders in school. It is, alas ! not uncommon Sessions] PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER _^ ^^ to meet with depravity in girls. A principal tells me this story of one of her teachers : Over two years ago there was in this teacher's class a young girl whose life was one of degradation. Her family and home were low in every respect. A visit to the family convinced this young teacher nothing could be gained there. A series of dreadful incidents occurred, foreshadowing murder and suicide. The young teacher at great risk to herself, but through this wonder- ful power she possesses, averted both, though the girl was expelled from the school. Not yet discouraged. Miss went to those in authority and had the girl readmitted. Then the teacher induced the girl to leave her home and found employment for her with friends. She has won their respect, for they report her a very quiet, refined young woman. Though she has left her family she still contributes to their support, and is now engaged to be married to a very estimable young man. This young teacher still keeps in touch with the girl. Her personal power is far-reaching and forcible. Her personality is very attractive, but a strong will that dominates her every act is the striking characteristic of this personal power. Here is a story, in her own words, which a girl, regenerated through the influence of a noble teacher, has written to one of my principals: At the time I came under the influence of this teacher, I was an unhappy, self-willed girl, who blundered continually. I knew my faults, but I had neither the ability nor desire to correct them. Sometimes I tried to force myself to do right, but it seemed like trying to climb a soft, steep gravelly bank. I kept sinking and slipping back at every effort to go forward. I recognized in this teacher a woman who was at once strong and gentle, firm and kind, noble and human, strict and sympathetic, wise and simple, powerful and controlled. Above all she was a person of high moral standards. As I became used to her type of excellence, I felt its beauty more and more, and she began to have a wonderful influence over me, which never lost its effect. She did not realize her power, she was simply living in her usual way. But I knew I had found a friend who would help me out of the misery and danger of despair. My blunders brought me before her, as an almost unimpressionable case. She had given me help; I knew what to do, but I seemed powerless. I could not make myself do right. She bore with me patiently, but one day she called me to her room and talked with me. I do not remember three sentences of it now. All that I was conscious of was that I was receiving an electric treatment of personality — a noble, magnificent character was revealing itself to me. I was speechless with wonder and awakening. She had trusted me and I had done wrong and deserved severe treatment. But she chided me without temper, rashness, or personal remarks. She was beyond the reach of my wrong doing, but still she was honestly grieved by my foolish ways and disappointed at my weakness. Incorrigible as I had been, I was reached, for there was something in her gentle, firm tone and steady searching look that offered hope and courage; something in that magnetic, sympathetic personality that urged me to brace up, go forward, and conquer the past mistakes, and live according to higher standards. That woman ennobled my life. "I still," adds the principal, "have this young woman under observation, and I know that the effect of this teacher on her life is permanent. " Marshall, in his monumental work on Political Economy, tells us that 126 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General probably one-half of the talent and genius born into this world finds its mani- festations in the lower ranks of society. If so, what a responsibility rests on the public -school teacher to discover and encourage talent ! I remember how an old lady who was principal of a school in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn often told me how she discovered budding dramatic talent in a little madcap of a girl who afterward became the bright particular star of the American stage as Ada Rehan. But why dwell on the shining examples? Let me rather relate, in the words of one of my district superintendents, the work of a man who was singularly successful in inducing boys to go on to the high school after completing the work of the elementary school. This teacher, Mr. X., had a graduating class in a public school in one of the crowded sections of the city. Without exception his pupils were poor, and as a class, responsive and appreciative. His assumption, as graduating-class teacher, was that no elementary school instruction was suflScient to fit a boy for modern life, however able or successful had been the men who lacked even so much. His problem was so to appeal to the understanding and emotion of his pupils that they would feel as he did and make that feeling a motive to activity in their lives. Some he influenced immediately; the restless ones who wished to "go to work" he won over before the term had closed. His power lay less in the definite reason- ing and appeal he made than in the confidence he had inspired. There lay his strength and power. But however he might influence their desires for better education, there was a more formidable obstacle. These children were poor, and poverty shrinks neither before argument nor appeal. With many of them that last year at school had been a painful story of sacrifice at home. Some of the boys knew from a more fearsome dictionary than books, the meaning of cold and hunger and neglected illness. He had kept them well together with that goal of child- ish triumph before them — the graduation day and the school certificate — but for the subsequent schooling he had no such incentive. If poverty cannot be talked down it may be challenged and fought. He proposed schemes of industry to tide them over: the evening paper stand, the afternoon delivery for the comer store, the early morning route, these and other devices were tried and employed. Then the parents too were sent for and questioned. Even among those who seemed the poorest, it is often thrift, even at times avarice, that takes the child away from opportunity. To the skeptical Mr. X. explained the value in material dividends that a year or two more of instruction might give. To the imaginative and emotional he painted the loving tribute of gratitude that would bless their old age, for one more sacrifice of effort and denial. He was not less fertile in appeal, if appeal might win, than in practical suggestion. The result was that the great majority of his pupils bound themselves to begin a course of secondary instruction. He tells me that at graduation one boy was working from four o'clock in the morning till school time; one labored Sessions, PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER 127 at night in a cracker bakery; another delivered parcels both before and after school, and several had their round of customers for newspapers. In such humble ground he planted seed that might some day yield the laurel. Circumstances subsequently necessitated his transfer to another part of the city and he lost sight of his charges. Recently, however, he met two of them and shortly after others called upon him. Without exception they had done well. One is an instructor in a school of technology, three are teachers, three others are completing a course in law school, and two have already begun practice. They have kept the old class spirit together and, as the teacher in- forms me, recently met to arrange a reunion with a single honored guest— himself. This man would not tolerate the arguments of those who claim that the majority of boys will be just as ''successful" without as with a high-school education. To all such he made answer: "My work here is to do what I can to put these boys in the way of getting all that the skill and wisdom of the schools can yield in preparing them for the best of life. I wish to see them whole men. " There is no more useful manifestation of personal power than that of the man or woman who stimulates to the higher culture and who guides the student in the direction indicated by his natural aptitude. Perhaps you think I have given too little attention to the purely scholastic side of our work. If so, let me sketch for you two teachers whose personal power was manifested in opposite ways. One is Miss C, a high-school teacher of history. Who that has seen her can forget her? Her dress, her voice, her speech, her gestures, her black eyes — ^all attractive. She held her pupils spellbound. Their attention never wandered for a second. What she willed them to do they did. She questioned them as Socrates might have done, leading them to see how ignorant they were in their first state and then how well informed they might be if they would but reason logically. She dismissed them with three topics to look up for the next day and with sugges- tions regarding the particular bookshelves on which helpful books might be found. The pupils would be sure to do plenty of reading and thinking in preparation for the next lesson, for they would know that Miss C.'s question- ing would turn them inside out. She did not merely question. When she received a good answer she would add to it, painting in a few brief sentences a picture that would remain in the pupils' minds. The second teacher is a teacher of psychology in a normal school. His pupils sit in a circle with him. He does not say more than a dozen sentences. The pupils seldom give him a glance. They conduct the conference them selves as any party of friends might talk together at the fireside. The sub- ject is the will. A young w^oman begins to talk as soon as the bell sounds, saying that she would go on with what she and her friend had found out about the subject. At her first pause two or three are ready with questions, objections, or comments. Nearly everyone has something to say, but, as this 128 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [General young woman had evidently obtained permission from the class to present this particular topic she is regarded as the leader for the time being, and is con- sequently appealed to or challenged by the others. The teacher speaks only when it becomes necessary to say that such and such a point had been a matter of dispute for ages. When he speaks it is always with deference to the leader and the pupils give him only as much attention as they give to one another. The teacher, when asked, cannot tell me what the topic for the next lesson will be — his pupils have not informed him. They study the whole subject on psychology in this way, using no one textbook but having access to many, selecting their own topics, conducting their own oral examinations, rating themselves, calling on him only w^hen they are "stumped." He shows his remarkable power in keeping himself from interfering, though he is really guiding all the time that the pupils seem to be acting independently. I have tried to sketch many different types of teachers who have evidently great personal power. Who shall analyze it ? Who shall determine the com- mon elements? I shall not attempt the task. The possessor of personal power does not know what it is. He only knows that the virtue is in him. We only know that all great leaders of men have had it is a marked degree. We see its manifestations in the reactions of pupils. Thrice blessed is he who is permitted to see that these reactions are good and not evil, and that they make for "manners, virtue, freedom, power." DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE WASHINGTON MEETING, 1908 SECRETARY'S MINUTES OFFICERS President — Frank B. Cooper, superintendent of schools, Seattle, Wash. First Vice-President — Stratton D. Brooks, superintendent of Schools, Boston, Mass. Second Vice-President — Ella C. Sullivan, district superintendent of schools, Chicago, 111. Secretary — Geo roe B. Cook, superintendent of schools, Hot Springs, Ark. FIRST DAY MORNING SESSION.— Tuesday, February 25, 1908 The Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association met in the Metropolitan Memorial M. E. Church, Washington, D. C, at 9:30 A. m., and was called to order by President Frank B. Cooper. Prayer was offered by Bishop Cranston, of the M. E. Church. President Cooper then introduced Hon. Joseph G. Cannon, speaker of the House of Representatives, who delivered an address of welcome on behalf of the United States government. Addresses of welcome were also given by Hon. Henry B. F. MacFarland, president of commissioners of the District of Columbia; Hon. Willet M. Hays, assistant secretar}' of agriculture, Washington, D. C; and Hon, Elmer Ellsworth Brown, United States commissioner of education. Response to these greetings was given by Dr. F. Louis Soldan, superintendent of instruction, public schools, St. Louis, Mo. President Cooper then introduced S. L. Heeter, superintendent of schools, St. Paul, Minn., who read a paper on the topic, "In View of the Increased Demands upon the Schools, What Opportunities Are Offered for Economy in Treating the Course of Study ?" The paper was discussed by F. B. Dyer, superintendent of schools, of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Frederick E. Bolton, professor of education. University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. A paper was also read by C. N. Kendall, superintendent of schools, Indianapolis, Ind., on "What Modifications in Organization Are Necessary to Secure Suitable Recog- nition for Pupils of Varying Ability, Particularly for the Ablest?" A general discussion followed, led by John A. Long, superintendent of schools, Joliet, 111., and W. H. Elson, superintendent of schools, Cleveland, Ohio. President Cooper appointed the following committees: COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS L. D. Harvey, superintendent of Stout Training Schools, Menomonie, Wis., chairman. H. H. Seerley, president of State Normal School, Cedar Falls, Iowa. W. H. Bartholomew, principal of Girls' High School, Louisville, Ky. Miss S. Belle Chamberlain, state superintendent of public instruction, Boise, Idaho. Henry Snyder, superintendent of public schools, Jersey City, N. J. COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS F. Louis Soldan, superintendent of instruction, public schools, St. -Louis, Mo., chair- man. N. C. Schaeffer, state superintendent of public instruction, Harrisburg, Pa. Lawton B. Evans, superintendent of public schools, Augusta, Ga. R. E. Denfeld, superintendent of city schools, Duluth, Minn. Lewis H. Jones, president of State Normal College, Ypsilanti, Mich. The department then adjourned to 2 : 00 P. M. 129 I30 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ' [Washington AFTERNOON SESSION The afternoon session was called to order at 2 : oo o'clock by President Cooper. The program for the afternoon consisted of a symposium entitled "The Place of Industries in Public Education." This symposium had been organized and the speakers secured by Jesse D. Burks, principal of Teachers Training School, Albany, N. Y. The following propositions were introduced for discussion: 1. The ideals of a democracy require a system of public education that shall provide equal educational opportunity for all. Discussion by James E. Russell, dean of Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. 2. Equality of opportunity can be secured only by proper recognition of {a) individual differences in native capacities and in social environment, (6) the requirements of vocational efficiency as well as of (c) general intelligence and executive power. Discussion by Edward C. Elliott, professor of education. University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis. 3. The most urgent need of our educational system is an adequate provision for the vocational needs of children destined for industrial and domestic pursuit. Discussion by James F. McElroy, president, Consolidated Car Heating Company, Albany, N. Y.; Benjamin R. Andrews, secretary of departments of domestic economy. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y.; W. E. Roberts, supervisor of manual training, public schools, Cleveland, Ohio, and Howard D. Brundage, Stout Manual Training Schools, Menomonie, Wis. 4. A comprehensive program of industrial education requires: a) Constructive activities as an essential and important factor in tlie elementary school course. Discussion by Miss Euphrosyne Langley, School of Education, The University of Chicago; Frank M. Leavitt, assistant director of drawing and manual training, Public Latin School, Boston, Mass. h) Intermediate industrial schools, admitting children at the sixth school year and equipping them for specific industrial pursuits. Discussion by Charles H. Morse, secretary of Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education, Boston, Mass. c) Technical high schools for the training of industrial leaders. Discussion by Geo. H. Martin, secretary of Massachusetts State Board of Education, Boston, Mass. EVENING SESSION The evening session of the department was called to order by President Cooper at 8:15 o'clock. The following announcement was made by Roland P. Falkner, secretary of the National Civic Federation, New York City: Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Your Committee has kindly given me two or three minutes in which to outline briefly the plan and purpose of the National Civic Federation to send next winter certain teachers of the United States to England and continental countries for the purpose of inspecting schools of elementary and secondary grades, industrial schools, manual-training schools, and schools for the training of teachers. The scope of the undertaking is indicated by the schools to be visited and the teachers to be selected would naturally be those who in this country are engaged in the same work. The scope of the undertaking is, as you see, practically identical with the universally recognized field of public-school education. The teachers who are selected for this tour of inspection will enjoy the benefit of greatly reduced rates in the steamships of the National Mercantile Marine Company. Recognizing the benefits which would accrue to the teachers of the country and desiring to promote as far as possible the friendly feeling between the two countries, this company has generously offered to these teachers passage to and from Europe at a rate which is about one-fourth of the regular rate. The teachers to be selected will go, not as a body, but a certain contingent in each ship. On arriving in England they vdll find that Mr. Alfred Moseley, well known to all American educators for his philanthropy and for his public spirit in organizing the Moseley Educational Commission, and later in organizing the trip of the English teachers to the United States, will have entire charge of the arrangements for the reception of the teachers. They will be met on arrival by committees; schedules will be made up of the schools which can be visited with most profit by the different types of teachers interested in corresponding types of education, and all arrangements will be made by these committees to insure to the visiting teachers a cordial reception. The advantages of such a trip to England — and some few can also go to the Continent — are so obvious that they have met with the cordial approval of all to whom this project has been broached; and a considerable number of prominent educators have expressed their approval of this plan and have consented to serve upon an advisory committee. I hesitate to tell Superintendence] SECRETARY'S MINUTES 131 you who they are, because some of them have told me that they did not want to have any ct)rrespondence in regard to the matter; that they want all the correspondence to be con- ducted by the New York office. The' interest of the National Civic Federation and its desire to promote the public welfare is evidenced by their taking hold of this matter. This organization, moreover as an organization, is profoundly interested in all the problems of industrial education and believes that these problems of industrial education cannot be solved except in connection with the general problems of the public school; and it is desirous that all information that can be obtained thru a visit to foreign countries to see what they are doing along similar lines should be obtained and spread among our people. In the selection of the teachers who are going to make this trip, of course, our desire is to make as wise a selection as possible. It is not a pleasure trip. It ought not to be so regarded. We feel that it should be looked upon as an opportunity for professional advancement; and it is desired to make the wisest possible selection of the teachers who will profit by such a trip; and to this end the National Civic Federation asks the co-operation of the educators here present. We hope that the teachers to be selected will be predomi- nantly those who are chosen by the superintendents of schools, and by the principals of industrial and normal schools, and who are duly nominated for that purpose by the board of education, or other corresponding educational authority. It is perfectly clear that the nomination should come to us; it is our desire that it should come to us by those bodies who are by law in a position to grant to the teachers leave of absence for this period, and preferably leave of absence with pay. As this is, and should be, an opportunity for pro- fessional advancement, we solicit your co-operation that the matter be considered by the educational authorities as a matter of professional advancement, so that the teachers who participate in the trip can do so without sacrificing, or without forfeiting, their regular compensation. We believe that a trip of this kind can be made of great value, not only to the teachers who participate in it, not only to the teachers of the United States as a whole, but that it should be beneficial locally. We believe that in every community there are certain specific problems to be worked out, and that those in the direction of educational affairs would be helped by sending to foreign countries representative teachers selected by them, with the distinct purpose of investigating those particular things which constitute their own home problems. This, briefly, is the plan and scheme of the National Civic Federation in this matter. On your return to your homes you will find awaiting you invitations to take part in it. You will find, with these invitations, circulars descriptive of all conditions in regard to the visit. These circulars have been printed, and so far as opportunity is given me after this session and during the meeting, I will be very glad indeed to give them to those who may be interested and to answer any questions that I can in regard to this matter. We hope that this project, undertaken for the benefit of the teachers of the United States, will receive the sympathy and support of the educators here present, and that thru that co-operation the National Civic Federation and those who are associated with it may be permitted to make their contribution to the advancement of education in the United States. The address of the evening was delivered by Hon. Willet M. Hays, assistant secretary of agriculture, Washington, D. C, and his address was illustrated by a variety of stereop- ticon views. A general discussion followed, by E. T. Fairchild, state superintendent of public instruction, Topeka, Kan.; Lorenzo D. Harvey, superintendent of Stout Training Schools, Menomonie, Wis.; and A. C. Nelson, state superintendent of public instruction, Salt Lake City. Utah. SECOND DAY MORNING SESSION.— Wednesday, February 27, 1908 The morning session of the department was called to order at 9:30 o'clock by Presi- dent F. B. Cooper. The following program was presented: Topic: The Nurture and Protection 0} the Physical Weil-Being of Public-School Pupils 1. How Can the School Make Contribution of Permanent Value to Physical Develop- ment ?— Luther Halsey Gulick, director of physical training, pubUc schools, New York City. ^ r t. 1 2. The Mission of the Play-Ground.— W. M. Davidson, superintendent of schools, Omaha, Neb.; General Discussion led by A. H. Yoder, superintendent of schools, Tacoma, Wash. 132 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington 3. Medical Inspection in Public Schools as Contributing to Health and Efl&ciency. — Thomas F. Harrington, director of physical training and athletics, public schools, Boston, Mass. General Discussion was led by E. C. Moore, superintendent of schools, Los Angeles, Cal.; Miss Sadie American, executive secretary of Council of Jewish Women, New York City. BUSINESS SESSION President Cooper, at the opening of the business session, called for the report of the Committee on Nominations, which was made by the chairman, L, D. Harvey, superin- tendent of Stout Training Schools, Menomonie, Wis., nominating the following as officers for the ensuing year: President — W. H. Elson, superintendent of schools, Cleveland, Ohio. First Vice-President — David B. Johnson, president of Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, Rock Hill, S. C. Second Vice-President — Ida C. Bender, supervisor of primary grades, city schools, Buffalo, N. Y. Secretary — A. C. Nelson, state superintendent of public instruction, Salt Lake City, Utah. On motion, the report of the committee was accepted and unanimously adopted, and the nominees declared elected. The question of the place of meeting for the year 1909 was then taken up. Invita- tions were received from Oklahoma City, Okla.; Rochester, N. Y.; Albuquerque, N. Mex.; and Chicago, 111. After the presentation of brief arguments in favor of each city as a place of meeting a formal ballot was taken, which resulted as follows: Oklahoma City 105 votes Rochester 87 " Chicago 44 " Albuquerque 10 " Total 246 " Oklahoma City was therefore declared the choice of the department as the place of meeting in 1909. Seiior Ezequiel Chavez, under-secretary of the Department of Public Instruction of the RepubUc of Mexico, was then introduced by President Cooper, and extended greetings to the Department from the Republic of Mexico. GREETINGS FROM THE REPUBLIC OF MEXICO Yesterday evening I had the honor of presenting the greetings of the Department of Public Instruction and Fine Arts of the Republic of Mexico to the Department of Superintendence of the N. E. A., at which time I expressed the earnest wish felt by the department that in the plans which prepare for the future formation of the coming generations of Mexico and the United States, there should figure not only the ideas, but also feelings of good- will and cordiahty which would realize to a great degree the co-ordina- tion of efforts of both countries in the working-out of the progress of the whole American Continent. I now beg to say that for the purpose of drawing the already existing ties of affection and mutual consideration closer and closer, the Department of Public Instruction of my country has commissioned me to come to state to the Department of Superintendence that the Department of Public Instruction would be highly pleased if the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association of the United States should hold its annual meeting of the year 19 10 in the City of Mexico, and there attend the meet- ings of the chief educational authorities of Mexico, or, failing this, that a commission of representative superintendents be selected to go to Mexico in the said year. The occasion will be dignified and memorable : at that time the completion of the first century of the independence of Mexico will be celebrated. Mexico has proved in the course of the century of her life that she has made good use of her emancipation. At the cost of heroic wars, she won for herself the complete separation of church and state, as far back as nearly fifty years ago. Isolated from all nations, except Spain, in the long period of Span- ish rule, she now has relations with all the nations of the world. She is proud of her long and bitter struggles which have served to bring, with the price of her blood, her independence Su perintendence] SECRETARY'S MINUTES ^33 and her political rights. The satisfaction afforded to us by a visit of such a delegation will be very great, and more so as it is the intention to form at the same date a national university, the plans for which she has already adopted. She will gladly share that satis- faction with a select group of men such as form this Department of Superintendents, whose work she considers of supreme importance in the organization of the people of this continent. Next year when the department meets an official communication from the Depart- ment of Public Instruction and Fine Arts of the Republic of Mexico vrill remind you of the invitation which I now share the honor of tendering, so that it can then be acted upon, whether the whole Department of Superintendence hold its session of 1910 in the City of Mexico, or whether only a delegation be appointed. In one way or another, my presence here, the announcement that I here make that next year the said communication will come, and the acceptance thereof, whether in the full form as we hope, or in the limited one, will permit, I earnestly hope, the very near realization of a great Pan-American Conference of Education, and will bind anew the ties of friendship and good-will of all citizens of this great American continent. Secretary George B. Cook then reported the following resignations from the Committee on a Universal System of Key Notation, viz.: F. Louis Soldan, of Missouri, and Aaron Gove, of Colorado. To fill these vacancies, President F. B. Cooper appointed Presi- dent H. H. Seerley, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Superintendent W. H. Maxwell, of New York City. There being no further business, the department, on motion, adjourned. AFTERNOON SESSION One of the most interesting events in the history of the Association occurred at 3:30 p. M. In accordance vrith a previous invitation. President Roosevelt received the members of the department and a few invited guests, numbering in all about 1,500, in the East Room of the White House, and delivered an address, a report of which will be found among the papers of the department. The remainder of the afternoon was devoted to various meetings of societies holding sessions in connection with the department convention. A session of special interest to the Association was the meeting held in the parlor of the New Willard Hotel at 4:30 p. M. for the organization of the new Educational Depart- ment of National Organizations of Women, authorized by the Board of Directors of the N. E. A. at their meeting in Los Angeles, Cal., July 12, 1907. MINUTES OF THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT OF NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS OF WOMEN The meeting was held in the sitting-room of the New Willard Hotel, February 28, 1908, at 4:00 p. M. Dr. E. Oram Lyte, of Millersville, Pa., called the meeting to order in accordance vrith the custom that the one who presented to the Board of Directors the petition for the organization of a new department should preside at the meeting for its- organization. On the motion of Miss Laura D. Gill, Miss Lillian W. Johnson, acting president of the Southern Association of College Women, was elected secretary pro tem. The chairman read from the Proceedings of the National Education Association for 1907-8 Article VI of the By-Laws entitled "Departments" (see pp. 7-8 of the Los Angeles volume). He then asked the Secretary to read from the Proceedings of the New Board of Directors for 1907-8 (see pp. 51-52 of Yearbook, 1907-8) the petition for the organization of the new department and the minutes of the action of the Board of Directors approving the same. The chairman announced that the first order of business was the nomination of officers of the new department. The following ticket was presented by the secretary: For President— Uiss Laura Drake GiU, of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. For Vice-President— Mrs. Frederic Schoff, of the National Congress of Mothere. For Secretary— Mrs. PhiUp N. Moore, of the National Federation of Women s Clubs. 134 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington The secretary was instructed to cast the ballot of the members present for the nomi- nees. The ballot was so cast and the oflScers declared duly elected for the term to expire with the Cleveland meeting in July, 1908. Dr. Lyte then introduced Miss Laura D. Gill as president of the Department and resigned the chair to her. As Mrs. Moore was not present Miss Johnson continued to act as secretary. President Gill stated that the first business to come before the new department was the selection of a name for the department, and that it would be necessary to appoint a committee to present the name to the Board of Directors of the N. E. A. On motion of Dr. Lyte it was voted to refer the selection of a name to the ofiicers of the department. Before the motion to adjourn, President Gill explained that membership in the department just organized could be held only by those who were members of the N. E. A., and that membership in one department entitled a member to vote in any and all departments of the N. E. A. After the motion to adjourn was passed, many of those present remained, and there was an informal discussion of the future plans of the depart- ment. President Gill outlined the program of the department for the Cleveland meeting. Among those present at the meeting were: Miss Laura D. Gill, president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae. Mrs. Frederic Schoff, president of the National Congress of Mothers. Miss Lillian W. Johnson, acting president of the Southern Association of College Women. Mrs. Hugo Rosenberg, president of the National Council of Jewish Women. Miss Sadie American, secretary of the National Council of Jewish Women. Mrs. J. N. Phillips, editor of ofl&cial organ of Alabama Federation of Women's Clu-bs. Miss Louise Connolly, superintendent of schools. Summit, N. J. Miss Elizabeth V. Brown, director of primary instruction, public schools, Washing- ton, D. C. Miss Anna E. Logan, primary supervisor, Ohio State Normal College, Miami Uni- versity, Oxford, Ohio. Miss Mina B. Colburn, superintendent of Cincinnati Kindergarten Training School. Miss Gertrude Edmund, principal of training school, Lowell, Mass. Miss Elizabeth A. Hayden, teacher in public schools, Washington, D. C. Mrs. Mary R. Gale Davis, Bridgeport, Conn. (Signed) Lillian Wyckoff Johnson, Secretary pro tern. EVENING SESSION The evening session of the department was called to order at 8:15 o'clock. An ad- dress was delivered by Hon. Andrew S. Draper, state commissioner of education for New York, on the subject, "Desirable Uniformity and Diversity in American Education." THIRD DAY MORNING SESSION.— Thursday, February 27, 1908 The morning was devoted to various round table conferences, as follows: (a) round table, state and county superintendents Leader, J. B. Aswell, state superintendent of public education, Baton Rouge, La.; sec- retary, J. J. Doyne, state superintendent of Public Instruction for Arkansas. Topic: County Supervision 1. "What Should a Good County Superintendent Know? — J. W. Olsen, state superin- tendent of public instruction for Minnesota. Discussion by W. S. Sutton, professor of education, University of Texas. 2. How Can Trained County Superintendents Be Provided, and How Should They Be Selected ? — F. A. Cotton, state superintendent of public instruction for Indiana. Discus- sion by J. M. Guinn, Department of Education, Tulane University, New Orleans, La., and others. 3. When Inspecting a School What Should a County Superintendent See and Do ? — G. G. Joynes, county superintendent of schools, Onancock, Va. Superintendence] SECRETARY'S MINUTES I^^ 4. What Can the County Superintendent Lead the People to Do ?— Lawton B. Evans superintendent of schools, Augusta, Ga. ' ' ' 5. By Whom Should Teachers Be Selected ?— F. G. Blair, state superintendent of public instruction for Illinois. 6. The Relation of the County Superintendent to the County Board.— A. C. Nelson state superintendent of public instruction for Utah. ' ' 7. The Relation of the County Superintendent to the State Superintendent.— W. W. Stetson, Auburn, Maine. 8. The Relation of the State Superintendent to the County Superintendent. J. Y. Joyner, state superintendent of public instruction for North Carolina. Discussion by State Superintendent C. P. Cary of Wisconsin; and others. (b) round table of superintendents of larger crriES Leader, Ben Blewett, assistant superintendent of instruction, public schools, St. Louis, Mo.; secretary, Charles E. Chadsey, superintendent of schools, Denver, Colo. Two brief papers were presented by J. M. Greenwood, superintendent of schools, Kansas City, Mo., and George S. Davis, associate superintendent of schools, New York City. The remainder of the time was given to general discussion. Topic — Teachers: Supply, Normal Training, Placing, Subsequent Training The following superintendents joined in the discussion : C. N. Kendall, Indianapolis, Ind.; Walter H. Small, Providence', R. I.; I. C. McNeill, Memphis, Tenn.; Addison B. Poland, Newark, N. J.; J. A. Shawan, Columbus, O.; W. C. Martindale, Detroit, Mich.; W. H. Elson, Cleveland, O.; C. F. Carroll, Rochester, N. Y.; J. A. Whiteford, St. Joseph, Mo.; Stratton D. Brooks, Boston, Mass.; Henry P. Emerson, Buffalo, N. Y.; Asst. Supt. Henry S. West, Baltimore, Md.; Carroll G. Pearse, Milwaukee, Wis.; William H. Maxwell, New York City, and President John W. Cook, State Normal School, DeKalb, 111. (C) ROUND TABLE OF SUPERINTENDENTS OF MEDIUM AND SMALLER CITIES Leader, J. H. Phillips, superintendent of schools, Birmingham, Ala.; secretary, G. G. Bond. Topics T. To What Extent Should State Uniformity Laws Apply to Cities in Respect to Courses of Study, Textbooks and Methods in: (a) Elementary Schools; (6) High Schools ? John W. Carr, superintendent of schools, Dayton, Ohio; Carleton B. Gibson, superin- tendent of schools, Columbus, Ga.; followed by Superintendents R. K. Buehrle, Lan- caster, Pa.; J. N. Study, Ft. Wayne, Ind.; John N. Davis, Stevens Point, Wis.; E. G. Lantman, Port Chester, N. Y.; Principal Edward Conradi, St. Petersburg, Fla.; C. A. Prosser, New Albany, Ind.; W. E. Striplin, Gadsden, x\la.; Vernon Davcy, East Orange, N. J. 2. Principles and Methods in Pupil Government, Wilson L. Gill, Germantown, Pa.; OHver P. Cornman, district superintendent of schools, Philadelphia, Pa. Discussion was continued by Superintendent Winfred H. Babbitt, Hawaii; E. C. Willard, Stanford, Conn.; and J. H. Phillips, Birmingham, Ala. (d) round table on AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION Session in the Metropolitan Memorial M. E. Church Leader, Ernest E. Balcomb, Department of Agriculture, State Normal School,Weatherford, Okla. ; E. C. Bishop, State Department of Education, Lincoln, Neb. Topic: Preparation of Teachers for Agricultural Education. 1. The Necessity of Preparing Teachers— A. C. True, director of experiment stations, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. 2. Some Notes on the Training of Teachers— Elmer Ellsworth Brown, U. S. com- missioner of education, Washington, D. C. 3. Plans of the Youngest State— E. D. Cameron, state superintendent of public instruction, Guthrie, Okla. 4. The Training of Teachers. a) By State Normal Schools— John R. Kirk, president of State Normal School, Kirksville, Mo. h) Co-operation of State Agricultural Colleges and State Normal Schools— Kenyon L. Butterfield, president of Agricultural College, Amherst, Mass.; Alfred Bayhss, presi- dent State Normal School, Macomb, 111. Discussion by Wm. M. Stewart, president, State Normal School, Salt Lake City, Utah. 136 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington 5. Co-operation between the United States Department of Agriculture and State School Authorities to Promote Agricultural Education — Dick J. Crosby, specialist in agricultural education, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. Discussion by E. C. Bishop, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, Lincoln Neb.; George B. Cook, superintendent of schools, Hot Springs, Ark. At the close of the program. Superintendent Carrington, of Missouri, moved that the meeting proceed with the organization of the Department of Rural and Agricultural Edu- cation. Motion seconded and carried. Dick J. Crosby moved that we proceed to the election of a president, vice president, and secretary. Motion seconded and carried. ♦ The following officers were nominated and unanimously elected : For President — E. C. Bishop, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, Lincoln, Nebraska. For Vice-President — D. B. Johnson, President Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, Rock Hill, S. C. For Secretary — E. E. Balcomb, Department of Agriculture, Southwestern State Normal School, Weatherford, Oklahoma. AFTERNOON SESSION The department met for its final session at 2:00 p. m., and was called to order by President Cooper. The following was the program of the session: Topic: The School as an Instrument of Character Building 1. The Fimction of the School in Training for Right Conduct — Miss Margaret E. Schallenberger, State Normal School, San Jos^, Cal. 2. The School and the Development of the Social Conscience — Mrs. John M. Glenn, Baltimore, Md. 3. An Experiment in Moral Training — Miss Jane Brownlee, Educational Lecturer, New York City. General discussion was led by Reed B. Teitrick, deputy state superin- tendent of public instruction, Harrisburg, Pa.; and Henry G. Williams, dean of State Normal College, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. At the close of the session the Committee on Resolutions made the following report, which was unanimously adopted. Report of Committee on Resolutions Resolved, That the Department of Superintendence recognizes the growing importance and increasing necessity for industrial education. It advocates the close adjustment of school studies to the demands of life. The fitting of the child for a life of industry in shop, farm, or home ranks next in importance to the building of character, the cultivation of intelligence, and, subordinate and contributive to these, the training of the hand, which are the chief aims of education. • The Department of Superintendence believes in the great value of the study of agri- cultural subjects in the schools of the rural districts. The Department of Superintendence favors the granting of federal aid to the state normal schools for the training of teachers in the subjects of agriculture, manual training, and home economics. The department believes that in the large cities provision should be made, by the open- ing of special ungraded rooms, for the instruction of children of emigrants unable to speak English. Grown children of this class should not be placed in the primary grades with little pupils, but, where feasible, receive special instruction in English, so they may be placed after a short time with children of their own age. Special provision should be made in every large city where the proper conditions exist for the maintenance of evening schools to instruct adult emigrants in the English language and the duties of citizenship. The Department of Superintendence is of the opinion that in every large city schools should be maintained for the special care of children who are neglected by nature. Superintendence] SECRETARY'S MINUTES 137 The Department of Superintendence is gratified to receive the information that the National Civic Federation in conjunction with Alfred Mosely have completed plans for visits of American teachers to the schools of Great Britain and the European continent during the coming autumn. The department believes the cause of education will be helped and advanced by the comparative study of the school systems of various countries by competent observers. The Department of Superintendence respectfully submits for consideration of Con- gress the fact that the provisions made for the National Department of Education are not commensurate with its importance and the vital national interests which it represents. More liberal financial means are required to csurry on properly its work for the study of educational progress and the dissemination of educational information. State legislatures and school administrators are dependent in every step they take for the improvement of the schools on the information gathered and published by the depart- ment and on the advice of its educational experts. The salary fixed for the office of commissioner of education should be more in keep- ing with the dignity and importance of the oflfice, and should not require constant self- sacrifice on the part of eminent men that have held that position. The salary paid by the nation to its commissioner of education should not be less than that paid by the large cities to the chief educational officer. F. Louis Soldan, Chairman Nathan C. Schaeffer Committee ( Lawton B. Evans Robert E. Denfeld Lewis H. Jones The following resolution was offered by A. S. Downing of New York, and, after dis- cussion, was passed. Resolved : That the executive committee of the Department of Superintendence, consisting of the President of the Department and Secretary of the N. E. A., be authorized to ascertain whether the hotel accommodations at Oklahoma City are adequate for the entertainment of the Department of Superintendence; and if they shall find that such hotel accommodations are not adequate, that they designate some other city that has ample hotel acconmiodations as the place for holding the next meeting of said Depart- ment. THURSDAY EVENING Thru the courtesy of the trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Board of Edu- cation of Washington, D. C, tendered to the members of the Department and invited friends a reception at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 8:30 to 10:30 p. M. Thru the courtesy of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the United States Marine Band supplied the music for the occasion. Respectfully submitted, George B. Cook, Secretary 138 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS IN VIEW OF THE INCREASED DEMANDS UPON THE SCHOOLS WHAT OPPORTUNITIES ARE OFFERED FOR ECONOMY IN TREA TING THE COURSE OF STUD Y ? S. L. HEETER, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA The saving of time and energy — the opportunity for economy in the work of public education — must be sought, first of all, in an economy of aim looking toward education for efficiency in our industrial society. Economy in treating the course of study, economy in the selection, adaptation, and presentation of subject-matter presupposes an economy of aim. We are proud and justly so of what we are prone to believe to be the finest public-school system in the world, a system which has developed marvelously along pretty definite literary, scientific, and professional lines; but there is a growing feeling that the historic curriculum is unbalanced and one-sided, that we have built up a system of schools whose academic courses best meet the needs of the minority. In the stress of rapidly changing social and industrial conditions, we have offered the means of knowledge to the millions, but our schools have not yet risen to their responsibility as instruments of the state in the development of popular efficiency. They have developed on the demo- cratic theory that all children are equal and that we must offer equal oppor- tunity to all, but we are now forced to see that all children are not equal, and what may be a valuable opportunity to one may be no opportunity whatever to another. Reports from all parts of the country indicate that the majority of boys and girls come to a point in our elementary schools where they fail to find genuine opportunity; they fall short in intellectual processes, arrive at a state of arrested development even inside the schools, drop out at fourteen or as soon as they can evade the law, and enter, once for all, low-grade industrial pursuits, and lives of social, moral, and financial uncertainty. Here is the condition, directly facing us in all our work, which must be reckoned with in our efforts to save time and energy — to economize in educa- tion. It is not my purpose to lay the blame on the short-sightedness of child- hood, nor on the blindness of parents, nor on the selfishness of employers of low-grade child-labor, nor on the indifference of the public, but to inquire into our school aims and into our school curriculum for elements which seem to permit, possibly encourage, the condition pointed out. At first thought it would seem that school authorities have the only part to play in the solution of this problem, and the remedy should be sought in a strict enforcement of compulsory education laws. This has been the first move everywhere, but I desire to emphasize the fact that the rational develop- ment of an educational system that counts for popular efficiency will not cul- minate in a condition under which attendance must be forced by external Superintendence] ECONOMY IN THE COURSE OF STUDY 1^0 authority, but in a condition which in itself possesses compelling power suffi- cient to hold boys and girls longer in training. Such compelling power must come from within, more than from without, and it can be secured not so much thru compulsory measures, as thru a reasonable adaptation of the train- ing offered by the schools to the concrete needs of society. It is gratifying to follow the successful movements that have brought real opportunity to the negro and the Indian; to our own mentally, morally, and physically defective, and especially to our juvenile delinquents and youthful criminals; and yet our extended system of popular education will reach its fullest development not in schools of discipline, ungraded rooms, parental schools, and detention homes, not in any special schools, but in the continued evolution of a democratic aim in education to the extent that nothing shall be negligible in the investigation of the individual needs of all children in our industrial society, and nothing negligible in adapting our educational aim, materials, and methods to their needs in view of special aptitudes, varying capacities, and prospective careers. Here is the problem, whose solution is as new as our twentieth-century city •and our present form of industrial life. The school has taken over most of the responsibility for education which it formerly shared with the home, the farm, and the forest. The school has taken over most of the responsibiUty of pre- paring the rank and file for the society in which they are to live, but as yet we have not discovered how to supply the important elements in education that in other days were provided thru activities outside of the school. There is a chasm between our educational system and our modern industrial life. On the one hand, discouraged boys and girls, abnormals, dullards, truants, and delinquents find themselves unable — mentally, socially, and physically unable — to continue with credit in our culture programs. On the other hand, science, invention, and specialization continue to withdraw them from the old-time chores, the light jobs and occupations, from the fireside, farm, and workshop, and trans- plant them behind the closed doors of our factories. The schools so isolate themselves from the industrial world, and receive so little inspiration from the industrial age in which we live, that thousands of boys and girls leave the elementary schools year after year with only the rudiments of book-learning, to find themselves helpless in the whirl of our industrial society, and drift about from one low-grade pursuit to another, or swell the crowd of improvident juve- nile tramps. And so we are forced, absolutely forced, to a reorganization of our educa- tional aims, having in mind the interests of the majority. We dare not boast of a system of universal education as long as our free schools are maintained to support the professions to the neglect of the vocations; a§ long as our high schools are dominated by the idea of books and preparation for college, and as long as our elementary schools are controlled by the idea of the making of a worthy life without giving the capacity to make a worthy living. The point is, there is still a lingering mediaevalism in our school aims taking as its ideal a I40 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (Washington worn-out conception of culture. The making of a cultured life was a sufficient aim in the days of academic seclusion, in the days of Greece with its dominant slave-owning oligarchy; but we are called upon today to train American boys and girls in an industrial democracy, and if we are in earnest about universal education, we must abandon all one-sided aims and ideals and recognize that our educational system succeeds just to the extent that we make it focus upon the individual needs of each member of society. My conclusion thus far is that the very spirit of the day is demanding of educators truth and directness in all their aims. The very first economy in education must be an economy of aim. A system of public education that aims to provide equal opportunity for all, should be so organized, equipped, and directed as to offer some genuine opportunity to the majority — opportunity to secure such knowledge and training during school life as will enable each individual to make the most of himself and render the largest service to society. All education today must aim at eflSciency. The very first element in a success- ful life, and the very first service of an individual to society, are the disposition, the determination, and the ability to make a living. I sincerely believe that we are at the beginning of a great development of primary industrial education in this country thru the channels of popular education. And now, as to the course of study itself, the materials with which we work. Economy of subject-matter must follow an economy of aim. There must be no inconsistency in any argument for economy of time and energy which would at the same time increase the demands upon the schools. The elementary program has been referred to as a heterogeneous mixture, a kind of stew, a hodge-podge of many ingredients. We hear a constant cry against the multi- plicity of subjects that have found their way into the schools. Yet here is not where we break down. Let us be careful. The problem of the course of study, the solution of which leads to economy of time and energy, is not a problem of closing our eyes and eliminating certain subjects bodily from the curriculum. The activities and studies that make up our program from the kindergarten thru the high schools, the games and plays, the arts and crafts, the industries and occupations, the elementary sciences, drawing and music, the laboratories, gymnasiums, school gardens, and shops, these are not mere accidents. They are abiding realities arising with the conscious needs of our complex social and industrial organizations. The problem before the school is not that of a wholesale elimination, not a problem of getting rid of this subject or that, but one of interpreting and proving relative values of materials, activities, and studies in the light of the new aim in education. It is no longer a problem of enrichment of the course of study, once con- sidered the panacea for all the ills of the schools, but one of arriving at essen- tials and fixing upon fundamentals and potentials in every subject taught. The old school was burdened by its own limitations and so narrow was the con- ception of its teachers that every lesson began and ended in drill on isolated facts. The reaction came none too soon, bringing about an enrichment that Superintcndencel ECONOMY IN THE COURSE OF STUDY 141 reduced brute memorizing, broke away from lifeless matter, opened up to the teacher broad fields of material; and yet after two decades of such enrichment, our curriculum has become so extensive, so comprehensive, so far-reaching in its scope and significance, that its outlines fairly bewilder, if not overwhelm our very best trained teachers. The time has come when school authorities should call a halt on enrichment and realize that content of study has been sufi&ciently outlined. I cannot help feeling that too many children are dropping out of our ele- mentary and secondary schools dazed and bewildered from a superficial treat- ment of elaborate academic courses. On the one hand our teachers have absolutely no time to stop for the sake of thoroness; on the other, they simply refuse to leave details alone. If a boy finds himself forced to be a wage- earner and wishes to increase his earning capacity, he should receive in four years at high school such a grounding in practical arithmetic, plain English, and typewriting as to be able to go out into our offices and put out of busi- ness the lads who spend eight weeks in our business college. I wonder if we are crowding back upon high-school boys and girls pure mathematics, institu- tional history, and abstractions in science beyond the experience and com- prehension of childish minds ? I am sure there are still too many science courses between the lids of the books, not enough applied physics and chem- istry. Too many laboratories, instead of being an interesting workshop for boys, are given up to abstract discussions of scientific laws. A child has no business working in historic geology and running about nights plajring at astronomical observations before he has an everyday practical acquaintance with physical, commercial, and industrial geography. Our free elective sys- tem should not lose sight of prerequisites. So far as the high school is con- cerned a certain amount of arithmetic should come along with higher algebra; spelling before or at least along with dramas and novels; a legible handwrit- ing before design in color; typewriting before stenography; home geography before astronomy; physiology, hygiene, and domestic economy before zoology, and so on. And now what are my recommendations ? It is easy enough to generalize, but what are the concrete possibilities ? First: Let us get together on such simplification of academic subject- matter in the first six grades of our elementary schools as will afford a prac- tical basic training to every child — a broad basis of general culture and effi- ciency for every boy however humble the home, and however circumscribed the course of his destiny. It may mean in arithmetic the elimination of com- plex fractions, metric systems, Troy and apothecary's weights, compound proportion, mensuration of trapezoids, trapeziums, cones, spheres, and pyra- mids, until all pupils have mastered the multiplication tables and become accurate in fundamental operations. It may mean in grammar the abolition of all guesswork in parsing and of fine discriminations in sentence analysis, until all children, even in our poorer districts, are given a sure grounding in 142 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington practical language training. In writing, it may mean less wrangling over the uniform slant of letters and more consideration for the development of an individual, intelligible hand on the part of each child. In drawing, it may mean nothing more than the cultivation of such artistic sense as will help boys and girls to wash their hands, comb their hair, clean their nails, and put their desks in order. Some things in all subjects are surely fundamental. It remains for us to agree upon these. Second: We must introduce into the daily program of the first six grades, including the kindergarten, a comprehensive system of primary industrial training whose varied and graduated activities may be pressed, daily instead of once a week, to the very highest point of interest and usefulness, but never to drudgery, routine, or arrested development, thus stimulating and encour- aging rather than neglecting and distorting the very impulses, the instincts of construction and production that lie at the basis of success for the individual as well as for our industrial society. Third: As to our seventh and eighth grades — we are called upon to reor- ganize our educational aim as well as our courses of study in these two upper grades upon the basis of vocation as well as mental achievement. We must socialize and industrialize our so-called grammar schools, must give a richer civic content to all studies and activities by the emphasis of such arithmetic, handwriting, and spelling as will meet the requirements of business; by draw- ing less artistic, less decorative, and more mechanical; by more practical lan- guage training and less formal grammar; by more attention to the commercial and industrial aspects of geography, to the civic and institutional side of his- tory, and by more frequent observation and by closer study of the leading industrial materials and processes of the community. Fourth : We must decrease the school hours, so far as formal studies in the grammar schools are concerned, for certain boys and girls forced by circum- stances to go early to work, but increase the time correspondingly for such pupils to be given to industrial training and commercial subjects to the extent of utilizing a larger variety of suitable materials and processes from the vari- ous leading industries of the community, ending possibly in a closely articu- lated elementary system of apprenticeship between the grammar schools and leading industrial enterprises. Fifth: In addition to night schools for the laboring classes maintained strictly for all over sixteen years of age, there should be set aside in every city a certain number of rooms for half-day continuation schools, some in the morning from eight o'clock until twelve, and some in the afternoon from one o'clock until five, for boys and girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen forced by necessity to go to work, such schools to be under men teachers, the board of education in every case to maintain a labor bureau to whom every employer of child labor must apply and by whom every certificate must be issued. Sixth : The saving of time and energy in public education will be encouraged Superintendence] ECONOMY IN THE COURSE OF STUDY . _^ »o by the abolition of the old-time, classical high school as such, and by the intro- duction of general manual-training and commercial courses into all high schools; by the establishment of city high schools on the district plan, pushing them out to the people and increasing the number as attendance will warrant, thus making the high school less a school for the privileged classes and more and more a part of our common-school system. Seventh and last: The scheme for popular education for all-round eflaciency will be complete in the establishment of at least one secondary industrial school in every city, which shall afford, in addition to its general courses, the oppor- tunity to specialize in mechanic arts, home economics, and commercial sub- jects, offering two-, three-, and four-year courses; such schools to be sup- ported locally with additional encouragement as soon as possible in the way of organization and maintenance from the state and federal government, leaving the establishment of special trade schools for adults aiming solely at narrow, specialized skill, to private endowment or even to the state, but entirely beyond the system of free, public education. All educators, superintendents of schools, and boards of education interested in general efficiency in our indus- trial society may safely encourage the establishment of independent trade schools turning out productive economic units and preparing for jobs, but we should take the stand that all independent apprenticeship systems and special trade schools should keep hands off of our boys and girls under sixteen years of age, and the entire responsibility for education of children looking toward general efficiency should be thrown upon our system of public education. DISCUSSION F. B. Dyer, superintendent of schools, Cincinnati, O. — In the foregoing thoughtful paper there is one point to which I shall offer a mild dissent. I refer to early industrial efficiency on the part of our pupils. Carlyle said his father was not simply a shoemaker, he was a man who made shoes. Efficiency is a blanket term, for efficiency in a democracy is a complex matter. While it includes vocational fitness, it includes much more. To be confidential, it seems to me that this term "efficiency," the slogan of recent educationists, has been sadly overworked of late. It has lost its special virtue, its divinum quiddam, its Socratic daemon, so to speak, and should be decently shelved in the museum of pedagogical cant. At least, can we not take it for granted as we do the gentlemanly virtues ? I know it would leave many of us for a time without much to say, but this would give us an oppor- tunity to think, and would reduce the volume of our educational proceedings to readable proportions. This is meant not as a protest against anything that has preceded, but as a protection in what is to follow. I have observed the occupations of people that live near the route from my residence to my office. There are three candidates for the presidency of the United States, two congressmen — politics is something of a profession in Ohio — physicians, brokers, manu- facturers, plumbers, tailors, all of them representatives of at least 128 honest trades, pro- fessions, or businesses, as distinct as those I have enumerated. Yet these people have so much in common, in spite of the bewildering variety of ways they have of making a living, that the neighborhood seems to be fairly homogeneous. Because of the diversified industries and vocations in American cities, the problem of vocational training is peculiarly difficult. It is a very different problem in cities of Europe 144 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION IWashmgton where industries are specialized along one or two lines, and where children usually follow the calHng of their parents. The superstructure of vocation, however varied, seems to need much the same sort of solid foundation of character, intelhgence, and knowledge of civic duty and natural law. It seems to me possible to find mental food that is good and wholesome for all normal children at least to the age of 14. But the discussion this afternoon will bring out whether it is wise to begin the dififerentiation of children at so early an age as 12, and to fix their bent at the dawn of adolescence; the topic of this morning evidently was planned to consider whether by good management we can make room for many things we are not doing, without the loss of anything of importance which we are doing. I believe we can. I shall not discuss the possible reorganization of our materials so that all manual work shall be the expressional side of other school activities. If this is brought about at all, it must be by painful evolution after many experiments and failures. I hope that many wiU try it, so that we may profit by their experience. METHODS OF SAVING TIME We can save at least one-fifth of our time (i) by the elimination of obsolete or worth- less matter, (2) by due regard for the laws of physical and psychical development in the assignment of time for subjects and the arrangement of material, and (3) by more expert presentation and consideration of the material in the classroom. When the three R's constituted the curriculum, it was necessary to expand them mightily to occupy the child for eight years. There is no reason now why they should remain dropsical. We can tap arithmetic, geography, and grammar, and reduce their bulk one-half without irreparable loss to this world or the next. As to assignment of time for different subjects, it has been pretty conclusively demon- strated that an excess of time given to such subjects as spelUng, penmanship, and formal language exercises, so far from benefiting children in those subjects, leads to dissipation of attention, decrease of effort, and poor results. In drill exercises of all sorts, the shortening of the time increases the intensity of application, and therefore the rapidity and accuracy. A daily five-minute drill on mathematical processes, and a half-hour for study of problems adapted to the experience of the child will probably accomplish more in the end than an hour a day even of the same character of work. The selection of topics may be made with an eye single to the requirements of our civilization, but the ordering of this material must be with an eye single to the laws of growth. We must begin with the things the need of which the child can feel and see, and must arrange the matter so that as the child's interest and experience expand, that topic which is nearest will be considered next. But I wish to address myself particularly to the third method: Economy in the school- room, in the presentation of the material. We superintendents are so busy inventing tables, pigeon-holing statistics, ordaining courses of study, and handing down misfit syllabuses (mostly second hand) that we have no time to spend in the classroom, assisting to eliminate the waste there. This is a pity — not that some of us could render much assistance there, but because it would enable us to attack the problem of economy in teaching with a better understanding of the conditions. The Schoolmasters' Club of my city has been giving this year to a study of the extent and the causes of the waste of time and energy in the schools. I shall not tell you the extent, for if I did, someone might go home and brag how much better he does things. But I shall enumerate some of the causes, for after a visit to several cities I believe these are not altogether local. I shall confine myself CAUSES OF WASTE IN THE SCHOOLROOM I. Insufficient attention to the formation of habits — especially habits of study and self-help, but also habits of order and cleanliness, of promptness, of consideration for others. Superintendence] ECONOMY IN THE COURSE OF STUDY — — — ■ ■- ■. ___^ ^ of honor, and trustworthiness. The teacher should see that the mental attitude is in the direction of right ideals, and then should stimulate the child to fix these tendencies into habits, by continual exercise in the school activities. This should be the controUine motive in the disciplme, and to this end the inteUigent co-operation of the home should be soueht Herein, according to our critics, our American schools fall short. ' 2. Lack of preparation in advance of the matter to be presented and illustrative ma- terials to be used, resultmg m random firing, all along the line. Departmental teachine is a partial remedy in grammar grades. ^ 3. Lack of perspective in the use of details to bring out the essential ideas, with the result that essentials and nonessentials are hammered on with equal fervor. This arises from a mistaken notion of thoroness and from an indiscriminating use of the memory in excessive drills and upon ill-digested facts on the one hand, and in failure to emphasize forms and concepts that are necessary to progress on the other. 4. Not a clear enough distinction between that part of schoolroom management which should become routine, and the occasional part which requires deliberation and decision Unnecessary time is devoted to distributing and collecting materials, preparing forms giving orders and countermanding them, getting ready for recesses, and getting down to business afterward. 5. Unstimulating teaching that does not arouse the children to joyous activity. I do not refer to weak personalities, for whom there is little hope, but to trained teachers with a full stock of devices and best ways of doing things. Artificiality and insincerity will ac- company skill, unless the teacher keep her sympathies and interest very much alive. 6. Unsupervised and excessive written work. Writing is likely to be the chief means of expression and occupation in mass teaching. Tests are convenient devices to keep a class qmet when the teacher wants a rest period. 7. Infrequent reclassification and inflexible systems of promotion, classes so large as to prevent attention to the individual at the moment of his need, the presence of defective children with normal children. These overtax the teacher without commensurate results. 8. Inattention to the physical condition of the schoolroom, and to the physical con- dition of the pupils. Expert medical assistance in the schoolroom is indispensable, not only to determine physical conditions, but to advise concerning the needs of abnormal children. That the loss of time and energy is very considerable in many schools is evidenced by the following estimates, which I believe are not exaggerated: In our large cities 50 per cent, of the pupils are one year or more behind the normal age of their grade, and 20 per cent, are two years or more behind their grade. More than one-half our pupils do not get farther than the sixth grade, perpetuating an illiterate proletariat in our cities, tho by law all are kept in schools until they are fourteen, and by expert estimate only about 5 per cent, are too defective mentally and physically to do the work. I do not charge that this is due wholly to waste in the schoolroom, but I believe that conditions can be brought about that will economize the time in the schoolroom to better advantage. Among the means of securing better conditions, I can discuss only one. The principal or head-master as the important factor. — Instead of frittering away time about the office, more than half of his energy should be given to supervising in the literal sense of looking over, not overlooking, children at their work. 1. It is for him to discriminate between children of dififerent capacity, and advance each with appropriate rapidity (acknowledgments to Dr. Eliot), to see that the lazy are stimulated, the dull are awakened, the bright are employed, the indiflferent are interested, the unruly are regulated, the failures are investigated, the absentees are brought to book. 2. It is for him to arouse the home to a full appreciation of its responsibility in the training of the children, to secure the intelligent co-operation of parents and teachers, and to ally with himself the social agencies of his community for civic betterment. 3. It is for him to see that the school plant is kept in good physical condition, with regard to temperature, ventilation, cleanliness, and repair, to see that the teaching apparatus is on hand and in good condition when wanted, and to see that it is wanted. 4. It is for him, with the assistance of such helpers as we can give him, in the class- room and thru teachers' meetings, to improve the method of instruction and of discipUne, 146 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington to see that the emphasis is placed upon the essentials (and this includes the essential habits and ideals of the children, as well as the fundamentals of the various branches of study), to keep the sympathies and interest of the teachers keyed to the proper tension, and to bring the whole school up to the standard of the best teachers in it. In short, some may propose one method, and some another, to eliminate the waste in the schoolroom due to mass teaching, but in any system an intelligent principal is the key to the solution. It is for us to see that he rises to his responsibilities and that he has the assistance which he needs to perform his duties. Frederick E. Bolton, professor of education, State University of Iowa, Iowa City, la. — I have not had the privilege of seeing Superintendent Heeter's paper and, consequently, shall be obliged to make an extemporaneous discussion. I am warned by the preceding speaker that the word eflficiency is to be tabooed. However, the first point which I wish to make is that while we are considering the arrangement of a course of study so as to secure efficiency for pupils, we must not forget the most important factor — efficient teachers. Undoubtedly the pupil's time is wasted far more because of inefficient teachers than because of any ill arrangement of subjects and topics. The textbooks suggest fairly good logical arrangement of subject-matter. We need teachers with breadth of scholarship sufficient to discern the varying worth of the dififerent topics and who know how to vitalize the whole range of subject-matter. To substantiate my view that our children sufifer from inefficient teachers, I may say that in one great state there is one teacher in every fourth high school who has had no training, academic or professional, beyond that received in that high school. Little wonder that we complain of waste and dissipation of energy somewhere. It could not be otherwise. We need great and efficient teachers more than modification of the course of study. When we have a teaching profession with every elementary teacher a graduate of some normal school, and every high-school teacher with the equivalent of a college course and requisite professional training we shall cease to bewail the arrangement of the course of study. We must look to Germany for an object-lesson. I fully agree with Superintendent Heeter that many details and topics must be omitted from the course. He has elaborated that so well that I need not enter upon it. Dr. Mc Murry gave a splendid discussion of this topic also in 1904. We must also reorganize and redistribute the various subjects and topics in the course. We must rearrange the material of the course in such a way as to adjust the various sub- jects and topics to the needs and capacities of the pupils at varying stages in their develop- ment. Under our present system this is impossible. In a general way the spiral plan would far better meet the needs of the pupils. Germany has long recognized this and acted accordingly. There each subject is introduced early and continued for a long period of years. Many subjects are given a small number of hours per week. By this method the pupils consider the subject at different times, from different angles, and with different in- terests. In this country, although the spiral plan has been adopted in name in some places, to my knowledge it has never been arranged on a scientific basis. Not a single book that I know of really observes the spiral plan as known in Germany. The Germans secure better results than we do and in a shorter time. I have investigated with considerable care the amount of time devoted to the teaching of German in Germany. It is a noticeable fact that they do not have several subjects like spelling, reading, composition, rhetoric, grammar, etc. They have one single subject — Deutsch. In this country we have a great variety of subjects relating to English. We devote to all of them about twice as much time as the Germans give to Deutsche and, I beUeve, with poorer results. Why could we not correlate all of these subjects around one center ? Why do we need special classes for composition, spelling, rhetoric, etc. ? Why could not practically all of the composition themes be secured from the work in history, literatvu-e, science, and geography ? This would result in a great saving of time and greater efficiency. In harmony with my first position I desire to state that the course of study must be Superintendence] RECOGNITION OF PUPILS' VARYING ABILITY ia>j considered in such a way as to recognize better individual needs and individual conditions of development. We have too long considered the course of study from the purely logical point of view. We have arranged our subjects and topics in harmony with cold logic and have failed to recognize the psychological and sociological aspects of the case. We must regard the question from a new point of view. The aim of education is being conceived entirely anew. We no longer regard it as a mere question of formal discipline. We wish to adjust and adapt the individual to social needs. We must come to regard the child as the center and circumference of all pedagogical considerations. We have too long sub- stituted for this the subject of instruction. WHA T MODIFICA TIONS IN ORGANIZA TION ARE NECESSARY TO SECURE SUITABLE RECOGNITION FOR PUPILS OF VARYING ABILITY, PARTICULARLY FOR THE ABLEST? CALVIN N. KENDALL, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, INDLA.NAPOLIS, IND. In the twenty minutes allotted me, I shall confine myself to a discussion of the modifications required in organization to promote the interests of the ablest children. So-called defective pupils are therefore left out of account. Backward children are more easily disposed of. Schools for defectives are increasing in number, and there is something like a settled mode of procedure in dealing with such children. They make a more effective appeal for considera- tion than the ablest children do. Incidentally, the removal of defective children from regular classes enables a teacher to devote her energies to children of normal power. Such separation, therefore, promotes the interest of all children. It is probably true that pupils in a given room are as unlike in their mental capabilities as in their looks. Forty children, forty characters. Says Presi- dent Eliot: ''To discriminate between pupils of different capacity, to select the competent for suitable instruction, and to advance each pupil with appro- priate rapidity, will ultimately become the most important function of the public-school administrator." Of course I cannot attempt to show satisfactorily to you, and certainly not to myself, how this discrimination, this selection, and this advancement can be made, for so long as the work of teaching and administering schools is done by mere men and women, so long will we fall short of the ideal pointed out by President Eliot. I am convinced, however, that substantial progress is being made in many cities and towns to conserve the interests of pupils of varying degrees of ability. A mere mention of special features of differing classification plans, which of late have come to my notice, would exceed the limits of this paper. If superin- tendents and principals have not wholly succeeded in breaking up the so-called "lock-step," it is not because of indifference or lack of effort. ' In my opinion the "lock-step" theory has been somewhat overworked, but the use of the figure has served to call attention to the individual as distinct from the system of which he is a part. The lessening of the rigors of grading was inevitable, as practical, modern psychology caused children to be better understood. 14S NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washingt.m In the preparation of this paper, I made an effort to learn what unusual or out-of-the-way plans of promotion and classification are in operation in important centers of the country. The usual response I received was like this one: We have a rather elastic system of promotion. The regular rule is semi-annual pro- motion, but bright children are in some cases allowed to skip a half-year's work. A grade is usually divided into divisions so that a part of it goes faster than the other. An unusually bright pupil in such a division would not really lose a half-year by skipping. It would be no exaggeration to say that this seems to be the normal or general plan of classification. At any rate, the variations are slight. From a few places, however, some special or unusual plan was reported. In Cambridge, the course of study in the grammar schools is six years, but the pupils are so classified and the course of study so arranged as to afford the able pupils an opportunity to complete it in four years. In fifteen years, of the nine thousand pupils who have gone thru the grammar schools of that city, 7 per cent, have made the course in four years, and 25 per cent, in five years. Those who are not familiar with the plan can, if they so desire, learn the details from the Cambridge school report. It has been in operation fifteen years. I have been unable to find else- where such carefully prepared tables, showing the actual numerical results of a particular scheme of promotion for pupils of varying degrees of ability. The schools of Cambridge are known as good schools. There is in my possession testimony, independent of the superintendent's office, of the merits of this scheme. For these reasons I have spoken of it. It may be no better than numerous other special plans; it may be no better than the common practice of semi- annual promotions with frequent individual promotions. It is interesting to note that the average age of pupils who enter the high schools in Cambridge is substantially fourteen-and-a-half years. In two other typical Massachusetts cities, Springfield and Worcester, where there are also nine grades, the average age of pupils entering the high schools is reported as practically the same as that in Cambridge; that is, the Cambridge plan, good as it is, does not bring about such rapidity of promotion as to effect in any considerable degree, in comparison with other cities, the age at which pupils enter the high schools. To repeat, it is chiefly significant because its results for a considerable period of years have been reduced to figures. Another consideration remains to be mentioned. In each large Cambridge grammar school is a special teacher, whose business it is to aid, by personal instruction, both the able and the backward. It is almost unnecessary to add that such additional teachers, giving individual instruction, are desirable in every large grammar school. It is, however, no practical solution of the prob- lem of either the ablest or the backward, for as we approach anything like real individual instruction, we have greatly increased expenses for schools. I believe, therefore, that existing plans of promotion and classification, if Superintendence] RECOGNITION OF PUPILS' VARYING ABILITY iaq properly administered by discriminating and capable principals, take care of the ablest children to a larger extent than is generally thought. Semi-annual promotions; two sections in each grammar school, three or more in primary schools; abolishing examinations as a test for promotion; individual promotion of pupils, and increased interest in the individual pupil apart from the mass, all contribute to this result. Thus far all relates to the child in relation to the conventional course of study; but arranging promotions so that the child may pass thru the schools in the shortest period of time is not, of course, a solution of what shall be done for the ablest pupils; for them, the course of study needs at some points eliminations, at other points additions, and sometimes generous additions. A capable pupil may also be an immature pupil; to rush him on to the high school of the prevailing type is to be deplored. I wish now to speak of a plan for caring for the ablest children in the last two years of the grammar-school course. It is by no means novel or original, but is in operation in several cities. It is this: to group the most capable children of the last two years in cer- tain buildings as centers, as defectives are grouped in centers. In growing cities there is of course difficulty in finding rooms for these centers in already overcrowded buildings. This difficulty, however, would be likely to disappear when we are convinced that as much should be done for gifted children as for slow ones, and when we are further convinced that in the schools of a democ- racy, every child, the able as well as the dull, has this claim upon us — to give him the best of which he is capable. In a large departmental school a class of the able children can sometimes be placed in separate divisions in -the standard subjects. These children should be placed with a strong teacher, for some of the ablest pupils will not make use of their power unless the teaching is effective. It is my conviction that any marked departure from the usual course of study or order of things is likely to fail unless the teacher or administrator is forceful and intelligent. I refer to the teacher of backward children, to the teacher of the ablest children, to the teacher of Latin in the grades, and to numerous other special teachers. The personal equation is the main thing. The paper administrative scheme is subordinate. Therefore, to place the keenest and most capable children in charge of the college or normal-school graduate of slender personal or teaching resources is to invite failure. The work for such children would not be the conventional course of study, for they are the alert and the capable. If from well-to-do homes, it is probable that many of these pupils will go to college. Latin or German may be begun, literature may be increased in con- tent, history and geography may be combined, the scope of mathematics may be increased, the use of English may be broadened and strengthened. These pupils will go to the high schools prepared to enter the second half-year, or they will reach the high school a half-year or a year ahead of pupils of normal 150 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington power. There need be little fear of their ability to maintain themselves in the high schools. There is numerous testimony bearing upon this point. In Cambridge the four-year grammar-school pupils lead their classes in the high schools, and have done so for years. Another center might be established for pupils who probably will not go beyond the high school, or perhaps to the high school at all. In this center Latin would be omitted, literature and geography would be enriched, the various art activities, including manual training, increased, science taught and arithmetic emphasized. However, it is not my purpose to formulate a course of study for these pupils; local conditions would determine. What these ablest pupils work at is important, but is of secondary consideration ; the main thing is to have them work at the safe and sane maximum of their power. This term we have established in Indianapolis two centers for unusually strong pupils beginning the second-half of the seventh year. In these centers pupils are gathered from eight schools. There are twenty-five pupils in each class; they work in departmental schools. In Baltimore there are four preparatory class centers, as they are called there, for seventh- and eighth-year pupils who have made creditable records in the sixth year. These pupils carry on the regular work of the seventh and eighth years, and, in addition advanced English work, Latin, and either French or German. Three extra study credits may be earned, which count toward a high-school diploma. Superintendent Van Sickle states that a pupil who is working successfully in these preparatory classes completes the high-school course in three years. In Worcester there is a similar plan for concentrating in a few centers pupils of ability who are preparing for the high schools. In Indianapolis, apart from the two special classes mentioned, at the begin- ning of the eighth year certain strong pupils begin Latin, whose parents request it. These pupils earn a half-year's credit to be applied in the high schools. AH our pupils in the eighth year have an opportunity to earn high-school credits in English and mathematics. About one-third of the pupils earn these credits and subsequently do good work in the high schools. Other pupils, and frequently the same pupils as those I have mentioned, earn credits in German. The aggregate result is, that about one-third of the ablest eighth-grade pupils enter the second half-year of the high school. The most, perhaps, that can be claimed for these and similar plans is that they are an attempt to differentiate pupils of ability in the higher grammar schools, independent of ordinary schemes of grading. Certain considerations should be mentioned: First, the number of the ablest pupils, as the term is used in this paper, is small; at least it so appears in the light of our present knowledge of children. Such is the judgment, too, of discriminating principals and teachers. Second, we must rely upon teachers and principals to point out such pupils. The tendency would be to choose too limited a number rather than too many. It is a responsibility the burden of which becomes less with experience. Then, there is the natural reluctance Superintendence] RECOGNITION OF PUPILS' VARYING ABILITY to part with strong pupils and lose the help of their leadership. This reluc- tance is made deeper by the feeling that the gifted pupils are needed to help the less gifted. Third, as I have said before, the immaturity of pupils cannot be left out of account, apart from their special power to do the technical work of the course of study. For immature pupils broader experience, breadth and depth of study, are as important as rapidity of progress thru the paper course of study. There are some things which pupils must grow to, as Dr. Hinsdale used to say. This leads to a fourth consideration, the consent of parents for pupils to have rapid promotion and to work in special classes. Strange as it may seem to us, parents sometimes know better than schoolmasters what is best for their children. Some of the most intelligent parents are entirely willing that their chil- dren, even tho precocious, should pass thru the grammar schools with slight demands upon their real working power, if the general school atmosphere is good. Here is a girl nine years old in the sixth grade. She is the daughter of a judge, the mother is a woman of education and refinement. The girl will make from 90 to 100 per cent, in any reasonable test in the various standard school subjects. The parents know these facts. She has no peculiarities except brains. They are unwilling to have her go ahead as she really has the power to do, considering only the conventional paper course of study. They believe that she will gain much from the general school life, for it is a good school. The attitude of these parents is typical. To satisfy intelligent parents is something, but not everything. If this child and others like her were in a special school where they could be taught independently of the ordinary course of things, their school life would be really worth while. As it is, there must be more or less regrettable dawdling. Both intelligent parents and school superintendents, in considering this phase of the question, might well take to heart Gladstone's words to a graduating class: Believe me when I tell you that the thrift of time will repay you in after life with an usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that the waste of it will make you dwindle aUke in intellectual and moral stattire, beneath your darkest reckonings. The consent of parents is essential, if additional demands are to be made which tax the strength of a child, and if he is to go an unusual distance to school. There should be frequent conferences between the principal and teachers on the one hand, and parents on the other, with reference to the health of these children. Fifth, additional expense in teaching classes with expert teachers. This expense may be justified, however, in the same way that we justify the per capita expense for high schools and for state university instruction— the necessity of training leaders in a democracy. In Oakland, California, where, by the way, there is an excellent promotion scheme, pupils who cannot be well classified in one building may be transported at public expense to another. Sixth, in Indianapolis, if I may refer again to a situation with which I am 152 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington familiar, the high-school credit system for the eFghth grade has resulted in a closer articulation between the high school and the grammar school. The heads of departments in the high schools have become interested in the work of the grammar schools; they visit the grammar schools, they give class instruc- tion in academic subjects to grammar-school teachers; they attend and take part in teachers' meetings: they have a better understanding of grammar- school conditions, and have, consequently, a more sympathetic attitude toward grammar-school work. The change from the grammar to the high school is perhaps made easier. I believe I can see signs of better teaching in the high schools resulting from all this. When high-school teachers turn their faces toward the grammar school, as well as toward the college, high-school instruc- tion will be more effective. There will be more teaching and less lecturing; more of a disposition to take the pupil where he is; less of a disposition to find fault with grammar-school instruction; and a greater realization that the pupil in the first year or two of the high school is still a child. It seems to me that signs are not wanting that the time is near when there will be modifications of the work of the seventh and eighth years of the gram- mar-school course: In organization — centers in which strong pupils can work at the maximum of their power, unhindered by less capable pupils. In curriculum — training and instruction which shall take a larger account of the differing needs of pupils, some vitally related to vocational life, for there is good authority for saying that "Incompetency in the arts is quite as dangerous to society as illiteracy." Neither the grammar school nor the high school can completely dispose of this menace, but they can do something. To do so effectively, however, requires teachers in the arts, of special skill and power, and conse- quently more expensive teachers. There is one paragraph from a lecture of Huxley's which seems to make a fitting close to this address: Now the most important object ot all educational schemes is to catch these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the good of society. No man can say where they will crop up; like their opposites, the fools and knaves, they appear sometimes in the palace and sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing to be aimed at, I was almost about to say the most important end of all social arrangements, is to keep these glorious sports of Nature from being either corrupted by luxury or starved by poverty, and to put them into the posi- tion in which they can do the work for which they are specially fitted. DISCUSSION John A. Long, superintendent of schools, Joliet, 111. — Most of our attempts to adjust the school organization to children of varying ability, so far as I am aware, have taken the form of breaking the school period up into smaller units which have no special psychological significance, and has only drawn us farther away from our actual pedagogical problem. My experience is that half-year promotions may be, and often are, quite as rigid as annual promotions. The imfortunate tendency has been to increase the emphasis upon subject- matter as the source of our pedagogical standards, instead of throwing it over upon the attitudes and capacities of the child as he confronts a new situation. Superintendence] RECOGNITION OF PUPILS' VARYING ABILITY iq» I wish to call attention to two things from Mr. Kendall's paper. First, the incident of the judge who was unwilling to have his precocious daughter go far beyond her grade because he felt that there was something to be gained by "waiting," that there was some- thing to be got out of time. Now, let us put alongside of that the saying of Dr. Hinsdale, that there are some things children need to grow up to. Both these things seem to me to point to the fact that there are, in the lives of children, certain nodal points of experience or attitude, ways of looking at things, which are outside of, and separate from, the mere ability to add to knowledge, to gather experience, or to follow the "paper course of study." In other words, there are times when children change their method of handling the subject- matter which they can get from the course. These are the things which they must grow up to, must get by time, and they cannot be given any other way. If we are to look to these nodal points, we must make our flexibility, our elasticity within these periods. We must never ask a child to assume an attitude toward the world which he does not have. In my judgment, we shall, in the end, be compelled to find our greater freedom by enlarging our sphere of opportunity and activity. This general line of thought leads us to an inquiry into the changing attitudes and capacity of the child as he advances in years along the school period. Does he change his attitude toward the world every year, or does he change it at all ? Is every year a new one, or are some of them only continuations of others ? According to Dr. Dewey, there are two points of decided change within the years generally covered by the public schools — one takes place when the child is seven and one-half or eight years of age, or in the latter part of the second grade; the other is what is known as pubescence, and takes place, with girls, usually about the beginning of the seventh grade. Why not make these psycho- logical changes the large breaks in your organization ? This divides the whole time into three great periods, each with its definite characteristics. The first period comprises the first two years in school, and is marked by what Dr. Dewey calls direct sense experiencing. The child is interested in those things which takef up his direct sense activity and add to his stock of imagery on that basis. He is accumu- lating imagery and is constantly asking the question, What ? What is it ? What can it do ? He wants to learn to read, and write, and use numbers simply as an activity, with little idea of using these things for some remote purpose. These two years constitute one period, and should be presided over by one teacher, not two. This gives us a criterion for the selection of that teacher. She should be one who has naturally much the same attitude toward the world as the children have. She must be able to see the world as they see it if she is to assist them. The second period extends, usually, from about the beginning of the third grade to the beginning of the seventh and is characterized by an interest in the organization of imagery on the basis of the adaptation of means (mostly physical) to projected ends The child has learned to hold his purposes, to project them into the future, and to organize or adapt his activities so as to reach them. It is the period of technique when the child is interested in how a thing is done. Here, again, the attitude of the child gives you the criterion not only for the selection of the teacher, but for the selection of subject-matter as well. The teacher should stay with the pupil more than one year, and should be able to see the world as he sees it. The technique phases of the different subjects should here be taken up: industrial history, industrial geography, the technical side of reading, writing, spelling, the organization of the arithmetical processes, the development of the various elements of the English sentence, the use of Uterature as an aid in the projection of ideas and ideals in life. All this gives both the superintendent and the teacher something to fall back upon, some standard and guiding principle for their work, so that they do not need to confine themselves to a narrow path dosed out each month from an office some- where. They both become free because they know the law of the thing they are dealing with. The third period is ushered in by the coming of adolescence, or pubescence, and is 154 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington characterized by a desire to organize the activities and images on a social basis. The child now becomes dimly conscious of his relations to the race and to society about him. His desires have outrun his muscular co-ordinations and he struggles to adapt himself to this new relation. Things are now seen in their larger and more scientific systems. Here again, we have the criterion for our selection of subject-matter. The social side of geography is commercial, of history is institutional, of literature is that which deals with the relations of members of society one to another, of science are those larger general truths which form the background for the organization of all the sciences. Some such larger and more psychological organization as is indicated above will make it possible to meet the various intellectual, needs of the pupils and still keep them free from the possibility of arrest by asking them to assume an attitude toward the world which they have not yet reached. W. H. Elson, superintendent of schools, Cleveland, Ohio. — ^We have gone a great way in the solution of this problem when we have the problem stated, as we have had so well done in the paper this morning. We have also had a good statement of the attempts that are making thruout the country in the most progressive schools for a modification of school organization in such a way as to adapt instruction to the needs of these varying groups of children, and in the moment that I am occupying your time I shall review only one or two of these points. We have first the mention of the method approached by the selection or separation of defective children. That is a splendid step, negatively, in providing for the brightest children. Something is doing in the grouping or segregation, or separation, of the back- ward children, which I thoroly believe in as one of the ways of solving this problem. Doubtless with both these groups provided for we have yet the problem of adapting the instruction, modifying the work that is presented to these children, best to meet their needs and requirements. Mr. Kendall has suggested a plan for the separation of children that are going to the high school. We have before us another possibility and another problem that will come up this afternoon for discussion, which resolves itself into two or three possible things about which none of us knows very much, perhaps, and about which we want to proceed somewhat slowly and yet to move forward; that is, Whether or not our schools shall attempt further groupings ? With, we will say, the segregation of the defectives and the segregation of the backward children, we shall have perhaps 90 per cent, of the children left — reasonably capable children, able to work fairly well together. Some of these children are going to the high school and some of them are going to college; most of them are going to work. Perhaps we all agree that in the grade instruction of these children there is needed a larger element of industrial work. Probably we would all agree with that, and perhaps also to some clipping and limiting of the course and to a better adaptation of academic subjects to the real needs of the children. We know the waste is great beginning with the fifth or sixth grade; whether or not these children are all to have more industrial work, with perhaps a modified and better adapted academic work; or whether we are to segregate some of these children and give them vocational instruction; or again whether we are to segregate children that are going to the high school and, perhaps, to college — these are questions that loCal conditions must determine. Those of us who have the problem of the foreign child and the foreign district know that in our own schools the widest possible range of adaptation is needed. Here is the one school which is distinctly foreign; difficulties of language are there, narrow and limited experience. The home life is to be taken into account. Those children need a modification of the course of study — very much modified from the group of children that are predominantly American; children that come from homes where there are books, opportunities for travel, and the widest possible experience. We know that in this one type of school the waste is very great. I said to the principal of a school the other day: "How many first-grade schools have Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION i^r you ? " He said : " I have ten." " How many fourth-grade schools have you ? " He said : ''I have five." "How many fifth-grade schools have you?" He said: "I have three." "How many eighth-grade schools have you?" He repUed: "I have one." Merely one showing in a school of forty teachers, or forty schools, a tremendous waste. That school offers a problem in itself. In another school that I visited a few days ago, I found two and one-half second grades in the school. I found two eighth grades— an American school in a fairly comfortable community. I went to the office and looked up the records and found that this school had in it fifty children, only, out of one thousand, that are at all behind their grade; that is, behind their normal year's standing. Now, these two schools present distinct types and the problem is entirely different as to how we are going to meet this modification. I do not know that any one knows; but it is sufficient to say that something is needed in the way of grouping and modification. Perhaps the suggestion that Mr. Kendall made for the segregation of children that are going to high school is well adapted to some conditions, perhaps to some cities, and certainly to some schools in certain cities. Then we have this other problem as to where industrial work is needed. In some cases, to learn how to earn a living is a matter of much greater significance to the children than some other things. Here a peculiar type of instruction is certainly needed. I would suggest with reference to the industrial phase of it, particularly to the vocational phase of it, that we need to go slowly, particularly in that part of it which relates to the direct work of the elementary school. SYMPOSIUM: THE PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION I. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION; EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL JAMES E. RUSSELL, DEAN OF TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBLA UNIVERSITY It is a commonplace of political history that our government is the resultant of contending forces in our national life. What the common man perceives as party policy or sectional issue, the scholar understands as a manifestation of conflicting ideals of social control. Autocracy at one extreme is met by democracy at the other extreme. The practical outcome' at all times has been an oligarchy more or less concerned with the welfare of all. The conditions of life in a new country do not favor democracy. Men who can lead will lead and must lead. In times of peril the necessity of con- serving each unit of force and directing it unerringly from some point of vantage is too obvious to admit of question. Such government is oligarchic. Such was the government of the American colonies and of every new state that has won its way into the Union. The ideal oligarchy is an aristocracy, the rule of the best. When an oligarchy becomes inefficient, when the few in control are not the best, then the progressive state must train up better leaders and reform its government. The record of our national efforts in these directions is the his- tory of American education and American politics. Our earliest schools and colleges were avowedly institutions for the training of leaders— leaders in church and state. It was vocational training maintained by the few in the interests of an aristocracy. In Harvard College, for example, 156 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington down to 1772 the students were enrolled according to the social standing of their parents and the severest penalty that could be inflicted for infractions of college discipline was loss of social rating on the college register. The aristocratic lineage of the colonial school is perpetuated today in the pro- fessional course beginning in the secondary school and ending in the university. It embraces not only theology and law, but medicine, engineering, architecture, agriculture, dentistry, teaching, commerce — every vocation in which trained leaders are required. It is the choicest part of our educational system. On it we have lavished our wealth and to it our ablest educators have dedicated their lives. If it be aristocratic, we console ourselves that it recruits an aristoc- racy of which we need not be ashamed — an aristocracy not of birth and breed- ing, but an aristocracy of those best equipped for service to their fellow-men. But there is another tendency in our national life, a force making for democracy. It found its initial impulse in the Puritanic conscience, and it has been augmented by each successive immigration of the oppressed and heavy laden of other lands. The political philosophy of eighteenth-century Europe found ready acceptance in the American colonies. Our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, documents written under the storm and stress of social revolution at home and abroad, declared unequivocally the rights of man as man. On this foundation our fathers established a government dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We, their children of the third and fourth generation, are still striving to realize that grand dream of liberty, equality, fraternity. That Utopia has not been attained and may never be attained. Men are not equal today; they were not equal when our Constitution was written ; nor yet when Puritan and Cavalier began their conquest of this new land. But what was true when our fathers first invaded the wilderness and began to build their homes and carve out new states was equality oj opportunity. It is the basic principle of our national life. However much we glory in our achievements as a people, and in the honor that has come to strong men made great by doing great deeds, the finest flower of the past century is the deepening of our faith in the brotherhood of man and the increasing of our devotion to the ideals of democracy. Meanwhile, as always, progress comes thru education. We have realized the justice of making our schools accessible to all and we acknowledge the necessity of compelling the attendance of those who might otherwise become a menace to society. But we are slow to appreciate that a course of training designed for a favored few puts the many at a serious disadvantage. Our education system is unfair in that it does not do what the founders of this republic meant that it should do. It does not give equality of opportunity to all. This may seem surprising, particularly as we have been boasting for a century of bur American liberty, fraternity, and equality. It is the boast, too, of most Americans that our great public-school system provides alike for every boy and girl taking advajitage of it. This is half true — and dangerous, as all half-truths are. The fact is, the American system of education grants Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION ic'i equality of opportunity to those who can go on to the college and the university. It takes little account of the boy— and less still of the girl— who cannot have or does not wish for a higher education. The ten millions of those now in our elementary schools who will be compelled to "drop out" to earn a livelihood will have missed their opportunity. But why ? Do we in America have need only of professional men and "men of affairs" ? Are those who pay the taxes and do the rougher work of life to be denied opportunity for self-improvement ? Are only those who can afford to stay in school to reap the advantages of education ? In a word, what are we doing to help the average man better to do his life-work and better to realize the wealth of his inheritance as an Ameri- can citizen? These questions raise the problem of vocational training for those who must begin early to earn their living. It is, in my judgment, the greatest problem of the future, and one which we may not longer disregard and yet maintain our standing as a nation. Our schools must grant equal opportunity to all. In most other countries, the school system is deliberately intended to keep some down while helping others up. So long as our mode of government endures we cannot shut the door of opportunity in the face of any citizen. It is the greatest experiment the world has ever seen, and while there are many who would gladly see it fail, it is our bounden duty to make it succeed. It would be presumptions to say, after only one century of trial, that success is already assured. This is only the beginning. We are just coming to realize some of our blessings, as we see more clearly for the first time some of our dangers. How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which in the nature of events cannot possibly be fulfilled ? If the chief object of government be to promote civil order and social stability, how can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders ? Is human nature so constituted that those who fail will readily acquiesce in the success of their rivals, especially if that success be the result of "cuteness," rather than honest effort? Is it any wonder that we are beset with labor troubles? We are, indeed, optimists if we see no cause for alarm in our present social conditions; and we are worse than fools if we content ourselves with a superficial treatment of the ills that afiflict us. Legislation may do much to help us out of trouble, but it is only education of the right sort that can per- manently keep us from ruin. There never has been a time when we were more in need of sound education, and in the struggle for existence that is yet to come we shall need a better education than we conceive of today. There is one educational principle that is peculiarly American. It is that every man, because he is a man and an American citizen, should be liber- ally educated so far as circumstances will permit. A man, according to our Magna Charta, is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The first business of the schools is to make life worth living, liberty worth striving for, and the pursuit of happiness something for which no man need be ashamed. 158 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington We need, in my opinion, one more article in our educational creed. It is this. In making a man, make him good for something. It is a practice easily recog- nizable in the history of our universities and professional schools. The next step is to see that the common man is equally well provided for. A beginning has been made in the enrichment of the course of study in our elementary and high schools, thus giving a choice of studies and better prepara- tion for life if the pupil knows how to choose wisely; in the introduction of the natural sciences, manual training, and the domestic arts, thus giving some acquaintance with the industrial processes underlying our civilization if the subjects be well taught; and finally, in the differentiation of the school courses and school work whenever future vocations of the pupils are definitely known, as in the negro schools of the South, the county agricultural schools of Wis- consin, and the trade schools of some of our eastern cities. But all this is only a beginning. At best but little can be done before the age of fourteen, but that little can be of the right kind. If nothing else is gained from the elementary school than a wholesome respect for man's industry, a good basis is afforded for participation in man's occupations. The serious preparation for practical life begins for the great majority of us at the age of thirteen or fourteen, on leaving the elementary school. The most dangerous period in the life of a boy or girl lies just ahead — say up to the age of nineteen or twenty. This is the time when the average boy must learn to be self- supporting, and when the girl must fit herself for domestic duties. It is the time, too, when technical training counts for most. I contend that every American boy and girl is entitled to practical help in this time of greatest need — and at public expense, too, if the state maintains high schools, universities, and professional schools for those who aspire to leadership in professional life. My reasons for this contention are these: 1. Anything that will contribute to the greater efficiency of the workman is a contribution not only to his own well-being but to the wealth of the nation. 2. Anything that will lead the workman to take more pride in his work tends to make him a better citizen and a more conservative member of society. If it be possible to make each man, no matter what his social standing may be, an honest leader in his own field, a workman who is not ashamed of his handiwork, then we need fear no criticism of our colleagues across the sea, nor need we as an industrial people fear the competition in the world's markets. More than that, we need never lose faith in the righteousness of American ideals nor dread the consequences of our social democracy. If there be those who say the task is impossible, I answer in the words of General Armstrong, when some one doubted the possibility of negro education, ''What are Chris- tians for but to do the impossible ?" Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION i^ 11. EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY CAN BE SECURED ONLY BY PROPER RECOGNITION OF (a) INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN NATIVE CAPACITIES AND IN SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT, (b) THE REQUIRE MENTS OF VOCATIONAL EFFICIENCY AS WELL AS OF (c) GENERAL INTELLIGENCE AND EXECUTIVE POWER EDWARD C. ELLIOTT, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON, WIS. The preparation of my brief contribution to this afternoon's discussion of this important topic of the place of industries in education has been carried forward with no inconsiderable apprehension. Upon first inspection the main proposition, with its several corollaries, seemed to be so axiomatic, and the character of an existing opinion regarding industrial education indicated in gen- eral such unanimity, as to render any effort at demonstration as simple and use- less as shooting at the classic " bam door." A more careful examination of this apparent axiom, and a more critical analysis of the implications of contem- porary educational opinion, revealed a series of problems of more or less difl6- culty and intricacy. Thereupon the whole question quickly changed its cloak of simplicity for one of complexity. At the first step of our examination and analysis, we are confronted with a sharp distinction between the theory and the practice of our system of public education. The land resounds with exclamations of loyalty toward a genuinely public education — an education jor and hy and oj the people; yet how few and far between are the parents, the teachers, the communities ready and willing to make the change of educational creed and to offer the financial sacrifice demanded by their seeming loyalty. There is, I believe, a fairly reasonable explanation of this chasm between words and deeds. The American public school rests upon the basis of the performance of a political and not an economic function. The cabalistic symbol of democracy — equality of opportunity — ^has possessed meaning for education only when attached to the political life. The history of the whole social movement for democracy, which has found its best expression in and thru the public school, is the history of a more or less conscious attempt to make a politically efficient people. The mediocrity of our success in the maintenance, thru education, of the condition of equity in political opportunity seems to have hastened the employment of the symbol of democracy for the maintenance of equity in economic opportunity. And with this has come the dim recognition of the probable insufficiency of the whole formula of equality. The problem of equality of religious opportunity in education has been solved by complete elimination; that of equality of political opportunity by a method of super- ficial inspection; that of economic opportunity by the fantasy of anticipation. In fact, ''equality of educational opportunity" bears every stamp of academic and philosophic abstraction. It never was, nor never will be, an ideal capable of realization. What we have, and shall attempt to bring about l6o NATIONAL. EDUCATION ASSOCIATION LWashington thru our public school, is an equilibrium, a balancing, of educational oppor- tunity. Equality is significant of similarity, identity, of reward. An equilib- rium of opportunity implies that grade of reward commensurate with capacities, whether those capacities are of the endowments of nature, of the acquisitions of training, or of the fullness of family coffers. The maintenance of such an equilibrium of educational opportunity will result in giving to industry its rightful share of competence, and give to education for vocation its rightful share of social respectability; neither of which may be said to obtain today. Viewed largely, four forces may be said to contribute to the drafting of individuals into industry and to the selection by individuals of a vocation. The social, concerned mostly with artificial distinctions of social grade and rank; the economic, dominated alone by material reward; the personal, guided by indistinct individual interests and desires; and the educational, directed by ancient traditions of intellectual discipline. Each operates con- sciously or unconsciously; with few exceptions unconsciously, and this uncon- scious mode has ever been favored by formal education. The chief argument in support of the main proposition that some definite preparation for vocational activity, especially industrial, within our scheme of public education, may be derived from the necessary improvement of the acknowledged selective function of the school. At the present moment, the distinct tendency is toward horizontal stratification of individuals into social classes, instead of a vertical selection according to specific eflSciency. Voca- tional industrial education for all is no more likely to yield larger social results than the traditional, pseudo-cultural, static education of the present, unless it becomes consciously selective, unless it consciously fits the square industrial worker into the square industrial hole, the round worker into the round hole, the triangular worker into the triangular hole. All educational reform passes thru four stages — the stage of stress, the stage of investigation, the stage of propaganda, the stage of reorganization. Of these, the stage of investigation is by far the most difficult of passage. What is needed today, before we can proceed with saneness thru the stage of propaganda on to the stage of rational reorganization, is investigation; facts, **Gradgrindian" facts pertaining to industry and to children. We need to determine, first of all, the extent of the demand for trained workers in specific fields of industry; we need to determine the character and the quality of the specific interests and capacities needed by specific industries. Above all, we need to determine the extent, actual and potential, of the individual possession of these specific interests and capacities. Here opens an entirely new field of activity for the study of social needs, and for the study of the pupils of the public school. This study of social needs, this evaluation of industrial conditions, can be carried on successfully according to projected plans by a comparatively few trained scientists and skilled investigators. But the study of the individual vocational intelligence and interests, ideals and capacities, motives and neces- Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION l6i sities of the American boy and girl must be carried on, in the largest measure, by the school. Yet the school dare not assume the responsibility for such study, until there is raised up a new generation of public-school teachers— especially in the elementary schools — who know how to detect, to classify and to direct the potential industrial powers of the child. Even given such teachers, this goal is not possible until we begin to rid ourselves of the factory, piece-work system of education of our graded school. This of itself is an almost sure preventive against knowing very much about any individual pupil. The sum total of the superficial observations of eight or a dozen teachers, each of whom has an opportunity of studying and knowing the child merely thru one- half of a year, or at the most, thru a whole year, will not equal one-tenth part of the insight that a skilled, observant teacher might obtain, did the machinery of the public school permit close contact between pupil and teacher, thru several years. Until we possess reliable data upon which to base a rational scheme of reor- ganization, the public schools cannot hope to become instruments for "indus- trial determination; " neither will they cease to prevent the present positive mis- selection of individuals for their proper station of efficiency and happiness. For a rightful selection must precede and underlie the maintenance of the educational equilibrium of democracy. II III. THE MOST URGENT NEED OF OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IS AN ADEQUATE PROVISION FOR THE VOCATIONAL NEEDS OF CHIL- DREN DESTINED FOR INDUSTRIAL AND DOMESTIC PURSUITS JAMES F. MCELROY, CONSULTING ENGINEER, CONSOLIDATED CAR-HEATING COMPANY, ALBANY, N. Y. A study of the attendance in the schools in the cities of the state of New York shows a very rapid falling off in the enrollment in the grammar-school' grades, of which the records of the city of Albany may be taken as an example. The enrollment in ist year of grammar school is 155 1 « « « 2d " " " " " 1242 it tt u -^ u u « '< " 1317 a ^^Ij a « " <' « 1448 a u u ^^1j u u u u a J252 li a u ^j.Jj « (' " " " 1088 " 7th " " " " " 720 Thus it will be seen that the list of pupils that complete the grammar-school work amounts to only 35 per cent, of the total number enrolled in the first year of the grammar-school grades. This falling off in the enrollment is a serious matter and calls for careful consideration. ' The term Vgrammar-school" evidently includes all of the usual eight grades below the high school.- L Editor.] l62 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington The manufacturing industries of Albany may be assumed to represent the usual trades found in cities of this class in this state. To determine the educa- tional attainments of some of our operatives, I have had inquiry made of over one hundred workmen composed largely of machinists and hence representing a grade of intelligence higher than the average. This inquiry has developed two facts in which we are concerned at this time : First, out of 102 men there was not to be found a single graduate of a high school, nor a person who ever attended as a pupil in a high-school course. Second, out of 102 men I found only seven who had completed the course in the grammar schools. From this it appears that the education of all of these mechanics was limited to such education as is furnished by the grammar schools and that 93 per cent, of them belong to that class of pupils that drop out of school before completing the grammar-school course. On inquiry of other people interested in manufac- turing, I am informed that approximately the same condition of affairs exists among people engaged in trades in their employ. The ordinary mechanic in our manufacturing institutions is indebted to our school system for teaching him to read and write and for some instruction in mathematics, but outside of these elements of an education the schools furnish him practically nothing that is of value or helpful in the struggle which he must maintain for the rest of his life. The course of study in our schools is based upon the theory that the student will continue thruout the entire course and graduate from the high school, and this course is designed to prepare the student for admission to college. This course of study, it seems to me, is unjust, unfair, and unreasonable so far as it relates to over 65 per cent, of the total school population. At the age of boys in the grammar schools they are fascinated with the study of mechanics and with all kinds of machines for generating or applying power. At this age a boy is much more impressed by doing things himself than by being told by other people how things are done. If our schools furnished him the opportunity that he longs for, there would be little tendency to shirk his duties and the services of the truant officer would not be required. There would also be no temptation on the part of parents to take boys out of schools in order that they may learn something practical elsewhere. The way to keep boys in school until they are sixteen years of age is to give them a course of instruction that will interest them and fire their ambition. As it is, you cannot keep boys in school until they are sixteen years of age, not even when your school authorities are backed up by the truant office and the police force. The boy knows better, and my feeling is that the boy is nearer right than some of you would be willing to admit. Young men, destined for industrial pursuits, not only do not receive in the schools a proper education for their life-work, but after leaving school they find no place where they can receive instruction in the trades which they may select. Our manufacturers cannot afford to maintain industrial or trade schools, and it is not their business to do so even if they could afford it. This Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION 163 is work that properly belongs to the public schools. Of what interest is it to the manufacturer to establish trade schools when the mechanic will leave his employ and go off elsewhere to work the moment his trade is learned ? It is to my mind clearly impracticable for the manufacturer, with a more or less changing Hst of employees, to carry on a system of instruction of apprentices. As you know, the apprentice system is a thing of the past. A young man cannot be bound to a manufacturer for a certain number of years of service as in the old apprentice system, but he leaves the employ of the manufacturer at will and if he has gained a good knowledge of mechanics and has become a good machinist, he readily gets employment elsewhere at good wages. Under existing conditions, a young man learns his trade in a. haphazard way and under great difficulties. The knowledge he gains comes to him a little at a time and from varying sources. Some of the knowledge is erroneous and not always consistent with things he already knows. He is not always able to distinguish error from that which is true, the wrong way from the right way. Things which he ought to know he does not learn at all. In the shop the good mechanic does not give to the poor mechanic the knowledge and results of the training which distinguish the two. The trained mechanic does not readily impart information to the beginner which would make the beginner a competing mechanic. It is under such a handicap as this that the average young man gains the simple knowledge with which his life-work is to deal. Not helped in the schools, held back and kept in ignorance by those already skilled, the result is that his knowledge at best is meager, unclassified, unsys- tematized, and unsatisfactory. There is a demand for a radical change in our system of education for girls as well as boys, for the gurl who is to become the mother of the household as well as the boy who is to earn the living for the family. How few graduates of our high schools or of our girls' colleges are proficient with the needle and understand the principles of cooking and the preparation of foods for the sick as well as for those who are well ? What foundation is laid in our common schools for the knowledge which the mother must have in the care of her family and in the direction of her household affairs? This knowledge should be furnished by the schools at the proper time and in the proper way. The employer of labor in this country suffers from the inefficiency of those upon whom the success of his undertakings most depends. The successful employer must have efficiency in the shop as well as in the office, in the service of manufacturing as well as in the service of management, and he is willing and ready to pay his employees in proportion to the efficiency of their service. It is for the interest of both employer and employee that men should be intelli- gent, as intelligence is the basis of efficiency. The characteristic feature of industry today is the demand for ability to do things, to get at results accurately and directly without unnecessary cost or loss of time. It is this ability which results in high wages to a certain class of employees and in profits to the manu 1 64 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington facturer. It is the lack of it which causes a large class of employees to produce work that is unsatisfactory and without profit. The question arises as to how can the difficulties of this situation be best met ? I do not believe that the best results will be obtained by what are known as trade schools, that is, schools with a course of instruction necessary to develop skilled workers in a particular trade. I believe that instruction should be much broader and that young men should have a working-knowledge of several trades. We should recognize the fact that changes in our industries have taken place in recent years in the systematizing and classifying of labor, in specializing, and in the use of automatic labor-saving machinery, all of which prevent a mechanic from getting wide experience and general knowledge of all kinds of work. What a young man should have as a result of the common schools is a broad idea of the arts and processes, and of kinds of machinery by which processes are carried out. He should know much of the nature of materials, and this should be on a broader ground giving both wider knowledge and experience than that which would be gained in a school of a particular trade. This should be so broad that a young man would have a good prepara- tion for any one of a number of trades and not be confined to instruction in a particular trade. A young man may study metals and metal-working and be prepared to do eflficient and valuable work in forging as a blacksmith, but that would not fit him for running a lathe or a shaper as a machinist. If he learns blacksmithing he may know how to harden and temper metals, but not know how to cut metals, which would be the work of an ordinary machinist. Schools, in my judgment, should give a broad intellectual foundation, not only in the working of metals as done by the blacksmith, not only in the shaping and tempering of tools for cutting particular metals which is the trade of the toolmaker, but in the actual cutting of metals and the evolving of forms out of metals as is done by the machinist, and in the fitting and designing of parts of mechanism which he will be called upon to do. He should have instruction in school in a variety of activities, because in the practical work in factories the division of labor there found necessary has a tendency to confine him narrowly to the particular trade in which he is employed. The routine work of the shop does not give him breadth of view nor broaden him intellectually, so that a man without a trained mind or one equipped with a general knowledge of facts finds, within the narrow place to which division of labor assigns him, that he is not in a position to understand fully all of the operations of a manufacturing business. Some people seem to think that our technical schools are educating men as mechanics in the industrial work of the country. In my opinion such is not the case. The manufacturing of this country is not done by technical graduates and never will be. The technical graduate will never be satisfied to spend his life as a machinist drawing $3 . 00 to $3 . 50 per day, and whilst some of our railroads have required that technical graduates entering their employ shall work in the shops for a certain length of time, the technical graduate enters Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION i6c the shop as an impractical theorist who has the shopwork all to learn and whose work, on account of the lack of experience in the shop and lack of knowl- edge of shop practice, is inferior to that of the uneducated mechanic. Our technical graduate gets out of the shop as quickly as possible and secures a position of more pay and less arduous work. Whilst I do not altogether share in the severe criticism which is at times made upon the technical graduate and of his usefulness in the world's work, I do, however, believe that his work is elsewhere than at the lathe and planer. I am clearly of the impression that it is useless and impracticable to consider that our manufacturing industries are to be suppHed with mechanics who are graduates of technical schools, or who are graduates even of high schools. The manual-training high schools do not meet the necessities of this case, because: first, boys must enter upon their life work in the industries before such a course in the high school can be completed; second, financial condi- tions of those who must spend their lives in the industries of the country make it impracticable for the great majority of them to complete the manual-training high-school course; third, the work of the manual-training high school fits young men better for foremen than for positions as mechanics. This instruc- tion is important, but it is of a higher grade than what is required for the great majority of our laboring class. I have therefore come to the conclusion that the great need of our system of education is the provision of industrial schools that receive children at the ages at which they now drop out of our grammar schools, and that the work of these industrial schools should be completed when the pupils reach the age of about sixteen years. These industrial schools should be supported as a part of our public-school system and should provide instruction for practically the whole of our school population. Admission should be from the industrial schools to the high schools for those that desire to take that course. These industrial schools should give a working-knowledge of several trades and, particularly, those trades peculiar to the community should be represented in the course of instruction. The instruction should be given by practical men, not theorists. These schools should be opened as night schools where instruc- tion could be given those not able to take the course in the daytime. DISCUSSION William E. Roberts, supervisor of manual training, public schools, Cleveland, O. —One of the most significant facts established by school statistics is the large number of pupils behind their grade. Of the boys who entered the sixth grade in Cleveland last year 15 J per cent, were of, or older than, the age at which they should have graduated from the eighth grade. What figures do not show so clearly is the reason for this loss of time. A careful analysis, however, leaves little question that a large percentage of loss is due to absence of those mental qualities which respond readily to the demands of the elementary- school curriculum, particularly to the complex work in arithmetic and technical grammar, and a consequent distaste for school work. The elementary-school courses fix arbitrarily a standard of culture and a means of development toward that standard to which all must 1 66 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Washington conform, rather than offering opportunities for development along lines for which pupils are temperamentally fitted. Personal experience and experiment convince me that there must be a differentiation of work in the grammar grades to meet more fully the varying needs and capabilities of pupils whose powers are manifestly in the direction of manual expres- sion. There must be provided courses, beginning with the sixth grade, preferably in separate schools, which boys may take, directed by the judgment of the school authorities and with the consent of parents. In these schools at least one-third of the time should be given to hand work upon which the greater part of the other school work should have a direct bearing. The whole course should be so unified that the usual division into subjects would be almost impossible. I would have the mathematics confined to the simple rules, with direct practical bearing upon industrial work and experience in daily life, avoiding problems designed for mental gymnastics; reading selected to include history and geography, related largely to the industrial side of the work, and to civics; language and spelUng with the thought of intelligent expression in speech and writing; penmanship sufficient to acquire legibility; drawing, both freehand and mechanical, particularly emphasized. The manual side of the course should for at least two years be based upon general principles underlying industrial work, which in the final analysis is reduced almost wholly to work in wood and metals. The manual work of the third year could be devoted to specialization determined by the development of capabilities exercised in the first two years. Such a school would have many outlets. It would save many pupils to the technical high school; it would lead directly to the trade school; it would prepare for apprentice- ship; it would better prepare this type of pupil for life in general. It looks to the time when the elementary schools shall recognize a standard of culture not dependent upon examinations in intricate arithmetical problems and technical grammar. That such schools are needed is indicated by the fact that so many pupils are kept in school, in spite of the loss of time, until they are practically forced out by stress of years. I have used boys as illustrative. There is no reason why a similar course cannot be provided for girls. Howard D. Brundage, Stout Training Schools, Menomonie, Wis. — The industrial school, in order to provide most efficiently for the vocational needs of children destined for industrial pursuits, must be so organized that each pupil feels himself an integral element in the work. He must exhibit a due amoimt of self-consciousness. He must not only feel, but actually have responsibility. He must realize that the value of the things produced in the school depends on him, and that the value of his services to his future employer depends on his personal character and on his judgment and skill as a workman. In such a school there should be few instances where the worker can say, "This is not for actual use, and I need not be so particular." Such conditions are detrimental to his advancement and he is not breathing "shop air," This kind of school life must ring with reality. The school should set high standards in the kinds of work done and constantly en- courage their attainment. Thoroness and quality should be the immediate aim, speed and quantity the final aim. However, the pupil should have clearly in mind that there are various grades of goods on the market and business contracts are made for first- and second-class jobs of work; but that the best workmen and the highest-skilled mechanics are engaged in the produc- tion of the highest grades of goods and in the performance of the first-class jobs of work. Also it is necessary for him to understand that an employer's business agreements and contracts vary in their requirements regarding the quality of materials, the form of construction, and the perfection of finish, and that the workman as a producer must con- Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION id-j sider these, and accordingly endeavor to use material and means that will please, and ful- fill the business requirements of the contract and at the same time conserve his employer's business interests. This is surely a practical standpoint, and to be practical a workman must learn the essentials and nonessentials in his vocation— where to be, and where not to be, particular; how to perform work quickly, yet thoroly; how to cut corners legitimately; understand the tricks or "kinks" of the trade; how to produce the grade of goods or perform the class of work required, and this to his employer's profit and thereby do his part as a workman in giving an " all round square deal." In other words, the aim should be to show himself approved, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly divining the truth. Therefore, I claim that the pupil in the industrial school must be an intelligent and real worker who produces the goods. He must be a vital factor in the work, a transformer, a positive not a negative force, and have an active not passive interest in his surroundings, where he is being prepared for life's work. This formative period of child-life spent in the right atmosphere and under proper training is what produces the "self-made" quaUty of stuff in the man, so essential to the individual and to society. To create these conditions lies with the organization and management of the institution and the time has come in the life of this nation when immediate steps must be taken by its body of educators to meet the urgent demands of its citizens in making adequate provision for this great social and industrial need. Benjamin R. Andrews, Department of Domestic Economy, Teachers College, Columbia University. — My remarks regarding vocational educational needs will be con- fined to the case of girls and women. Present education does not prepare for earning a living. Miss Addams' report in last week's Charities on seventy-eight New York girls who left school for work, repeats the story: nearly all in unskilled, unprogressive work; only two factors in day-school training found useful — skill in sewing and skill in business pen- manship. Half the girls had sought supplementary training in city evening schools, but no real vocational help was found there. In considering the case of vocational education for women and girls, two points of view must be regarded as fundamental: Woman's relation to self-support, and woman's relation to the home. 1. In regard to self-support. — The time is not far away when every girl will learn a specific piece of remunerative skilled work, just as we expect boys to do; this does not mean that married women will follow a vocation outside of the home save in exceptional cases. The American family and home will never encourage that. It does mean that girls will generally earn a livelihood in some skilled work for the three, six, or eight years prior to marriage, and will do so to their own good and the good of society; that this earning power will raise the standards of living in their parents' families, and give the impulse to a higher level when the girls marry and start their own homes; and it means, further, that this possession of skill in remunerative labor will, after marriage, afford protection and support, when families lose their male head. In the United States one married woman in five is a widow and is responsible, as was her deceased husband, for her own support and usually for that of children. Woman's present relation to remunerative employment in the United States is shown by two facts: (i) Of women over ten years old, 18.8 per cent, were in 1900 engaged in remunerative employment. (2) Of the 377 lines of employment for men and women listed in the census, women had in 1900 entered all but seven, in greater or less numbers. Women are wage-earners then already, and if men's training is to be considered, women's must be also. 2. Vocational training, as affected by woman's relation to tlie home. — Of American women over twenty, 65 per cent, are married and inferentially responsible for a home and the rearing of children. Material conditions have changed and the business of directing i68 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington a home has become one of the most complex, as it always has been one of the most signifi- cant, of human tasks. A single instance — the care and feeding of infants involving milk modification, observation of conditions, and the application of varying formulae, is a matter made plain only by instruction, which ought to be provided for every young mother. Some- how, then, opportunities for training in home management, and all that that implies, must be provided. Another phase is the training of girls and young women for remunerative domestic work. One thinks at once of the servant question, and who knows but that some day we may have trained servants. Already, on a higher level, college women are being trained for domestic administrative positions in hospitals, dormitories, and other institutions. On all levels, professional domestic training can be given and it is one of the economies of the situation that if a trained woman leaves employment and marries, she takes her skill into the management of her own home. One instance again: in every large city, thousands of girls, fourteen or fifteen years old, take as their first emplo)anent "minding the baby" of a neighbor at two dollars or thereabouts a week. It would be possible at once to provide a nurse-maid's course for these little girls, either in day or evening schools, which would professionalize their tiny tasks, give them skill in bathing, feeding, and caring for little children, raise the level of their present service, and unconsciously prepare them for their own home life later. Woman's educational needs from this partial, vocational point of view are, then: First, vocational training for self-support; second, a preparation, incidentally in early years, and directly when the need arises, for the duties that fall to the direction of a home. IV. CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITIES AS AN ESSENTIAL AND IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL COURSE MISS EUPHROSYNE LANGLEY, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO "Constructive Activities in the Elementary School" — that is my topic, and any discussion of it must be prophecy rather than history, for as yet the ele- mentary school has had no constructive activities. Ten years ago a wave of criticism to the effect that the schools were impracticable and could not hold the children led to a widespread determination to put in manual training. That was to be the specific for the ills diagnosed by the critics; but our specific, it is now said, has failed to work a cure. And why? For the very good reason that though the manual-training prescription was duly written out, the medicine was never actually administered to the patient. I cannot find a school in this country where shop-practice for boys and girls is found thruout the elementary school. The name "manual training" appears often in courses of study, but when analyzed into its actual constituents it is, outside of shop-work for boys in the seventh and eighth grades, hardly more than a chaotic assemblage of various forms of "busy work," relieved now and then by a bit of knife-work for boys, sewing for girls, or, for the younger children, a dip into the realm of the aes- thetic in what Mr. Veblein calls "clay-muddling." Few subjects have been so handicapped as manual training; at the outset there was little in the way of equipment, no kilns, no looms, no benches. There was no time, the subject being superinduced on an already overcrowded curriculum. There was no Superintendence! PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION i6 pedagogical experience. There was no real understanding of the place of handwork in the educational state, and, at the best, manual training has never been more than an unnaturalized foreigner in the body politic, not oj it. Can handwork be made an effective part of the elementary school ? Yes, but there must be a new point of view. We must be ready to put into practice what the best psychological theory has given us. There must be an entire reorganization of subject-matter. The handwork must not be a new subject elbowing out space for itself and squeezing up the other subjects. No subject must be allowed to stand isolated. We must break down the pigeon-holes into which kinds of knowledge have been separately bunched. The three R's tho hoary with respectability, are not the pivots on which the educational system turns. No child has an intellectual appreciation of the value of reading, writing, and arithmetic as such. They become of importance to him only when they are the means thru which he attains some desired end. Take a child in the first grade. Give him the simplest forms of constructive activity; let him build a playhouse, make jelly or dry apples, dye wool and weave tiny rugs. The wooden house, instead of being '*so big" by hand, is a definite number of inches on the ruler. The materials that enter into the making of jelly are weighed and combined in definite proportion. The weaving of rugs demands careful laying-out of spaces before the design can be put in. Thus thru the actual making of things, number work, in terms of measurements and weights, is levied upon by each activity. The record of the work in the child's own notebook turns into reading and writing. In a perfectly natural, simple fashion, the child reaches out thru his social occupations to the more formal studies, which, under such circumstances, cease to be formal or even formidable. As the three R's become the tools which express and reinforce the activities, on the one hand, so, on the other, history, geography, and nature-study, a group in which each is the complement of the others, should form the industrial and social background from which the activities themselves spring. It is illogical and arbitrary to tear apart subjects which rightly belong together in order to build a series of separate coops in which to house a curriculum. Constructive activities demand a constructive method, and a constructive method insists that the order of introducing handicrafts should be from the kindergarten up, rather than from the eighth grade down. A right construct- ive method also implies that the handicrafts should not follow along a line of prescribed models arranged from the point of view of the tool and of the adult organizing mind, but should be based absolutely on the subject-matter taught and should be vitally related to each other. One of the effects of such reorganization is a saving of time. With such fusion of studies as I have briefly indicated, all the formal subjects usually taught in the grade, plus actual shop-work in all the handicrafts, can be ade- quately taught without the expenditure of an extra half-hour of time. The cost of such reorganization would be chiefly the initial expense in the way of 1 70 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington additional space and equipment, and the permanent expense of perhaps two additional teachers in a school of average size. And finally, to make such reorganization effective, there must be mental organization on the part of both grade teacher and special teacher, and the special teacher should add to a broad pedagogical outlook a sound technical training. What would be the effect of such school work on children? The most startling assertion concerning the elementary school is that of those who enter the first grade 80 per cent, do not reach the eighth,^ an educational leak which, if paralleled in business, would mean bankruptcy. It is my belief that no possible agency could so effectively hold a child in school as a right re- adjustment of the elementary course on the basis of handicrafts, and I say put the handwork in from the kindergarten up, because the children fall out chiefly in grades 3, 2, and 4, and in that order. Consider for a moment the agencies which the modern feeling of responsibility for the child brings into co-operative guardianship around the third-grade boy who wishes to play truant. A recent report lists them for us: The truant officer, the factory inspector, the probation officer, the charity worker, the sociologist, the social- settlement worker, the woman's club, the teacher, the principal, and the humanitarian — all these to make one boy stay in the third grade. And yet he slips through the meshes of the educational system and escapes to his true school, the street. This small boy has more ingenuity and more energy than the school in its present organization can use, an ingenuity and energy certain to be destructive unless we can make them constructive. If the money spent, and now necessarily spent, on restraint, constraint, reformation, were turned over into the school funds and expended on pre- vention, children and communities would be immeasurably the better therefor. That constructive activities would hold the child is clearly apparent from our truant schools, where the most difficult children are so held, and the report of their desirable activities comes with pathetic emphasis to the good little boy who has no such opportunities. We can quite understand the inoffensive little chap who in Chicago was found deliberately throwing stones at windows that he might be sent to Bowmanville (the parental school) "where they make things." Now if we do succeed in holding the children thru the eight grades our educational problem is practically solved. It is because we have not been able to do this that the manufacturers have come forward with their remedy which is to push the trade ideal down into the grades. Appalled at the lost 80 per cent., at the mass of raw material not converted by the school into marketable stuff, dismayed by their own inability to get skilled workmen, they say, "Give us the child at the earliest possible moment, at the place where you no longer hold him; let him select a trade and we will at least make a tolerable artisan of him." There can hardly be a movement more significant and more important than to have the proverbial apathy of communities toward educa- ' Statement made at the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Chicago, 1908. Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION 171 tional questions broken in upon by the alert interest of business men. They are progressive, practical, accustomed to see a weakness and remedy it without any beating around the bush. They command money and influence. What they ordain is almost certain to come to pass. I heartily agree with their plan of establishing trade schools. They are an imperative need But I am strongly of the opinion that the trade school should not begin its special work till the close of the elementary school. In other words, I do not believe in two sorts of elementary schools, one bent to fasten on to a trade school, the other bent to fasten on to a ''culture" school. Handwork in the elementary school should be the same whether the child is destined for the carpenter's bench, the professor's chair, or any of the vast range of occupations lying between these. Differentiation can seldom come wisely into play in the elementary school. Vocational selection, if imposed upon the child while still in the grades, is likely to be a disastrous mistake. No teacher, no parent, even, holds the divining-rod whereby may be discovered the secret springs of a child's best future activity. Even if voluntary, early vocational selection is not to be trusted. It is liable to be whimsical, uncertain, determined by tem- porary influences. If the kind of occupation fervently chosen by every boy of ten were to reach mature realization, the army and the navy, the police force, and the livery business, would be steadily overcrowded. It is hardly reason- able to expect a child of ten or twelve to select out of the great industrial forces of the world that particular line in which his contribution to those forces should run, nor should it be the purpose of the elementary school to urge such selection. Courses in the elementary school should be planned with the idea of giving to each child the utmost in the way of general development possible to him. It is on this basis alone that constructive activities should be put into the first eight grades. I think of the child as at the hub of a wheel. All his studies and activities are the spokes that connect him with the rim, or the world in general. And he must be led to look along each spoke to each section of the rim. Each handicraft, each subject, should be considered as a means in throwing what Browning calls "films of connection" between the child and his environment. If you set him too early in an appointed groove, you unduly narrow his experi- ence— you compel him to look along one spoke, to one section of the rim, instead of to all; you strengthen one film of connection at the expense of the others. Every child, whether he is to be later in trade or in scholastic life, has a right to the widest opening-out of his personal resources, the most varied activi- ties, the most freely experimental stretching-out of tentacles that the best- planned, best-equipped elementary school can offer. By all means give every child a chance at a trade, but first give him the opportunity of being a devel- oped individual. Reorganization such as I believe in, a reorganization called for by two expert opinions, that of the business man and that of the small boy who plays truant at the third grade, would, I am confident, serve even the manufacturer's 172 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fWashingtom need better than his own method, which, indeed, he does not purpose as ideal but as a practical meeting of a present situation. Business statistics are as relentless as those of the schools and show that boys who go directly into some trade at fourteen to sixteen usually come to the limit of their advancement by eighteen, while those who can g(^t more training are the ones who go on to higher positions. To sum up: I believe in handwork in the elementary school, from the kindergarten up. I believe not in one or two activities, but in all the activities, taught in real shops, in a workman-like manner, from the standpoint of indus- trial history, to both girls and boys. I believe that the result of such training will be a product of greatly increased value to trade, to the college world, and to life in general, and I believe that this ideal can be wisely accomplished only when the business man and the pedagogue make it their common problem. DISCUSSION Frank M. Leavitt, assistant director of drawing and manual training, public schools, Boston, Mass. — The only procedure consistent with American ideals of free public in- struction for all is the following-out, in some fashion, of the program which Miss Langley has indicated. The public school is on trial and to hold its place in the esteem of the American people it must grapple with and solve this all-important problem of vocational training, and not hand it over to some other agency. Failing in this, the public school stands dis- credited and condemned. There are three factors in the problem of industrial education: the manufacturer's or business interests, the educational interests, and the labor interests, and I place, in nam- ing them, the educational interest between the other two, because that is just where in fact educators should stand. Between the demands of business on the one hand and the obstructions of labor unions on the other, the agency of public education should stand, holding the balance of power and turning all forces to the betterment of the condition of children. That the business interests cannot be trusted to deal with this question in a disinterested way can be all too clearly shown if we but recall for one moment the condition of child-labor as it exists in America today. That is another story, but let us not forget, however, the 2,250,000 children under fifteen who are wearing their lives away today in factory, mill, and mine, sadly degrading the next generation. Some maintain that all industrial training must be given in special schools and that such schools should not admit children under sixteen years. If we accept Miss Langley's deduction that public instruction should provide equal opportunity for all, tho not neces- sarily the same opportunity, I do not see how we can refuse a considerable amount of constructive work — manual training, industrial training — call it what you will, to large numbers of our children who will surely take their places in the ranks of the industrial army. Such children need more manual training and a different kind of manual training from that which is given for its "cultural" value, so called, to those children who expect to enter business or the professions. To be somewhat dogmatic — for the time is short — I believe that the program for a large city system must be somewhat as follows, in some sections of the city, at least. Beginning with Grade VI, the children should have a chance to elect (or their parents to elect for them) admission to the "industrial class." (Let me say that this is not entirely visionary. We are actually doing it now in Boston, experimentally.) In this "industrial class," five hours, at least, should be given to manual training — the time to be taken from drawing, physical training, and arithmetic. The work done Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION 170 in these classes, and the conditions under which it is done, should conform as closely as possible to actual industrial work in real life. The product should be not only useful, but should be put to use, preferably by the city. The articles made should be those which may be produced in quantities. The methods should be practical, and both product and method should be subjected to the same commercial tests, as far as possible, as apply in actual industry. What is it hoped to accompUsh ? To turn the attention of the children to things industrial; to give them an appreciation of values— \d\\xt of materials, of time, and of modern industrial methods; to prolong the school life of the pupils while enhancing their chances for industrial success. It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the Boston experiment without going into details, especially as regards methods, teacher, observed interest, increased efficiency, and disposition of work. Call it what you will, I believe it to be real industrial edu- cation, in the public schools. I believe that it is needed, that it will be welcomed by the parents, and that it should be in the public schools and nowhere else during the com- pulsory school period. V. AN INTERMEDIATE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL BEGINNING AT THE SIXTH SCHOOL YEAR CHARLES H. MORSE, SECRETARY AND EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE MASSACHU- SETTS COMMISSION ON INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION, BOSTON, MASS. There should be no real industrial education, as I understand the term, undertaken before the child is fourteen years of age or at about the end of the ninth school year. The term "industrial education" has been used by the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education for nearly two years to mean trade educa- tion. But this does not mean a trade education as understood by some to signify the instruction given in a school which teaches a degree of manipulative skill in the shortest possible time without regard to a thoro preparation for a trade. Neither should manual training be regarded as industrial training. In the majority of cases in this country, manual-training courses are given by men or women who have never learned a trade of any kind, and they deny with much feeling that their courses should be treated as other than cultural. Manual training should be given in all the school grades from the kinder- garten up. But do not let us deceive ourselves. Such courses are no more industrial courses than the penmanship courses or the drawing courses now given in our elementary schools are industrial courses. If I must plan a course which will ultimately lead to a trade, beginning with boys at twelve who are residents of a city, the course for the first two years would not materially differ from the work which would be given in a well- conducted grammar school for children of the same age. I would have the child at that age study, in connection with other subjects, the manufacturing establishments of the community. He should know their business organization and general methods of management, their history, the sources of the raw materials used, the geography of the regions from which the raw materials come, the transportation facilities, and, in a general way, the various processes of manufacture. The markets for the finished product T71 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington should be studied; also the special qualifications required of the employees, the wages for beginners, the average increase of wages, and the possibilities for advancement for an earnest, intelligent w^orker, as well as the hours of work and the steadiness of employment for each industry. All this would be given as work in English, geography, and history. These investigations of industries must needs be conducted under the guidance of a teacher who could understand the bearing of such study upon the boy's mind. All of this work should be comprehended in every grammar-school course. If such studies could be carried on under a broad-minded and well-equipped teacher, the boy's point of view would be quite different from that of the four- teen year old boy as educated today, and he would be prepared to choose an occupation more wisely. I look upon such study not as industrial education, 'however, but as a line of general education of value to every boy. Last summer I visited a school in Cork, Ireland, which should be seen by every American teacher. Each classroom was completely surrounded by cases with glass doors, containing Irish manufactures in every stage from the raw materials to the finished article. And yet the school was not a trade school. At fourteen years of age the industrial training begins. The boy should be given, courses in woodworking and iron-working for one-half of each school day. This should be supplemented with other subjects, including drawing, arithmetic, simple bookkeeping, industrial geography, and industrial history, as well as a continued study of local industries. At the sixteenth year, such a boy would be prepared to study his chosen trade, having a foundation for that trade which could not be obtained in any shop in our American industries. These last two years should be taken either in a school, under shop conditions, one-half of the time in the classroom and one-half in the school shop, or by a combination of part-time in the school and part-time in a commercial shop. In the former case, the boy should remain in the school eleven months of the year, eight hours per day, except Saturday, when the school should close at noon. There should be no protracted vacations other than the month of August. One-half of the time should be given to shop-work, and the balance to the study of such subjects as have a direct bearing on the chosen trade, such as its history, drawing, mathematics, chemistry, and physics; and, in addition to these, citizenship should be studied. Under the part-time system the boy would take these latter courses along with work in a commercial shop, by working in the industry for a week and then attending a continuation school for a week. Thus the theory and practice of the trade would go on hand in hand, and the boy would also be helping "to support himself and his family. By such systems of trade education our boys would ultimately contribute more largely toward the prosperity of our country than is possible under our present method of trade education. Such courses of instruction are proving eminently satisfactory in numerous European schools, and the graduates of such schools are in demand after a shortened apprenticeship and are receiving the highest prevailing wages. Superintendence] PLACE OF INDUSTRIES IN EDUCATION 175 The problem for the boys who will conduct our farms is somewhat different from that just stated for the boy who intends entering the manufacturing indus- tries. That he should be given preparation for his life's work in an agricultural school, and not in a high school with some agricultural courses attached, 1 have no doubt. During the past week the farmers of Massachusetts, thru the State Grange, appeared at the state house in opposition to a bill providing for agricultural and industrial courses in the existing high schools. Many of the superintendents of schools of the state argued in favor of the bill. The farmers said most emphatically, "This is not what we want." They said, "Give us independent agricultural schools." We would all agree that some instruction in mechanical trades should be made a part of the work of an agricultural school. Much farm machinery must be cared for by these boys, and farm carpentry should not be neglected. In these independent agricultural schools the girls should take many of the agricultural courses, together with domestic science and home dressmaking and millinery. The school must be planned as a finishing school for the future farmers, but provision should be made for those who can continue their education. Such schools should fit the boys for the state agricultural college and both the boy and the girl for the state normal school. For the city girl who must, at an early date, begin to earn her living, the problem is most difficult. We are informed by those who have made a study of this question that the average time a girl remains in productive industry is about five years. The question of educating a girl, therefore, for the industry in which she is likely to remain for so short a time must be considered as a distinct problem. These girls are destined, in the large majority of cases, to become the wives of our mechanics and the mothers of the coming generation. I can but feel that the school training these girls to earn their own living for five years should be accompanied by a large share of instruction which will fit them for the work of home-making which they are to pursue for the forty additional years of life. An interesting problem is now being tried in the city of Boston in a section where the residents are very largely from Italy. At the request of their parents, fifty girls about thirteen years of age have been selected, who attend the upper grades in the grammar school during the forenoon. The entire afternoon session is devoted to hand and machine work in a separate and independent school provided thru private subscription. Here about two hours per day are devoted to sewing and dressmaking. The work cannot, however, be fairly classed as industrial work. I am informed that several of the girls who have become fourteen years of age since entering the school have continued in the grammar school that they might attend the afternoon classes. This work is in charge of enthusiastic women who are seriously studying this prob- lem. We shall look forward with much interest to the result of this experiment. Certainly, the choice of all would be to retain these girls in school for a much 176 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fWashington longer time and give them a thoro preparation for home-making and also for a trade corresponding in thoroness to that suggested for the boys; and I sincerely hope the problem may be worked out with such a course as the ultimate aim of the girls' school. I regret that ten minutes does not give me sufficient time to present this subject as it should be presented to this audience. I have confined my remarks to what I consider the essentials. VI. A TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL GEORGE H. MARTIN, SECRETARY OF MASSACHUSETTS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION, BOSTON, MASS. In a complete system of industrial education the place and function of a technical high school may be summarized as follows: I. Such a school will have an avowedly vocational purpose. This will exclude the so-called general courses and also manual-training courses for culture which aim only to offer new intellectual feeding-grounds to boys who do not care to browse in the old academic pastures. 2 J The vocations for which such a school would prepare are not the pro- fessions. Hence, courses especially designed to prepare for the colleges and for the normal schools would be excluded, tho these are really vocational courses. 3. Technical high schools may be commercial, agricultural, or mechanical. Mechanical high schools may be as varied as the manufacturing industries for which they are to prepare. A school may prepare for a single industry, or it may be polytechnic in its character, offering a variety of courses adapted to local needs. 4. In the age of its pupils, in the length of its courses, and in its preparatory requirements, a technical high school should correspond with high schools of other sorts. This would call for four-year courses following the completion of an eight- or nine-year elementary course, and would include pupils, roughly speaking, from fourteen to eighteen years of age. 5. Being a technical school, its distinctive function will be to develop economic efficiency, but in common with all public schools it must aim also to develop intellectual and moral character. Each of these aims is both individual and social. 6. The work of the school will be threefold: {a) To furnish technical knowledge and technical skill; {h) to promote intelHgence, breadth, and refine- ment of a cultural sort; (c) to develop a sense of civic obligation. 7. For the first purpose there should be drawing, mathematics, and science, in kind and amount according to the needs of the industry for whose technique the student is preparing. Thus for agriculture there would be needed a larger proportion of chemistry and biology than of drawing and mathematics. For the mechanic arts, the course should be strong in drawing, mathematics, and perintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS 177 physics. The course in chemistry would be different in agriculture from tliat in tanning or dyeing or household sanitation. 8. Technical skill in mechanic arts can be acquired only in a shop, so that shop practice must constitute a large part of the work of the technical school. It may be gained either in a school shop or in a commercial shop. Which is better the experience of the world has not yet determined. Both are in operation and each has its advantages. Undoubtedly a good school shop is better than a poor commercial shop, but a school shop to be good must contain the essential features of the best commercial shop. Its instruct- ors must be shop-trained men, its hours and discipline must be those of the shop, and its product must be a salable commercial product. Whether the product should be sold or not is another question. What is true of the shop- work is equally true of the farm-work. 9. In order that the student may become a useful citizen as well as a skilled workman, the school course should include history, economics, and civics. Time also should be provided for thoro physical training, including personal hygiene and organized athletics. English should be cultivated thruout the course by composition and forensics. Opportunity should be offered to those students who might find relaxation and aesthetic pleasure in the study and practice of vocal and instrumental music. No attempt has been made in this brief outline to indicate the sequence of these studies nor the distribution of time among them, nor have I under- taken to discuss the mode of administration or financing or the governmental relations of the school. It will be seen that I do not believe in throwing away the existing high school nor in turning it into a shop nor in substituting a shop for it. This whole work would be destructive of the most cherished American ideals if, while teaching young men how to get a better living, the schools failed to teach them how to live a better life. AGRICULTURE, INDUSTRIES, AND HOME ECONOMICS IN OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILLET M. HAYS, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE, WASHINGTON, D. C. Our country has come to recognize that changed economic conditions, an increase in technical knowledge, and newly devised forms of school work have made it necessary and practicable to broaden out our educational machin- ery so as to give a large place to the industrial vocations. Existing schools must enrich their courses of study along these new lines so vitally connected with the thought and work of the people, and the newer types of schools espe- cially fitted to the industrial life of the people must be developed so as to meet the new conditions in the largest and best way. The volume of the new work is very large. No one class of schools can do all of it. The question might be raised whether it is better to adapt existing schools to do this teaching or 178 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington to develop new schools for this purpose. Manifestly we shall get on all too slowly, even if we utilize both plans. Generally speaking, one-third of our menfolk are in agriculture, and one- third in the non-agricultural productive industries; while two-thirds of our women are in the vocation of home-making. Thus at least two-thirds of all our people enter the vocations of agriculture, the mechanic industries, and home-making, and nearly all these receive their only schooling in our public schools. The percentage of the whole of our workers engaged in agriculture has decreased in a century from three-fourths of the whole population to one-third, and the indications are that it will decrease to one-fourth. As this percentage decreases the proportions become more nearly static, and those leaving the farm for the city are replaced by those leaving the city for the farm. Under conditions in which only a very small part of the population move from the farm to the town and only an equal number move from the city to the country, the rural community should have for the higher grades in its schools strong vocational courses, and the education for the city youth should close with courses related to the city vocations. There should be also easy methods of transit from the country life schools to the city schools and vice versa. AH will agree that there should be in the city schools some agri- culture both as a culture-study and as a means of interesting those peculiarly attracted to and adapted for the life of farming or the work of specialists in lines related to agriculture. All will agree, also, that the school in the rural community should have some instruction in mechanics because of its general educational and its vocational value in farming, and because it may enable those youth with pronounced mechanical instincts to find and develop their peculiar talents. And all will agree that the girls in all public primary and secondary schools in country and city should study home economics. The expense of developing strong agricultural courses in city public schools is prohibitive, because even with state and federal aid few cities would be able to support courses for all the vocations in their own districts. Agricultural secondary schools, consolidated rural schools, and the small district rural schools, for a similar reason, cannot offer courses in mechanic arts, com- mercial business, and other city vocations. Large highly differentiated schools covering all fields might be devised, but they would not be near the people where the pupils can sleep in their parents' homes. For those who cannot secure in their home schools vocational training along the lines they desire, special vocational schools are necessary. For the non-agricultural industries these schools may best be located in large centers of population, so far as practicable, in the atmosphere of the voca- tion for which preparation is sought, and near the homes of a large portion of the pupils, each choosing that school which best meets his needs. For the agricultural industries these vocational schools should be in the country, preferably near a town or city. Those experienced in agricultural secondary schools designed mainly for young men and young women who are to remain Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS 17 on the farm, or are to change from city to country life, are unanimous in the belief, so far as I know, that these schools will not succeed so well as annexes to city schools as when separate and on large farms. As the school of art, theology, literature, or science needs an environment, an atmosphere of its own, made possible by a strong special group of teachers and students in a large institution, or in a separate institution, so the finishing industrial voca- tional school secures advantages from being distinctive as a separate school or as a strong unit in a large school. Weak industrial departments in schools mainly devoted to non-industrial subjects are being developed pedagogically, and as the industries become better organized so as to increase the amount and regularity of employment, these industrial departments will oftener than now succeed, whatever the school environment. But it will always be true that the schools highly developed for special work in agriculture, in the mechanic industries, arts, and trades, and in home economics, will establish the highest standards in education in these respective lines. The trend seems strongly to the development of large secondary mechanic-arts schools and large secondary agricultural schools as parts of our public-school system, and to include home economics in both. There are, however, none so narrow as to limit instruction in these practical lines to these large special secondary schools. The industrial studies are finding more and more room in the aca- demic public secondary schools in cities; and especially in the secondary schools of villages, towns, and cities not large enough to support separate technical schools. Even short trades courses are finding favor in the public schools of some smaller towns where there is need for expert tradesmen in specific industries, as well as in large centers of population. And even the primary schools of our cities are giving more and more attention to mechanical and home-making vocational work. A most powerful movement has set in to place agriculture and home economics in our rural schools. The efforts have been fairly fruitful in devising ways of successfully installing at least the beginnings of these studies in the one-room district school. But modern conditions have decreed that the little red schoolhouse shall live in blessed memory, and that gradually the consolidated rural school shall take its place, and shall grandly combine the general and the rural vocational subjects into a broader, richer, and more useful course of study. Here is the most promising of all fields for vocational school work in relation to the productive industries and to the homes of the community. It is worthy of note that there are already established, or being established, thirty agricultural secondary public schools out of the 300 needed to place one in each group of ten of our 3,000 agricultural counties. Even more signifi- cant is the fact that 600 consolidated rural schools have taken the place of 4,000 little district schools and that two-thirds of our district rural schools seem destined eventually to give way to the consolidated rural school. It seems clear that the great bulk of all instruction in agriculture and country l8o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington home-making will be given in the consolidated rural school. The agricultural secondary school will set standards for the consolidated rural school and provide its teachers, and the graduates returning will make possible its excellence. The colleges of agriculture, the state experiment station, and the federal and state departments of agriculture will each serve most important purposes; but they will do their largest work thru the consolidated rural school. In this neighborhood school two-thirds of the farm boys and girls will combine school-going and apprenticeship education on the home farm. In the districts too sparsely settled or too isolated to consolidate their schools, the other one-third of our rural youth will have teachers who have been trained in the consolidated rural schools, in the agricultural secondary schools, and in the state normal schools equipped to prepare teachers to instruct in farming and home-making. AN ARTICULATED SCHOOL SYSTEM The United States has a system of articulated schools for non-agricultural communities well organized. The primary eight-grade schools, including simple forms of instruction in manual training and home economics, are now well defined in most states. The secondary four-year courses in academic studies, often with electives in technical and industrial lines, in technological subjects, trades, business and home economics, and the shorter vocational courses, as in trades, business, and home economics, are also being definitely organized. The same is true of the collegiate schools offering academic courses, often with many elective subjects leading toward vocations; pro- fessional courses, as law, medicine, and pedagogy; science courses, as chemistry and physics, and engineering courses, as electrical and mechanical. For agricultural communities the one-room rural district school with six to eight grades, including wherever practicable some agriculture and home economics, is the well-defined type; and no doubt it will remain in one-third of our agricultural area. The consolidated rural school with eight primary grades and two secondary-school grades, including instruction in agriculture and home economics, is coming forward as a type of local school for all of our more productive agricultural areas. In some cases this school is combined with the village school, but in most cases it is in the open country with only farm patrons. Estimates place the number of strictly rural consolidated schools, each covering an area approximately five miles square, at six hundred. This type of school is far more advanced in type, in numbers, and in the firm hold it has taken on the rural community, than is realized by any but the few who have especially studied this class of schools. Mr. George W. Knorr, after visiting two hundred consolidated rural schools, estimates that more than 99 per cent, of their farmer patrons have become ardent supporters of consoli- dation. The farmers who try this form of school are as unanimously in favor Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS i*, of it as those who adopted the grain reaper or the sewing machine upon first trial were in favor of those implements. The secondary agricultural school with the third and fourth high-school grades or years is coming forward to supplement the two high-school years of the consolidated rural or village school, and the little unconsolidated school with four-year secondary courses in agricultiu-e and home economics. Every person, so far as I know, who has really absorbed the plan and spirit of agricultural secondary schools as developed in this country, and especially those who have followed the farm boys and girls thru these schools back to the home farm or into the college of agriculture, is exceedingly optimistic concerning the future relation of this class of schools to our country life. The college of agriculture thru half a century of struggle has gained an honorable place among collegiate institutions, and these institutions abready form a crown to that branch of our system of articulated schools which is related to our country life. Buttressed by the research work of state agricul- tural experiment stations and departments of agriculture, the improvement of the quality of work in these institutions is going forward rapidly, and the multiplication of agricultural research and educational institutions is greatly increasing the demand for their graduates. There is keenly felt in our agricultural education a need of such an articula- tion between the schools relating to agriculture and to country life as exists between all our schools and the colleges devoted to the non-agricultural pro- fessions. The farm youth has no continuous school ladder in the line of his early training, and few are encouraged to go on to our poorly filled collegiate agricultural courses. Some secondary schools are needed which along with a broad training lead farm boys forward to leadership in technical agriculture as well as into other vocations. But what is still more needed is broad second- ary courses which articulate at both ends with the farm; which attract those farm youths who are to remain on the farm and specifically prepare them for their work. Those who fear that providing special schools which would graduate annu- ally 20,000 to 30,000 farm boys and girls in secondary agricultural schools would divide our school system into two systems need only to use arithmetic to discover how small a part these are of the three millions who annually close their school careers. The problem will still remain of reaching the several million pupils from rural homes. The establishment of several hundred strong secondary schools of agriculture, and of mechanic arts, as well as the intro- duction of agriculture, mechanic arts, and home economics into our public normal schools, will make possible the introduction of these subjects into all our schools. The opportunity which seems to offer of installing vocational education thruout our school system seems a very large interest compared with which mere local interests are of very minor weight. Those interested i82 < NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION LWashington in our youth will be able to make our schools even more American than they now are if the American industries have a larger recognition in all classes of our public schools. The connection of our collegiate, secondary, and elementary schools which deal with country life, with our state experiment stations, with the United States Department of Agriculture, and with other institutions which discover new truths, creates new values as by breeding plants and animals, and helps devise new pedagogical methods in technical studies, on the one hand; and their con- nection, on the other hand, with th-e practical management of our farms and farm homes, is of far greater significance than any relations between city and country life schools, important as they may be. The unity with the home education during school life and with the after-graduation life-education is the matter of larger concern. The few finding it well to do so can easily shift from non-agricultural to agricultural courses, or the converse, with far less loss to society than will occur from having the schools lead many into fields other than those into which the pupils are to go. The schools which today are dwarfed, as compared with the functions they have to perform, are those secondary schools or ''people's colleges" which lead to the industrial vocations where large numbers are to be accommodated. It should clearly be recognized that the types of primary, secondary, collegiate, and graduate schools to make a well-formed American educational system are all present, and that the weakness of the system is quantitative. The secondary academic schools leading to the collegiate and graduate pro- fessional and so-called higher technical vocations are not outgrown; the schools leading to the productive industries are simply undeveloped. To articulate with the farm, the shop, and the home in a broader and more unified way the vocational studies must be magnified. While all our schools need strengthening, placing equal stress on building up all classes of schools on their present status would retain the present unequal development. The need of the hour is to build up the industrial vocational courses in our system of secondary schools. Some conservative persons have wrongly defined the vocational school as an institution in which industrial subjects displace the accepted academic studies. The fact is that most of these courses are approximately one-third academic or literary, one-third scientific, and one-third vocational. Prac- tically, the foreign languages and a small part of the other general studies give way to book, laboratory, and shop or outdoor studies related to the basic industries of the community or to home-making. In two ways these courses are broader than the general academic course. The student can accomplish more when part of his work is with things, and his book work is brighter and means more to him. His other studies have a clearer setting, a keener interest, and wider co-ordinations. The more practical school leads to a broader view of life, better fitting the youth to choose a calling. It at once prevents Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS ig the dreamy student from becoming bookish and holds the too practical student longer on his book tasks. One prominent educator has expressed fear that to supplement our school system with secondary schools highly equipped for training in farming and farm home-making would peasantize our farmers. Suppose the great state of Iowa had lo of these schools with a total of 5,000 students, and should graduate annually 1,000; suppose further that 400 of these graduates would become teachers of agriculture and home economics in consolidated farm and village schools, eventually for the most part becoming farmers or farmers' wives; 400 return to the farm direct; 100 go forward to the agricultural college, and 100 into non-agricultural vocations. How less than one trained farmer per township would peasantize the farmers of a state is not made clear. It may be supposed that the author of that statement conceived the idea that the oncoming consolidated rural school and the agricultural secondary school would be narrowly agricultural. Those who are experienced in developing secondary courses in both of these classes of schools for the vigorous American farm boy and girl realize that the course of study is broadened by adding to nearly all the academic work ordinarily given in high schools strong, inspiring, practical subjects relat- ing to the farm and the farm home. Since the mind is here developed along lines in which it is to have food for thought thruout life, the education is truly started for the whole lifetime. How so changing our courses of study in the rural schools that the youth not only receives vocational training but remains longer in school and secures more of the traditional education as well, will peasantize farmers, has not been shown. It certainly is not based upon intimate knowledge of the actual effects of typical schools now in operation. That education can un-American ize or peasantize, is truly a novel proposition. Money can never secure the land from farmers highly trained to succeed in and to appreciate the management of farms and farm homes. Strong schools combining general and vocational education are the nation's great safeguard against peasantizing the people. Educated people rule. Our fathers installed Americanism on this rich continent, and thru a broad and efficient educational system the kings of finance are to be kept under the rulership of tlie people. Newly centralized commercial powers require newly organized power of the people. The productive unit — the man — must be increased in economic, social, and political power, and this requires general and vocational education. The same author objects to building up schools especially devoted to country life, fearing that the village and city schools will be seriously injured by withdrawing from them the vigorous farm boys and girls who now attend there. Another writer insists that our republicanism depends upon educating all classes together in one set of schools. The experience of 600 consolidated rural schools has shown their 10,000 farm patrons that this and many other 1 84 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington objections to country life educational institutions are fallacious. In so far as experiments have gone in the mapping of counties to consolidate our rural schools, the tendency has been for more rather than less pupils to be conveyed into the schools of villages and smaller town centers. The method of dividing the districts so as to carry more to the village school, thus helping to build it up, or to carry more to the consolidated farm school more or less distant from the village so as better to insure a rural atmosphere, is a subject as yet open for investigation. Where there is a village as well as a rural community to be served, probably combining the village school and the school for the rural pupils on a school farm beside, the village will oftenest best serve the largest number. But the farm school out in the country, and the agricultural secondary school, where the farm boy or girl at the age of seventeen to twenty boards for two or more winters, will give a vastly broader point of view, a wider acquaintanceship, and a stronger social status as well as a better preparation for the management of the farm and the farm home than is possible under the alternative plan of a little agriculture in a general course of study or of a little agriculture and home economics in existing schools. Allowing agricultural education just to grow, or trying the impossible task of securing state money to introduce agriculture into existing secondary schools, nearly all of which are in cities, is apparently a very poor alternative. Let that education for rural youth grow as it will, but let us give specific direc- tion to federal and state money into vocational schools to set standards for and impetus to a more practical education in all schools. All know that local tax measures of the state or city will do well to yield sufi&cient revenues for the academic studies. Federal and state money, limited to the studies deemed too expensive by the local community, will result in a co-operation between state and locality which will provide schools including both general and vocational education. The proposition in the Industrial School Bill now before the Sixtieth Congress has rapidly grown into wide favor. Many national and state organi- zations of farmers, of labor leaders, of educators, and of manufacturers have generally either indorsed this bill or have taken such action that their executive boards may properly favor this measure in practically its present form. Con- gressman Davis says that many members of the House of Representatives and Senate express the desire to help enact it into a law. It equitably dis- tributes money raised by general taxation, giving its share to every district in the land. It is generally agreed that the worst fault of our schools is that they discriminate against the productive industries and home- making; and correcting such a general local mistake is clearly a federal function. Those who earlier feared that national appropriations would tend to cen- tralization realize that taxes raised by the federal government and turned over to the localities with which to build up state institutions accumulate the strength in the state and actually decentralize government. The results SuperintendenccJ AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS i«5 from federal appropriations for state colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts and the state agricultural experiment stations absolutely dissipate that fear. Those who feared that the present Secondary Industrial Education Bill was the forerunner to revive the movement centered years ago in the so-called ''Blair Bill," which designed to put the federal treasury behind our public-school system, acknowledge that this bill adds no new principle of law to that in the Morrill Act of 1862, confining the expenditure as it does to industrial education even more rigidly than does that act. INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN THE FIFTY-NINTH CONGRESS The Fifty-ninth Congress passed the Adams Act, adding $15,000 to the similar annual appropriation to each state experiment station; and made into law the Nelson Amendment giving to each state college of agriculture and mechanic arts $25,000 more annually. It also liberally increased the research and educational funds of the United States Department of Agriculture. But of equal or greater significance is the fact that at this session were intro- duced bills to extend federal appropriations to secondary education in agri- culture and the mechanic arts. Following the meteor-like financing by private subscription which gave $800,000 to equip eleven agricultural secondary schools in Georgia, two bills were introduced along this line by members of Congress from that state. One would give $10,000 to each agricultural secondary school established in a congressional district; the other would provide a fund for a branch experiment station at each of such schools. These were followed by a bill embodying not only these two ideas, but also including funds for mechanic-arts secondary schools in all our cities. A bill to enable state normal schools to prepare teachers to teach industrial work was also introduced. It is stated of this new bill that it simply carries out the intention of the Congress of 1862 which inaugurated education for the industries by providing for a college of agriculture and the mechanic arts in each state. It seems clear that Congress looked upon all education above the primary school as collegiate education; advanced schools not then having been differentiated into secondary and collegiate institutions. Congress had no means of con- ceiving the magnitude of the undertaking, nor of the resources the present and future decades can afford to devote to this vocational education; and at that time there were only vague dreams of our great Department of Agri- culture or of state experiment stations. Briefly stated, the terms of the proposed bill provide that Congress shall appropriate annually to each state ten cents per capita for secondary industrial education. Of this sum each city with more than 2,000 inhabitants shall receive its per-capita share, the only limitation being that this money shall be used for studies in mechanic arts and home economics in schools of secondary grade. To the population outside of cities of the size named the ten cents per l86 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington capita shall be used for studies in agriculture and home economics in secondary agricultural schools. In both the city secondary industrial schools and in the agricultural high schools thus established the state or locality must furnish the lands, buildings, and also current funds to provide all the necessary general studies to round out strong courses of study. The only restrictive provisions are that the federal money shall be effectively used for studies relating to agri- culture, the mechanic arts, and home economics. Since the money is not sufificient to be applied to the consolidated rural school and to the village school where rural pupils must attend while sleeping in their parents' homes, that part provided for those who expect to be farmers and farm home-makers is directed to be used in agricultural secondary schools of rather large size. This insures that excellence of equipment and teaching force which will justify the nearly mature farm youth in expending time and money to attend. The bill further provides that Congress shall appropriate one-fourth the sum received by each agricultural high school for a branch agricultural experi- ment station to be located at these institutions and requires the state to appro- priate an equal sum for these stations. This branch station fund will aid the practical teachers to understand fully the soils, crops, and live stock, and the plan of farm management suited to the respective districts. It will provide means with which to co-operate both with the state experiment station and with the United States Department of Agriculture in breeding, testing, and distributing new varieties of field, orchard, and garden crops; in improving the breeds of animals; and in working out systems of farm organization, field management, soil fertilization, and crop production. The assistance these branch stations located in each agricultural district of the entire country would give to the state experiment stations and to the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture in enabling them better to do the work of creative breeding, testing, and distributing varieties of plants will, by increasing the values of our crops alone, more than pay the entire sum annually provided by this bill for practical education in city and country. As a federal measure the ten-county district plan is far more conservative than the plan of establishing one agricultural secondary school and branch agricultural experiment station in each county. To provide one well- equipped school in each county would cost several times as much as to equip one in each ten counties. And even yet more expensive would be the plan of using federal money to place agriculture in existing consolidated rural, town- ship, and village schools and in secondary city schools where rural pupils attend. Our rural township and consolidated schools are developing secondary courses. To pay out of the federal treasury for secondary agricultural studies in these schools would mean undertaking to place this instruction where all the pupils could secure it, while yet sleeping at home. The cost would be several times the cost under the plan proposed, and those who, in opposition to the pending bill, propose that alternative surely have not considered the cost to the federal treasury. The more conservati/e plan is to use federal Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS Tg money only to produce leaders and teachers for the proposed larger secondary schools and thus to prepare the state and the locality to meet the local expendi- ture and to manage their home problems. The ten-county plan provides branch agricultural experiment stations of a size which have proven stable and efficient. Districts of this size provide the needed permanently equipped experiment farm on which the state experiment stations and the federal Department of Agriculture can carry on such long- time and careful work as improving the crops and animals of the respective states by breeding, and comparing systems of crop rotation, soil fertilization, and farm management. The consolidated rural school and especially the village school, in which the farm boys and girls begin their courses of vocational training, need the large finely equipped agricultural high school where the secondary vocational course relating to country life can be completed, where both instruction and inspiration will be given. The branch experiment station will articulate with the ten-acre farm of the consolidated rural or village school, and many of the seeds and plants and many of the new ways of doing things developed by departments of agriculture and by experiment stations can be carried by the branch station to the rural school farm and from there thru the pupils to all the farms of the country to which they are respectively adapted. This new educational bill, under a plan of restricting the use of federal funds to industrial studies, proposes to broaden, round out, complete and make more effective our entire educational system, alike for city and for country. It will do wonders for our farm boys and girls, for our city youth of all classes, and will start our colored race on a new era of industrial interest, enlightenment and efficiency. Instead of breaking up the unity of our system, it brings about unity by unifying school education with education outside the school. This measure was written in the light of the lessons learned from the administration of the land-grant or state college and the state experiment station acts. Following such noteworthy examples as the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska agricultural high schools and branch experiment station organiza- tions, 300 of these institutions would accommodate 100,000 farm boys and girls, most of whom are not seeking an avenue off the farm. Probably 20,000 would graduate annually, the majority returning to take leading places in their farm communities, a large proportion entering upon teaching as in the consolidated farm schools, in village schools, in normal schools, and in the small district rural schools, and probably 10 per cent, going to the agricultural college. Following such splendid examples as the St. Louis, St. Paul, and Washing- ton mechanic arts secondary schools, hundreds of non-agricultural secondary schools will accommodate hundreds of thousands of city youth who wish to pursue courses in mechanic arts, industries, and trades, and girls who wish to have technical training along home-making lines. Tens of thousands will NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington annually graduate and be prepared rapidly to gain high eflficiency in the expert trades or in the keeping of homes. Not a few will proceed to the engineering or other technical colleges and the graduates of these schools will eventually grow into leadership of many of our manufacturing and transportation indus- trial enterprises. But the great majority will take the well-paid places requir- ing masterful artisans, now too often taken from American youth by highly skilled foreigners. These schools, instead of being places to turn out cheap tradesmen, will supply men who, having joined scientific information, school- shop experience, and actual service in their chosen trades, will set new standards for our expert trades. Under public management, they will treat fairly both the man who has labor to sell and the man who is seeking to employ labor. They will tend to increase wages in these lines; and they will tend to increase the output from labor and to increase the remuneration both of the laborer and the capitalist. Many of the women graduates will splendidly build up the home-economics instruction in all schools where girls attend, from primary to collegiate, insuring that the housewives and mothers of our land be expert in their work. The improvement which will come thru instruction in home economics in the agricultural high schools and in the mechanic arts high schools will repay all the cost to the federal, state, and local governments required under the provisions of this bill. Probably the most important feature of the new educational plan in our public-school system is the extension of the school life into the youth's work period: the dovetailing of the school attendance into the entrance upon active life. The youth in the secondary course in the consolidated rural school or in the agricultural secondary school devotes alternate six-month periods to school and to the work of the farm. And during the six months out of school the work is made educational by the co-operation of teacher and parents. Likewise, some manufacturing concerns co-operate with the schools, and give the students apprenticeship training one part of the year, taking another group at another season, or the years of work at school and in the apprentice shop are alternated, or even the months or the weeks in school and in the shop are alternated. In some cases the boy's day is divided between the school and the apprenticeship shop. The evening continuation-school for those who must work the whole day is still another form of joining school arid practical life. General plans need to be wrought out, that the pupil may change from school to real life in a natural way, not easily nor yet too abruptly, nor in a way too strenuous for the development of full physical and mental health. An arithmetical statement of a completed system of country life educa- tional institutions for a state like Iowa, which is nearly all agricultural, will aid in an understanding of the new movement to give to those who are to farm an education at once broad and vocational. Iowa has one agricultural college in the central one of its ninety-nine counties. An agricultural high school in each group of ten counties would provide ten of these schools. Consolidating the Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS ig 130 rural schools and the half-dozen village schools of each county into 20 consolidated rural schools and 6 schools in which the farm and village schools are combined would provide a total for the state of practically 2,000 consolidated farm schools and 600 village, town, and city schools to which rural pupils are hauled by teams. We have thus one agricultural college, 10 agricultural high schools at which the pupils must board, and 2,000 con- solidated farm schools. It may be assumed that some pupils will go from the village and city schools to the agricultural high school, but that more will go from the farm to the city, general, and special secondary schools, and that for the present purpose the village and city schools may be left out of the general figures. It may be further assumed that each consolidated rural school will have 130 pupils, 20 of whom are in the high-school course, for the most part in the first and second high-school years, and no pupils in eight primary grades. A normal proportion of students in the three classes of institutions would then seem to be about as follows: Primary students in 2,000 consolidated rural schools, 220,000; secondary-school students in these 2,000 consolidated rural schools, 40,000; secondary-school students in 10 agricultural high schools, 4,000; and agricultural collegiate students in the agricultural college, 400. No doubt many would go from the largest consolidated rural schools directly to the state normal school, while others would attend the agricultural high school before attending the normal, thus better to prepare to teach in the consolidated rural school. Similar figures might be used to show the relation of the city secondary schools articulating with the engineering and other courses in the State University at Iowa City, and in the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, at Ames; also of the agriculture, manual-training, and home economics in the village, town, city, and agricultural schools, to the State Normal School at Cedar Falls. The bill now before Congress is open to defeat or to improvement and passage. Broadly speaking, it proposes to change our expenditure from say $4 per capita to $4.10 per capita; and to provide that this added 2^ per cent, of our school expenditure shall be placed under a plan where it can be used only for training in agriculture, in mechanical industries, and in home-making. We all know that this is the side of our educational machinery which has not kept pace with our needs. Some may be willing to take the responsibility of opposing this plan now so auspiciously started, or to load it with other propositions good in themselves but handicaps to the main proposition. It is of interest to this assemblage of school officials to state that those officials of state normal schools and of state departments of public instruction who are promoting a federal appropriation for normal schools and those interested in securing federal support to secondary industrial education have each recognized that the two measures represent a single movement and that they should be combined. Already steps are under way to frame a bill around which all can unite in a common movement to put industrial education into IQO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington our public-school system, wherever and in whatever form local conditions may require. In the secondary schools the studies relating to the industries will be mainly directed toward the preparation of pupils for those agricultural, mechanical, and home-making vocations into which most of them will enter; but in a less direct way these studies will be used to prepare teachers for these subjects. The normal schools, on the other hand, will use the proposed federal funds mainly to prepare teachers in agriculture, manual training, and home economics; but incidentally will add materially to the sum of vocational training, as many of their students will at most teach only temporarily. The greatest object of education is the uplift of the whole people, the greatest good to the greatest number. But this must be done in large part by the development of leaders. Leaders must not be alone leaders of religion, literature, art, and science. There must be leaders of the community, of the everyday life, of the common work, and of home-making and social intercourse. Our existing schools are rapidly developing along many of these lines. For our industrial communities, secondary schools are needed which will produce many leaders broadly trained to be at once economic and moral leaders and leaders in social and home-making lines. The agricultural high school, with its fidelity to the truths of nature's science, its power-giving along economic and home-making lines, its uplift thru noble school officials, its opportuni- ties for experience in social life and in working in public meetings and in students' co-operative organizations, and with its strong voluntary religious work in Young Men's Christian Associations, and Young Women's Chris- tian Associations, and with its after-hold on its graduates, is a unique and most powerful institution for the production of country-life leaders. The city high school, with studies related to the industries and to home-making, and the separate industrial secondary school, also, have great potentialities in the preparation of all-round leaders in the industrial communities of our non-agricultural workers. This enlarged expenditure for teaching the children of our native and recently arrived Americans how to make better homes and to increase their production of commodities has the broadest possible national significance. We are in world competition with nations able and willing to make commodi- ties at lower units of labor charge than we. We must either increase the efficiency of our labor units or be willing to sell them at lower wage prices. America has charge of the world's highest standards of wage and of living. Industrial education has a very large place beside a reasonable tariff in keeping America's dinner pail full. Let us adjust our differences, if indeed we have any, and unite on this broad plan to turn the face of our schools from its too exclu- sive attention to the splendid traditional studies, and let it shine upon those who work with their hands as it now shines upon the so-called learned pro- fessions. Let us try to please all except those who fear to add to the education of the boy and girl studies along the lines of the industrial work in which most of them must earn their bread and purify their hearts by the isweat of tb«ir brows. SuperintendenceJ AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS 1 DISCUSSION E. T. Fairchild, state superintendent of public instruction, Topeka, Kan.— To prove all things and hold fast to that which is good is the educational spirit of the hour. Custom and tradition are no longer terms to conjure with in determining the curriculum. In endeavoring to solve the problem what knowledge and what training is of most worth new tests are being applied. The passive interest of the abstract is being supple- mented with the active interest of the concrete. The strong presentment of the neces- sity and value of the study of agriculture and home economics in the pubUc schools, which we have just heard, is in complete accord with the general movement to recognize the other 98 per cent, in our public schools. It is not so much a question of what, as of how, and when. With more than half of our people engaged in agriculture and home-making, the public has every right to demand that the schools shall train the pupils with a training that shall adapt them to their environ- ment. When we reflect that many states have a rural population of 70 per cent, or more, the need of an industrial training becomes all the more apparent. The question whether agriculture shall be taught in special schools, such as are contemplated in the Davis bill and such as are in operation in at least three of our states, or whether it shall be attempted in all of our high schools, is a highly important one. While I fully recognize the importance of the measure advocated by Dr. Davis and realize the great impulse such a law would give to agricultural instruction, I cannot but feel that it would be much better if assistance could reach all high schools where agriculture and home economics are taught. In my own state, Kansas, the Agricultural College is a separate institution and articu- lates closely with the rural school. With a population of 1,650,000 we should have but comparatively few schools reaping the benefit of national aid. If pupils are obliged to leave home it would seem that they might with greater profit attend our large and splen- didly equipped Agricultural College. I confess to a great deal of sympathy with the argument advanced by Professor Davenport in his address on "The Place of Agriculture in Our American School." Instead of special schools for a special class, let us have strong schools with a sufficient number of courses to meet the varying needs of -the student- body. Breadth of view, a wider outlook, and a closer understanding and sympathy with the life-work of others will follow. The consolidated school will afford much opportunity for instruction in certain phases of agriculture, which may easily serve as an incentive to take a more extended course in the high school. In our state we have a class of high schools that are peculiarly adapted to the intro- duction of courses in agriculture and home economics. Under what is known as the Barnes law, a favorable vote by any county places all high schools therein, maintaining a four-year course, and preparing fully for the university, in a position where they may be supported wholly by the county at large. At the last general election forty-three of the one hundred and five counties took advantage of this act and today more than eighty high schools are being supported by their respective counties, and forty more high schools are establishing conditions that will render them eligible to like benefits another year. As an equivalent for such county aid, tuition is free to all pupils in the county. In addi- tion to these schools some twenty counties have elaborately equipped county high schools, supported by the county. Both classes of schools are largely supported by the farmers, and it seems peculiariy fitting that agriculture and home economics should be taught therein.- It is pleasing to be able to state that excellent courses in these subjects are being offered in several of these schools, and that they are entirely satisfactory to the farmers themselves. I have said that it is no longer a question of what we shall teach in the high school. This question has gone beyond the stage of debate. The people whose school it is have demanded that the industrial and vocational shall be recognized, and shall have a place 192 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington in the curriculum. The next step is to see that agricuhure and home economics have the same place of importance and availability in the high school that they have in the college, Lorenzo D. Harvey, superintendent of Stout Manual-Training Schools, Menomo- nie. Wis. — In the little I may have to say in the present discussion of the general topic "The Place of Industries in Public Education," I wish first to express my appreciation of the forcible presentation of the subject of agricultural industries and home economics in pub- lic schools to which we have just listened. It has presented in a masterful way the argu- ments for the extension of educational facilities for industrial education. It has shown the possibilities thru the development of the idea of consolidating rural schools and the broadening of their curricula so as to embrace those studies of vital interest to the country boy and girl; and it has outlined an articulated system leading from the home of the child living in the country to the college, while at the same time presenting a course of instruction admirably fitting the child for the active duties of life within his environment. I must confess that I am not as optimistic as the writer of the paper, concerning the early and general development of the consolidated farm school. The consolidation of rural schools is not a new idea. The six hundred of them now in existence do not present a large showing for more than twenty years of agitation, but their more rapid increase in later years indicates that in the coming years they will increase in number very much more rapidly than in the past. In many states practically nothing has as yet been accom- plished. The present systems of school organizations in many of these states make consolidation extremely difficult, while the conservatism of the rural population where any increased expenditure of money is concerned acts as a further deterrent. Of the six hundred schools now in existence probably not one realizes the ideal which the author of the paper has in mind. It will be many years before that ideal vdll be realized in a large number of schools. I am not arguing against it. I am simply stating what I believe to be a fact, for the purpose of emphasizing the idea that not only the plan proposed but all other means of efifort looking toward the development of a better system of instruction in rural communities should be utilized to the fullest extent. The purpose of the Davis Bill, as outlined, is one which must commend itself to all. I trust it may be so modified that, if it become a law, it shall not operate to fix a single type of secondary agricultural schools for all communities, especially as to area of the district which such a school shall serve. I hope the bill may be so modified as to leave to each particular state the distribution of the money appropriated to that state for second- ary agricultural schools to such schools as shall furnish proper faciUties to a reasonable number of students without regard to the area of the district served. Upon the general topic, "The Place of Industries in Public Education," I wish to say that while I recognize the importance upon social and economic groimds of the estab- lishment of special vocational schools, I think the problem of industrial education is a much larger one than this. I believe all will agree that with a proper organization of the elementary and secondary school work, the longer pupils can be induced to remain in these schools before entering upon a vocation, the better for them^ for society, and for the state. I should regret to see distinct vocational schools established in such numbers and with the vocational side so emphasized as to present an inducement for children to leave the public schools earlier than they now do, or earlier than is necessary. We hear much of the different types of vocational schools in other countries and especially in Germany. We have much to learn from these countries in the organization of these schools in the United States, but I hope the time will never come in this country when the falling off in attendance of pupils in the public schools shall equal that of Germany as these pupils pass from their thirteenth to their fourteenth year. Up to the thirteenth year practi- cally the entire school population of Germany is to be found in the public schools. In Superintendence] AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS ___^ ^^^ y«3 the fourteenth 'year the number has dropped in many citie? of that country to less than ro per cent, of the children of that age. If in school at all, they are in the continuation or trade schools. In this country manufacturers do not want apprentices at fourteen years of age, and at that age they are not sufficiently mature to do the best kind of work in the preparation for a vocation. In our larger cities it is unquestionably true that many children are of necessity compelled to leave school at an early age, and that the continuation school or the trade school must be provided to meet their needs. The report of the Massachusetts commission shows that a very large percentage of the children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen in the public schools have not with- drawn from them because of necessity, but because they were not interested in the work which was ofiFered them, or because their parents did not see in it anything which appealed to them as of value in increasing the industrial efficiency of their children. I believe it is entirely feasible to modify our elementary and secondary courses of instruction in our public schools by the introduction of handwork, so that the work offered will appeal, on the industrial side, to these children and to their parents. It is argued in some quarters that manual training is in no sense a preparation for industrial efficiency; that its purposes are cultural rather than vocational. I should rather put it that its purposes are both cultural and vocational, and that the work should be SQ organized as to serve both purposes. It is not a question of what has been or is being done in the way of manual training in this or that public-school system. It is a question of what can be done and what purpose it may be made to serve. In the acquiring of any trade, I care not what it may be, there are two distinct stages. During the first stage the learner is concerned with finding out the what of each particular process which must be mastered, the how in performing, coupled with the performance of the process under the guidance and control of the attentive mind. During the second stage the learner is occupied in developing skill in the accurate and rapid performance of each particular process and in the correlation of these processes to meet the demands of the shop in which, he may be employed. This skill is developed through the repeti- tion of that which at the beginning of this stage he could perform reasonably well when done slowly and with the closest attention to every detail of the doing, continued until the process is performed accurately and rapidly with little mental effort beyond that involved in initiating the motor activity demanded by the process. In the statement of the scope and character of work demanded in the first stage, it should be observed that there are three steps in the mastery of any one process: first, the determination of what is to be done; second, the determination of how it is to be done; third, the doing for the accomplishment of the what thru the appUcation of the how. It must be observed further that the necessary knowledge of the how requisite for the proper performance of the process may not be acquired in advance of any effort in doing, but the learner must have in mind how he proposes to perform any act he regards as necessary in the process before he begins the action. The result of the action may show him that the manner in which he attempted the doing was wrong and that he must revise his conception of the how. But always the knowledge of a how must precede the doing; the doing modifies the how; this modification reacts upon the doing until the proper standard of correctness is reached. The first stage is one thru which every learner must pass in the mastery of a trade before he can property enter upon the second stage, during which skill in processes and their use is to be developed, no matter whether the trade is learned in the shop, in the school, or in both school and shop. This is not the time to discuss the educational principles which determine the place, scope, and character of manual training in the elementary and secondary courses of study for training purposes other than for industrial efficiency. But I venture the asser- tion that the three steps which characterize the first stage in the mastery of a trade must 194 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION f Washington also characterize every phase of work in a manual-training course which requires an intelligent use of tools and materials in constructive processes, in accordance with sound educational principles. Therefore, it follows that the first stage in the mastery of trade processes, in its rudimentary form at least, is fovmd in all manual-training courses based on sound educational principles and adequate in scope, and that, with proper equipment and competent teaching force, manual training may be extended so as to apply the work of this stage to a considerable number of trades. The second stage may be completed in the shop, in the trade school, or in both. Manual training in its earlier stages must of necessity be carried on without direct reference or relation to the development of skill in any particular vocation. The train- ing which it gives in close observation of an object to be produced from any given material or as the result of effort in the construction of that object, or determination of wherein the effort has failed and what must be done thru further effort to remedy the failure, the training of the hand to execute mental judgments, furnish a preliminary preparation of high value as a basis for intelligent workmanship which employs the hands later on. In the later development of manual training it may be so organized as to bear a very definite relation to certain processes largely employed in the industrial world, and at the same time to secure the kind of mental training needed for the proper development of the individual. In a general way it may be said that the following things are essential for industrial efficiency in the workman: 1. Habits of close observation. 2. A high ideal as to what constitutes honesty in workmanship. 3. Habits of accuracy in work. 4. Comprehension of what is good in design as related to use in connection with the work in hand. 5. Knowledge of materials best adapted to different forms and types of construction. 6. Knowledge of construction processes in the treatment of materials. 7. Skill in the care of tools and in their use in industrial processes, and skill in using machinery. 8. Skill in freehand and mechanical drawing. The foregoing statements are general, but specific applications may be made of them so far as they apply to any particular industrial process or trade. The practical problem for any community in organizing work in manual training in the public schools so that it may bear the most direct and immediate relation to the indus- trial efficiency of the boys on leaving school is to consider, first, the manufacturing indus- tries of the community where skill in operation is required and which are likely to furnish employment for the boys upon their leaving school; and then to determine the kind of training thru which the boys will make the greatest progress toward skill in the special industry or industries. In case there are no manufacturing industries in the community in which the school is located, and it is still desired to give training which counts most largely for industrial efficiency within the particular trades or skilled industries which are likely to prove most attractive to the boys of the commimity, those trades or industries are to be considered. With the incorporation of a properly organized manual-training course as a part of the work in the public schools, greater inducements to pupils to remain in school will be presented than exist under present conditions; and as a result pupils will remain in school longer, will get a broader training, and in acquiring every one of the eight requisites I have enumerated as essential for industrial efficiency in the workman they will have made some progress, and in all subjects except those in which skill in the use of machinery is considered they will have made very decided advancement. Superintendence] WRLLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 195 NURTURE AND PROTECTION OF PHYSICAL WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS I. HOW CAN THE SCHOOL MAKE CONTRIBUTION OF PERMANENT VALUE TO PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT? LUTHER H. GULICK, DIRECTOR OF PHYSICAL TRAINING PUBLIC SCHOOLS, NEW YORK CITY During the past century and to an ever-increasing degree within the past quarter-century the school has had thrust upon it a fundamental, new problem and a new responsibility: fundamental, because education is not worth while if it is secured at the sacrifice of health; new, because only recently has edu- cation come to dominate the great bulk of the child's waking time. If the permanent result of these new conditions is not to be the uprearing of a genera- tion of physically undesirable citizens, the school must see to it that the health interests of the pupils are as energetically and as efi&ciently looked after as are any other parts of the school work. This involves the creation in each school system of a department of school hygiene or some other organi- zation for the adequate care of this set of needs. Among the reasons for the organizing of a Department of School Hygiene within each department of education the following may be stated as a funda- mental principle: The great increase in the length oj the school year and the changes in the character oj the child's physical environment make attention to physical health necessary now as it has never been before. The schools do not differ from other institutions of Ihe time in having undergone profound changes during the past century. One hundred years ago, 5 per cent, of the people of the United States lived in cities of 8,000, or over, population; now 36 per cent, of the people live in such cities. Then, few children had more than three months' schooling per year; now, city chil- dren have ten months' schooling per year. Then, the recesses were out of doors; now, only a limited number of city schools have space in which the children can take such outdoor games that were possible in the old school yard. Then, practically all the pupils had to walk considerable distances to and from school; now, city children have to walk a few blocks only. Then, there was a large variety of outdoor niuscular work for the children to do on the farm— aiding in doing the chores, milking the cows, getting the horses, caring for the poultry, tending the garden; now, the bulk of the work is done by machinery. It is no longer possible for a large percentage of the city children to do their needful muscular work by helping their parents. Then, in the schools there were taught chiefly the three R's; now, because of these changed conditions of daily life, it has been found necessary to introduce into the schools muscular exercises, manual training, nature-study, cooking, dressmaking and the like. Then, a considerable territory had to be drained to get enough children to make the small countrv school; now, in the thickly settled areas of cities great school buildings 196 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington are erected on nearly every block. The constant hearing of noise, the lack of quiet, the lights in the houses, and on the streets at night — these are all relatively new and evil. Then, we had children helping their parents; now, we have child-labor. All these make a profound contrast between former conditions and those which obtain now. We are told that 25 or 30 per cent, of the school children have eye deformi- ties sufficiently serious to interfere with their school progress. It is the general opinion that this condition is directly related to the unwise treatment of the eyes in school life. It has been discovered that a very considerable percentage of the children have such difficulties with the nose and throat as to interfere with proper circulation or proper respiration. A very large number of children do not have such care at home as insures their coming to school cleanly in person. The hearing of quite a number of children is below par, so that they fail to take advantage of much of the oral instruction that is given. Some of the children develop crooked backs, or scoliosis; occasional cases of chorea have been discovered. Sensational stories have been told with reference to the malnutrition of city school children. Allowing for all the exaggeration that there may be, it is undoubtedly true that there is a remarkable number of children who, because of unwise feeding or of insufficient feeding, are in a condition of vitality too low to profit by the school education. More than half of all the children in the schools have sufficiently decayed teeth to account for many of the neurotics and for a great deal of the malnutrition. From 30 to 40 per cent, of all the children in the middle grades are one, two, or three years behind their grades. This in many cases is due to some physical cause. To help remedy this situation, there needs to be a Department of School Hygiene. Attention to the physical wellbeing oj school children would result in great and immediate economy. In all of our great cities, a considerable proportion of the school children are above the normal age for the grades. According to the report of the city superintendent of schools of New York City for the year ending July 31, 1907, the number of children in the public schools above the norm.al age on June 30, 1907, was as follows: First year 9>o73 Second year i9>039 Third year 26,514 Fourth year 3o>25i Fifth year 30)813 Sixth year 22,862 Seventh year i3)S02 Eighth year 6,412 Special D 4,289 Special E 13,769 Total 176,524 It is difficult to estimate the direct money cost to the school system of these over-age pupils. Some of them are only one year over age, while many more are two, three, four, and even five years older than they should be for the grades they are in. For safety let us estimate that only 50 per cent, or 88,262 Superintendence! WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 197 such children in New York are behind their grades on account of defects which might be remedied. At the average cost of tuition last year— $30— the loss to the city amounts to $2,647,860, for each year that these children fail to make progress. A further and important consideration is that if the number of backward children was reduced by half, the necessity for part-time classes would be done away with. The Americanizing oj the large alien population involves their receiving new ideals and new habits oj life with rejerence to health and the care oj their own children. A large fraction of the children who are in our city public schools either themselves come from non-English speaking countries, or are the children of those who come from those countries. How large a proportion of the population of our great cities is made up of persons of foreign parentage is not generally realized. The facts as told in the late census in regard to some of our leading cities are as follows: POPULATION OF NATIVE AND FOREIGN PARENTAGE IN 1900 aty Per Cent. Foreign Gty Per Cent. Foreign Boston 72.2 77-4 77-4 82;8 Newark 82.8 Chicago New York St. Paul 76.9 72.6 78.1 Detroit Jersey City San Francisco Milwaukee The public schools are a primary factor in the development in these per- sons of ideals and feelings that are basal to life in this republic. The training with reference to efficient living, right ideals of health, and the care of chil- dren needs to be given to these children as it does not need to be given to the native-born American citizen, whose social heredity carries such basal information. This education can best come thru the example of a Department of School Hygiene in its care of physical health. The present state oj medical knowledge allows us to aid in educational matters in a way and to a degree never bejore possible. During the past generation medicine has been becoming scientific. Our knowledge of preventive medicine has developed almost entirely within this generation. By means of this new medical knowledge it is possible for the skillful physician to discover and remove many conditions prejudicial to health and education, which were beyond our reach a century or so ago. Boards of education should avail themselves of this new development of medical science. Problems bejore us indicate the need oj expert medical counsel. Some of the problems are as follows: Posture.— The tendency of the children to acquire bad habits of posture— malposirion of the spine, with resulting interference with circulation, respiration, and digestion, seems 198 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington to be inevitable so long as the present hours of sitting still remain. Thus, school furniture of a proper character is important. Vision. — It is not enough for us to discover the cases of ocular deformity which are occurring in the schools. What we need to know, if possible, are the exact causes of such deformities. Nose and throat. — There seems to be a great increase in the number of children having difficulties with the nose and throat. Is this due to general disability, to dust in the school rooms, to malnutrition, or to any other removable cause ? What are the best ways of handling these difficulties ? Nutrition and growth. — We believe that there are many children who fail to profit by their education because they do not have enough nutrition. Nervous diseases. — Many children have the beginnings of nervous diseases which interfere with their school life, and which are more or less serious in their subsequent mean- ing. We need to know the causes of these diversions from the normal and the best means of meeting them. Fatigue. — What are the conditions for the most efficient study on the part of the pupil, i. e., can a child do more in eight hours than in seven ? Can he do more in seven hours than in six, or the reverse ? We have no accurate information in answer to these questions, nor can such information be secured easily. It demands the most expert work and wide acquaintance with what is being done elsewhere. In the modem scientific business life the technical expert has a permanent place. The erection of the modern city structure involves a co-operation of engineering and architecture as never before. The electrical and mining work being done involves groups of experts, each connected with some special phase of the subject. The same applies to business. The general business man has vanished; his place has been taken by experts in various lines. The school boards have had thrust upon them new problems, as have business and science. The erection of school buildings has involved the work of skilled architects. The size of the timbers that will support the roof of a given span, the strength of the structure in relation to its height — these are technical questions of architecture and engineering. Questions of stress and strain of material have thus come within the pur- view of one of the subdivisions of the work of boards of education. Similarly, boards of education have been pushed into the business world in the purchasing of their supplies. The hundreds of different kinds of material used in all the grades in all of the schools, the coal for fuel, and the like, involve for their wise purchase and administration the same buying expert that is demanded for any business house. Questions as to the purchasing of coal and other commodities are not questions of psychology and pedagogy, but are questions of business. In what quantities, and what to buy, and when to have delivery made, what systems of auditing and accounting to adopt — these are technical questions and they must be met by the technical business expert. It is my opinion that the group of problems centering about the health of school children demands technical treatment of a nature similar to that required for the departments whose duties I have just sketched. If the children's eyes are becoming defective because of lack of wisdom in the choice of type, the Superintendencel WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS igg length of line, width of margin, the spacing between lines, it is of fundamental importance that something be done to procure proper textbooks and thus remove the cause of the eye deformity. But for this, the advice of the technical expert is needed. It is not a matter of untrained common-sense — any more than the question of the stress and strain in a building is a matter of untrained common-sense. If the present modes of sitting in the public schools are responsible to any degree for the crooked backs that we sometimes see in chil- dren, we should know it, and then change the habits of sitting. This, again, is a matter for the trained orthopedic surgeon. It is not a question of psychol- ogy or pedagogy — at least not until after the diagnosis and treatment have been decided upon. How much home study shall children of a particular age be allowed or required to do ? This, also, is not a question of psychology or pedagogy; it is a technical question for the physician. What lessons shall children study at home? This is a question of pedagogy and school administration; but the number of hours for home study, or the time when a child may do his best work — these are biological problems. These are problems that are capable of more or less exact determination. Such facts as these lead us to believe that there should be, co-ordinated with the other activities of boards of education, a department composed of men who are technical experts on the various questions of health in relation to school life. The school will make no contribution of permanent value to physical development till it seriously attacks this series of problems with the implements of science. Is it not obvious: (i) That the detection of contagious disease in the schools, involving daily visits and the power of the law to act, belongs in the nature of the case to the board of health ? And further (2) that the care of ventilation, recesses, lighting, seating, exercise, hours of home study, is the business of the board of education ? The general principle involved is that where the object is the protection of the community the board of health is responsible, and where steps necessary to the proper education of the individual are concerned, the Board of Education is responsible. If these propositions are true they leave but one division of the topic open to discussion — namely: Who should conduct the examination of school children for defects liable to interfere with proper growth and education, such as adenoids, defective eyesight, and hearing ? Whoever does this work, it is further obvious that such records must follow the child from grade to grade and also from school to school; that they must be considered by the class teacher and, most important of all, that each case must be consistently followed up so that in so far as is possible such disabilities may be removed. That is, they are an important part of the school records and must be so made and administered as to be available to the school authorities ; so 200 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington that the Board of Education must at least be one of the active parties in such a medical examination. Further than this there is as yet no general agreement. But as an indi- vidual it seems to me that this work should be done by the board of education because: (i) it is done for educational purposes; (2) it must be constantly and intimately connected with school records and activities; (3) it does not need to be connected with the other work of the board of health; (4) it differs in kind from the inspection done for the detection of contagious diseases. III. MEDICAL INSPECTION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS CONTRIBUTING TO HEALTH AND EFFICIENCY THOMAS F. HARRINGTON, M.D., DIRECTOR OF DEPARTMENT OF HYGIENEj PUBLIC SCHOOLS, BOSTON, MASS. It is now more than sixteen years since Boston started the agitation for the medical inspection of schools in order to harmonize the two great duties which the state owes to its children — namely, education and the preservation of health. Prior to the introduction of medical inspection into the public schools of Boston (1894) every state, having upon its statute books a compulsory edu- cational law, was in the position of compelling by law the children of its province to go directly into the midst of dangers to their health. Unfortunately some states are yet in that same indefensible position. That these dangers are real and a menace to the individual and to the community no one denies today; that they can be almost entirely avoided or removed is beyond dispute. How far medical inspection of school children may contribute to health and effi- ciency by pointing out the prevalence, the causes, and the means of the removal of those factors tending toward mental stagnation and physical retrogression is the problem which I have been asked to present to this association. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Peter Frank, of Austria, issued his System oj Complete Medical Police^ setting forth the duties of physicians to schools. In 1832 the number of lessons was diminished in Sweden for reasons of health, and in the same year France issued regulations concerning medical inspection in schools. Many of the scientific congresses of Europe in the third quarter of the last century discussed the need of medical inspection of schools. School physicians were appointed subsequently in different cities of Sweden, Austria-Hungary, France, Egypt, Belgium, and Holland, as well as in Japan, Chili, Argentina, Switzerland, Russia, Roumania, Servia, Germany, England, and the United States. The progress was not without opposition. Furst came the distrust on the part of the teachers that such additional authority established in public schools would give rise to friction, confusion, and over-emphasis of the sanitary and the hygienic factors in school life. Then the argument of the municipal authorities that the financial expenditure involved was not justified by the existing state of health of the school children; the attitude of the medical Superintendence! WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS JOI profession that the private practice of physicians might be injured thru the measures employed by school inspectors; and lastly the anxiety of parents lest meddlesome interference might destroy the rights and the authority of the home. Then, too, the impatient pressing forward by zealous advocates and the jealous warding off by honest conservatives add much to the confusion and disturbance incidental to the introduction of all new public measures as well as in changing fixed traditions. Gradually, however, these fears subsided and the opposition passed into mingled feelings of indifference incredulity, or ridicule. Little was then known of the great possibilities in preventive medicine. Tuberculosis was an inherited disease; spinal curvature was due to a ''fall*" deaf children were heedless or disobedient; measles and scarlet fever were diseases which every child should have; diphtheria was "quinsy," unless it ''turned into croup" from which "no one ever recovered." The child suffer- ing from defective vision was the dunce of the schoolroom until, growing too large for the grade, or driven from school by ridicule and shame, he found peace in the truant school or in the shop and factory where his defects became a menace to limb and life. The many statutes on law books the world over, having for their object the prevention and regulation of child-labor, the enforce- ment of compulsory education, and the disposition of juvenile truancy and misdemeanors, all find their greatest field of application among children whose discontent at school led to the violation of these laws. Necessity for the wage- earning assistance has been, and is, no doubt, often the cause for many parents' sacrifice of their children's education; nevertheless if the voice of those ma- tured today who were forced to leave school at an early age could be recorded, many thousands would, I feel sure, attribute the former rather than the latter as the real cause of their limited schooling. The idea that medical science had any relationship to the problems of public scliool life was not entertained prior to the great awakening in preventive medicine during the epoch 1880-90. During this remarkable period Robert Koch discovered the bacillus of tuberculosis; Eberth, the organism of t)rphoid fever; Klebs and Loeffler, the bacillus of diphtheria; Lavaran, that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes; Fehleisen, the streptococcus of erysipelas; Kitasarto, the bacillus of tetanus — all discoveries that transferred tuberculosis from the class of diseases supposed to be inherited, and placed it in the category of diseases preventable and curable; that proved diphtheria to be a specific, communicable disease, and not a filth disease; that suggested that skin affec- tions may be contagious, that lockjaw may be epidemic; and that night air is as healthful and as free from disease as day air. In such a renaissance it was but natural that attention should center upon those affections which for ages had been known to be communicable and most prevalent at the earlier periods of childhood. The legal authority to carry out such an investigation was the board of health; the most likely place to find the facts was in the aggregation of children in school. Thus originated 202 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington the first scientific basis for medical inspection of schools. This was at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1892. The relationship of public-school life to medical science since this intro- duction of medical inspection is one of interesting evolution. First came the movement to prevent the schools from becoming centers of infectious or con- tagious diseases; then followed the attention to such hygienic problems as schoolroom environment, proper seating of the children, the lighting, heating, and ventilation of school buildings; next came the examination of each school child in order to ascertain his physical asset for the life mapped out for him and the removal of remediable causes of handicap or a modification in the school program and extra school life of the child in order to avoid possible shipwreck. This was followed by the scientific study of the development of great groups of children in order to obtain accurate data of their physical and mental growth, so that the factors of heredity, age, sex, race, environment, and nutrition might be properly estimated in their bearing on pedagogical progression and racial deterioration. The later stage in this evolutionary process has to do with all those measures tending to the promotion of the physical health and the corresponding growth of the individual child and is embraced in the term "school hygiene." These stages are best considered separately. I. BOARD OF HEALTH INSPECTION OF SCHOOLS This was a method inaugurated in this country at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1894, and has been followed more or less closely by the cities in this country and abroad. Briefly, the plan adopted has been as follows: The city is divided into districts and a physician appointed by the board of health has been assigned to each district. These physicians are both agents of the board of health and inspectors of schools. They are all engaged in private practice. They are required to visit each school in their respective districts daily, and to examine all pupils referred to them by the teacher and who in the judgment of the teacher are ill. If any pupil is found to be suffering from any contagious disease, or is otherwise too ill to remain in school, the inspector advises the teacher to send him home for temporary observation by his parents or family physician. The inspector does not prescribe for the child, nor advise or criticize anything beyond that which pertains strictly to the isolation of the child, and he carefully avoids any word or act which might be construed as an infringement upon the rights of the family or the attending physician. He is not required to give a diagnosis even. He is concerned more in the protection of the other children at school than in the treatment of the ill child. In his capacity as agent of the board of health, the inspector receives daily all notifications of communicable diseases reported by physicians and he visits the homes of those so reported residing within his district for the purpose of examining the places and plans of isolation adopted by the family. He reports to the board of health his approval or disapproval of such plans, and he visits the patient as often as may be necessary to inform himself of the con- Superintendence] WELL BEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS ao? tinuation of the isolation adopted. No case will be discharged from this quarantine until the inspector certifies that recovery is complete and that all danger of contagion has passed. This plan has been modified somewhat by local conditions, and its administration has been effected by the school authority in a few localities. Medical inspection under board of health supervision prevails at BuJBFalo, N. Y. ; Camden, N. J. ; Chicago, 111. ; Des Moines (west side), la. ; Detroit, Mich. ; Elgin, 111.; Evansville, Ind.; Hartford, Conn. ; Kansas City, Mo. ; Milwaukee, Wis.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Montclair, N. J.; Newark, N. J.; New Haven| Conn.; New York, N. Y.; Ogden, Utah; Philadelphia, Pa.; Plainfield, N. J.; Providence, R. I.; Salt Lake City, Utah; Syracuse, N. Y.; Washington, D. C; Waterbury, Conn.; IndianapoHs, Ind.; Baltimore, Md.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Mount Holly, N. J.; Cleveland, Ohio; New Orleans, La., as well as in twenty-three cities and forty-seven towns in Massachusetts where medical inspection of schools is a state law. The board of education appoints the inspectors at Ann Arbor, Mich., at Paterson, Atlantic City, Passaic, Engle- wood, Orange, and Asbury Park, N. J. ; as well as in ten cities in Massachusetts. At Grand Rapids, Mich., and at Jersey City, N. J., the medical inspection is done by nurses appointed by the school authorities. A detailed account of the work as carried on in the different cities of this country has been furnished to me by the several superintendents of schools. I desire to thank these officials for their valuable aid and co-operation in compiling .these data. In many cities the system is in an experimental stage; in a few it has been abandoned on account of municipal financial curtailment; in some places its workings have won commendation; while in other places it has been severely criticized even while its adoption has been urged. These criticisms are against the method and means of administration, not against medical inspection per se, and have given rise to much confusion. An important fact in the method of medical inspection under the board of health is that the detection of cases of contagious diseases among the children is done by the teacher and not by the medical inspector; if the latter confirms the suspicion of the teacher, the child is excluded from school; if the inspector does not agree with the conclusions of the teacher, the child returns to its classroom. Non-agreement is very frequent, and it requires exceptional perseverance for a teacher to hazard the chagrin of a second mistake, yet disastrous consequences might result from such hesitation. In Boston during the year 1905, 21,111 children were referred to the medical inspectors; 9,241 were found free from any disease. In London between 20 and 30 per cent, of the cases submitted by the teachers were not suffering in any way. The greatest criticism against this system of inspection is that it lacks uniformity; that it excludes pupils and does not provide any means of ''follow up," nor any guarantee that the child will receive medical care; that the duties of the inspector as an agent of the Board of Health brings him in contact with much contagion in the homes; 204 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fWashington and finally that the dual duties and divided responsibility are not conducive to the best in health and efficiency of school children. Within recent years medical inspection has widened its scope beyond the detection and isolation of communicable diseases among school children, and has come to include all questions of physical defects and mental back- wardr 3ss of children. A recent act of the Massachusetts legislature requires cities ctnd towns to provide medical inspection for all pupils in the public schools. The following excerpt iridicates the scope of the new law: The School Committee of every city and town shall cause every child in the public schools to be separately and carefully tested and examined at least once in every school year to ascertain ether he is suffering from defective sight or hearing or from any other disability or defect tending to prevent his receiving the full benefits of school work or requiring a modification of the school work in order to prevent injury to the chilS or to -ricure the best educational results. There are many causes of ill health and mental dwarfing which are seldom, if ever, acute and requiring immediate inspection. On the contrary, they are detected by their effects on the daily school life of the child, and are not diseases dangerous to the public health. The problem, then, is one of pedagogy pure and simple. The advantage and the necessity for data such as this latter form of inspection alone can furnish is beyond measure. Future progress in physical and mental growth depends almost entirely upon these data. There are in the United States today not less than 150,000 persons so feeble-minded that institutional care is advisable, yet the latest census gives the number in institutions as 16,500. More than three-tenths (30.2 per cent.) of these have one or more physical defects; 77.2 per cent, of all admissions to institutions for feeble-minded persons occur before twenty years of life have been passed, and the admissions at the ages of fifteen to nineteen years are more than twice as numerous as in the group twenty to twenty-four years. It is important to add here that the percentage of foreign-born inmates is much smaller than among the native white population. If to these figures we add the 17,000 supposedly feeble-minded among the inmates of almshouses, and the 40,000 children in reform schools, we have a population in this country not equaled in any civilized country or age. Almost 11 per cent. (10.9 per cent.) of the insane in this country are physically defective. More than 30 per cent, of the children in the elementary grades in the public schools are over the normal age of the various grades. Science today has proven conclusively that the blunting of the moral sense has a distinct anatomical or functional stigma which in many cases is remov- able. Few teachers in cities where attention to defective eyes, throats, and ears has been directed have failed to witness the transformation, mental, physi- cal, and moral, following the correction of refractive errors, the removal of adenoids causing deafness or oxygen starvation and abnormal metabolism. The extent of physical defects in children may be concluded from the results of the examination of 200,000 children in New York between the ages Superintendenccl WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 20 C of five to fifteen years: 60 per cent, were under-nourished; 66 per cent, needed medical and surgical care; 40 per cent, hadlaad teeth ; 38 per cent, had enlarged cervical glands ; 31 per cent, had defective vision ; and 18 per cent, had enlarged tonsils, while 10 per cent, had adenoids. It has been estimated from the result of a recent investigation among school children in New York City that there are in this country 12,000,000 children having physical defects more or less serious that should receive atten- tion from parents and family physicians. There is no evidence that the per- centage of children suffering from physical defects is any greater today than it was fifty years ago. Medical experience and vital statistics indicate the contrary, and any attempt to charge physical deterioration to the present-day school life must fail from lack of evidence. The only possible exception to this statement is defective vision. Time alone can prove whether all the defects of vision recorded today are permanent. Thus the problem in relation to physical defects becomes one of prevention and remedy. How can these be accomplished best ? The question is plainly whether the inspection of school children is a part of the duty of the board of health in its protection of the general public health, or whether its object is to ascertain and determine the fitness or unfitness of the child for education at school, due regard being given to the nature of the work imposed as well as to the child's capacity and environment. If the detection of infectious diseases among school children is the object and aim, as well as the limitation of medical inspection, few will deny that the agents of the board of health should have exclusive right upon all premises, schools included, and that it is the duty of these agents to exercise preventive measures whether they relate to the child, the school, the home, or the workshop. Any number of foci of infection found and eliminated, however small, justifies the existence of the agencies employed in affording this protection to the individuals; yet the actual number of cases of communicable diseases found among those pupils thought to be ill is surprisingly small, less than 15 percent. The diseases classified as com- municable and coming within the legal scope of the health department are detrimental to the health and eJB&ciency of the child, only so far as they become complicated by possible sequelae. Assuming that teachers are not trained to detect these sequelae, the presence or absence of such complication should form a part of the notification blank which permits the child to return to school after exclusion. The general law requires that the child be free from contagion liable to affect the other children before being permitted to return to school. In some cities it contains the additional statement that "the child has recovered fully" from the disease. If the attending physician or the agent of the board of health would furnish to the schools data of the child's physical condition after an attack of contagious or infectious disease, the necessity for further inspection would be greatly reduced, and the child's health and efficiency would be promoted immeasurably. Today these defects form the basis of the great need of medical inspection in schools. With such infor- 2o6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washiniftun mation before her, the teacher would have a guide by which the school work of the child could be regulated so as not to aggravate nor cause physical defect \ To summarize, then, the value of medical inspection under boards of health, it can be said: First, that the inspection has its greatest value as a part of the general preventive duty invested by law in that department; Second, that 85 per cent, of cases of exclusion from school are due to causes over which the health department has no exclusive jurisdiction. Third, that no child should be given a certificate of health after an illness demanding exclusion from school until a careful examination has demonstrated that such illness has not left a defect which in all probability will be a hindrance to his health and efficiency. Fourth, that any defects thus resulting should be made known at the time of his entrance or return to school. Fifth, that dual responsibilities and duties, as carried out in school inspection under the board of health, must necessarily result in confusion if not inefficiency, and it does not relieve in the least degree the responsibility imposed by law upon school authorities. Sixth, that something more adequate than board of health inspection is needed to follow up and relieve the results of inspection, and to secure data upon which may be built a rational system of education having for its basis the physical well being of the individual child. This plan I have called II. MEDICAL SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS It was my privilege to point out in an address before the Boston Medical Library Association in February, 1907, the antithesis, "Medical Supervision versus Medical Inspection of Public Schools." Since that date the School Committee of Boston has established a department of school hygiene having for its basis such supervision in its broadest sense, a plan which it is believed will make for the greatest health and efficiency in school children. It is no new theory to assert that mental development without a true physical equivalent is unstable and undesirable; that individuals differ as to capacity and capability of mental acquirement; that the standard of a nation's health depends directly upon the physical state of its children — its future citizens, men and women. Physiology and psychology have for years pointed out the correlation and intimate dependency of mental and physical growth; that race, heredity, age, sex, climate, nutrition, period of growth, season, environment, former diseases, etc., are all factors, often the predomi- nating factors, in deciding the fate of the individual. Ancient and fixed as these truisms are, modern educational institutions seemed to be indifferent if not oblivious to these lessons. Individuals in large numbers have been sacrificed, races have struggled against deterioration, nations have been heavily burdened. Mental instability and physical degen- eracy have vied with each other for the mastery of the being. Crime, depravity, and pauperism have resulted. Legislature and private philanthropy contented itself with ministering to the result rather than toward finding and eliminating the cause. Pedagogues have given the subject scant notice and have been satisfied with the development in the child of the greatest amount of mental strength. This they have considered their special duty. Money, energy, and Superintendence] WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 207 time have been wasted in trying to make all children equal, in trying to con- tinue a machine-like method of instruction until finally the waste products so clogged the wheels that investigation for the causes became necessary. The results found were startling. At Copenhagen, 18 per cent, of the boys were sickly on entering school. This percentage rose to 30 after two years of school life and reached 40 per cent, at puberty. Among the girls in the same school the sickness increased from 12 per cent, to 32 per cent, during the first three years of school life, and during the period of twelve to sixteen years the ill outnumbered the well by 10 per cent. In Germany one-fourth of the number of pupils are physically below par; nervousness among children in these schools increases from 10 per cent, in the lower grades to 60 per cent. in the highest grade. The Danish commission found that 29 per cent, of boys and 41 per cent, of girls are sickly. In Sweden the percentage of illness rose from 5 in the first school years to 36 in the second year, and to 40 per cent. in the fourth year. At the thirteenth year of age the curve of sickness was 65 per cent. At Moscow, the percentage of illness at different ages was 58 at ten years, 51 at eleven years, 100 at twelve years, 61 at thirteen years, and 57 at fourteen years. Combe's investigation at Lausanne showed: Ages 8 9 10 II 12 13 14 years Boys, per cent, ill 64 43 42 40 33 29 34 Girls, per cent, ill 88 75 60 66 68 61 39 At Rugby School, England, 1,000 boys (thirteen to fifteen years of age) showed 36.5 per cent, under height, 47.1 per cent, below normal weight, 42.3 per cent, below normal chest measurements, 49.1 per cent, of the aggregate cases had acquired deformities, 15.7 per cent, had albumenuria. There are no data bearing on the subject in this country other than that furnished by the 1907 examination of the hearing and the vision of all children in the public schools of Massachusetts: 432,937 children examined; 96,609 (22.3 per cent.) had defective vision; 27,387 {6.2, per cent.) had defective hearing. Medical inspection as carried on in America has done little to solve the great problems in pedagogy suggested by the above data. In the absence of a standing army with compulsory military service whereby the physical status of the whole population may be learned, it becomes necessary and essential to study closely the advancing army of school children so as to gain that infor- mation necessary for healthy development. Nothing can be taken for granted ; every problem must be solved rationally; every factor of home life and school life must be weighed carefully and each given its value properly. This requires the co-operation of pedagogue and physician under a different relationship than that prevailing in existing board of health systems of school inspection. The physician should be counselor and adviser to the teachers, school authori- ties, and home authorities in adjusting the many questions of mental and physical correlation in school curricula. He must be a part of the school system to which the parent and state intrust the child. He should have super- 2o8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washingtor vision and control of all those questions having to do with the physical welfare of the school child and the guidance of those means best calculated to accom- plish greater health. In this way only can the curative and the preventive as well as the constructive measures of health be fostered and strengthened. m. DEPARTMENT OF SCHOOL HYGIENE | The Department of School Hygiene estabhshed at Boston, Massachusetts, the first in this country, if not in the world, has all these factors. The organi- zation provides for a director of school hygiene, three assistant directors, as many special instructors in physical training, special assistant instructors in physical training, instructors of athletics, and assistant instructors of ath- letics, supervisors of playgrounds, playground teachers, heads of playgrounds, helpers in playgrounds, and helpers in sand gardens, as the board may from time to time authorize; a supervising nurse and assistant nurses; an instructor of military drill; and a medical inspector of special classes. The director of school hygiene shall have general supervision and control of all matters affect- ing the physical welfare of pupils and teachers; of medical inspection, except that under the control of the Board of Health; of school nursing; of physical training, military drill, athletics, sports, games, and play engaged in by pupils or conducted in buildings, yards and grounds under the control of the board, or in other buildings, yards, and grounds that it may have the. right to use for such purposes. In the normal school, the health of the pupil-teachers is under personal supervision of the director, who is a physician. Here as well as in the high schools a gymnasium is equipped and special teachers are provided for instruction and the physical examination of the girls. Military drill is provided for the boys. Both courses are compulsory. All high-school pupils, boys and girls, are compelled to take a setting-up drill of ten minutes' duration each day. This is given by room captains selected for the purpose. In the elementary schools and in the primary schools, calisthenics and drills in the classroom and corridors are given by the teacher under supervision of the assistant director. From the kindergarten to the normal school one principle is emphasized — namely, that proper breathing, proper standing, and proper carriage are the three essentials of all physical training. These essentials are taught and enforced in the schoolrooms in every movement of the child, and not left to gymnasium or calisthenic periods or military-drill periods alone. Instructors in athletics have a rating and a certification similar to regular teachers, and after written and practical examination. Selected teachers in the elementary schools act as play-teachers for the children of these schools after hours daily, and on Saturdays and holidays, extra compensation being allowed for this work. School yards in crowded districts are being equipped with suitable appara- tus for playgrounds for younger children. The season is to run from May i to November 25; matrons, janitors, and teachers are furnished by this depart- Superintcndencel WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 200 ment. On large playgrounds belonging to the Park Department, as well as at the public baths, arrangements are made whereby instruction in athletics, swimming, games, and play may be carried on under school supervision, thus offering the best means to make these activities a source of better health to all the children rather than a spectacular exhibition by the few. A specific appro- priation amounting to more than $50,000 annually is provided for these pur- poses by legislative act. This appropriation cannot be used for any other purpose. The nursing division of the department is under the direction of one super- vising nurse who has at present thirty-four assistants. The division is pro- vided for by an additional special appropriation of $25,000 annually. Rooms are equipped at schools in each district, and each nurse has an assignment of approximately 2,700 pupils. These nurses are appointed from a certified list similar to that of other employees in the service. The following report of the first twenty nurses appointed under this department for the period September 11, 1907, to February i, 1908, shows the work possible under this adjunct to health and efficiency: Diseases of: Ear^ 1,492 cases cared for; Eye, 6,078 cases cared for, including 3,649 suffering from defective vision; of these 1,131 were corrected by oculists; Nose, 2,602 cases, of which 1,405 had adenoids, 423 of whom had the obstruction removed; Mouth, 1,765 cases including 1,686 who had carious teeth; Throat, 1,695 cases, including 683 of hypertrophied tonsils, and 608 of tonsilitis; Skin, 10,139 cases, all of which were followed to their homes and the parent or guardian instructed how to care for the same. In addition to the above 2,563 pupils having abrasions and wounds received 9,144 dressings; 2,034 miscellaneous affections, including 350 septic wounds, 312 suffering from renal disease, 121 having rachitis, 207 suffering from malnutrition, 227 with epilepsy, 126 with chorea, and 548 with bronchitis, anaemia, and heart disease were treated; 3,120 excluded pupils were followed to their homes; 3,293 were taken to family physicians, resulting in 3,202 being cured and returned to school at the minimum of absenteeism; 4,772 were taken to hospitals on request of parents; and 3,223 of these were cured and returned to school; 7,559 home visits were made for the purpose of instructing or advising parents concerning the children, or in order to persuade the parents to seek proper medical or surgical aid for the child. There were also 2,882 affections looked after of which there is no classification. These do not include the specific infectious diseases. The nurses are not permitted to visit homes of contagious diseases. The great advantage of having a nurse under the school jurisdiction who may look after the minor ailments in school life and who visits the homes of children, giving advice and assistance to mothers, and in harmonizing .the fixed customs and traditions of a great alien population with our habits and standards of living is solving'many vexatious problems of the past and forms a link between the school and the home not possible by any other means. It does not seem possible to conceive a more satisfactory arrangement nor a more effective piece 2IO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington of school machinery than nurses under school supervision. With a corps of medical inspectors under this same supervision, who would conduct a daily clinic in their respective school districts, there are no problems connected with the health and efficiency of school children which could not be quietly, rationally, economically, and effectually solved. Until such an organization is perfected in part or in whole, little progress can result from the efforts to promote the health and efficiency of our school children. DISCUSSION E, C. Moore, superintendent of schools, Los Angeles, Cal. — A health program is needed for all schools. For years our ideal of education has been wrong. It must be not a sound mind in a sound body, but a sound mind making and keeping its body sound. The mind in control in the school, and the minds being trained there, must make and keep the bodies of the students sound. There is no other way. As Dr. Allen has put it: "When the state for its own protection compels a child to go to school it pledges itself not to injure itself by injuring the child." Shall the board of health or the board of education undertake this work ? A part of it must be done by the board of health. Combating contagious diseases falls naturally within its province. School funds should not be used for that purpose, but the best health officer is one who is present all the time and ever-watchful of the welfare of the child. That ever-present health officer is the teacher. She must in the main be the guardian of con- ditions to see that they are hygienic and she must develop the cardinal physical virtues of breathing, sitting, standing, and walking properly. There are other conditions which immediately affect school work which she may detect but which she cannot of herself remedy. Some of them are caused by the schools. All of them affect school work and in the very degree in which they obtain they render school work impossible. For this reason it belongs to the schools to do all in their power to remedy them. In so doing they are treading on the well-established preserves of the physician, and the physician is apt to regard their encroachment with distrust and con- cern. The situation is a delicate one. A line must be drawn between what school authori- ties may undertake and what properly belongs to the province of the medical profession . I believe that it is a safe principle to lay down that the schools must not undertake to do what other social institutions, the home, the hospital, the clinic, the settlement, the medical profession, stand ready to do and can do perhaps better than the schools. It may be easier to hire a surgeon to do the operative surgery that should be done to give a certain number of pupils their chance, but I am convinced that it is better to employ the agencies already existing to get the work done. This principle would limit the medical work of the schools to inspection and even that must, it seems to me, be limited and of a superficial sort. Certain defects go uncared for because their presence is unknown. In every schoolroom some of the pupils cannot see well, cannot hear well, cannot breathe properly, have uncared-for teeth, or irregular heart action. If parents but knew of these conditions, they would in most cases see to it that they are remedied and if they will not on their own initiative, they can be persuaded or coerced to have them cared for. The program of medical inspection with which I am familiar aims to concern itself with defective eyesight, defective hearing, defective teeth, defective breathing, and defective heart action. It is in the charge of a health laboratory with a director and three assistant physicians. With this laboratory the teachers of the schools co-operate. It is the duty of each class teacher to test as carefully as possible the eyesight and hearing of the pupils in her class. The physician in charge of eye-examin- ing tells me that the teachers make the preliminary tests in a very satisfactory manner. Superintendence! WELLBEING OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PUPILS 211 All the more difficult cases are sent to the laboratory for examination and all the examina- tions which the teachers make are under the direction of the laboratory staff. Reports of all examinations which show conditions which need care are sent to the parents with urgent recommendations that the case be taken up with a specialist or with the family physician. There is a follow-up system to see that the proper steps have been taken. Miss Sadie American, executive secretary, Council of Jewish Women, New York City (founder of Vacation Schools in Chicago, 111.).— There is one point that I specially desire to emphasize. It is the necessity for providing more fully for our girls, in play, in athletics, and in vocational or industrial training. Not sufficient regard has been paid to the girls, not sufficient careful study has been given to conditions and to their needs. Those of you who have had anything to do with reformatories for girls must know the appalling number of girls between the ages of ten and sixteen who are in such institutions. It is my firm belief that many of them are there because of the insufficient provision for playi for physical activity, for amusement, if you will, for desires perfectly legitimate, but which have not been satisfied. If we properly provide for our girls the dance halls will not be filled and the well-known consequences of the dance hall may be lessened. A second point that I desire to make is the necessity for educating the parents. A friend of mine — a teacher — recently showed me the following note: "Dear m'am. I don't want Mary to spend her time in no dancing. If I want her to jump I can make her jump myself." This is typical of the attitude of many more highly educated than was this mother whose Mary would probably have learned to dance in some less favorable place. Along the line of Dr. Gulick's paper another experience comes to my mind of an educated mother who resented her child being sent home from school with a note advising that the adenoids be removed. She felt that she knew what was good for her child and did not wish to be interfered with. We have much to do not only to secure proper medical inspection and the school nurse, but to make parents of all groups and grades understand the intent and the need and the meaning of such innovations as medical care of school children and as play. A third point is that we need school playgrounds, no matter whether there be municipal playgrounds or park playgrounds or settlement playgrounds. We need these playgrounds out of doors next to the school if we can have them, and if not, then in the basement, or on the roof, or wherever else it is possible, for not until we learn to associate in the mind of the child the school with his play, will we have less of a truant problem. The school should be the center of the life of the child, next to the home, with which he associates his joys and his pleasures as well as his work. Alas, in the tenement districts, to many it must be instead of the home. But when he does associate the school with his play and with his work of the hand as well as of the head, the school will become the influence and the lasting influence which it should be. And finally let me say that we have passed the theoretic stage in regard to the effect of work with the hand in addition to and in connection with work for the mind, whether we call this industrial training or vocational training or manual training. The vacation schools of Chicago have proven that such hand work holds the children purely by their desire to come, and the police of that city testify that juvenile arrests are at least one-third less in the districts in which there are vacation schools, than they were in these districts when there were no such schools. Juvenile arrests, I say, and not juvenile crime, for there is great difference between them, and that which is called mischief in the home of the well-to-do and where there are larger spaces for play n\ay be interference with law or ordinance and cause arrest and send a boy— yes, shove a boy— along the crimi- nal path. 212 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington ADDRESS AT THE RECEPTION AT THE WHITE HOUSE PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT [Stenographic Report] Gentlemen and Ladies: Of all the bodies of citizens that I have received here at the White House, there is none which occupies a more important relation than yours. I am tempted to say none has come that has occupied as important a relation to the nation, because you men and women who deal with education, who represent the great American policy of education for all children, provided by the public as the prime duty of the public, bear a relation to the family, a relation to the future of our whole people, such as no other like number of individuals can bear. I own six of the children that you educate, and I am prepared to extend cordial sympathy to some of you. Seriously, friends, it is idle for any man to talk of despairing of the future of this country, or feeling unduly alarmed about it, if he will come in contact with you here, and with the forces that you represent. Fundamentally this country is sound morally, no less than physically. Fundamentally, in its family life, and in the outside activities of its individuals, the country is better, and not worse, than it formerly was. This does not mean that we are to be excused if we fail to war against rottenness and corruption; if we fail to contend effectively with the forces of evil; and they waste their time who ask me to withhold my hand from dealing therewith. But it is worth while to smite the wrong for the very reason that we are confident that the right will ulti- mately prevail. You who are training the next generation are training this country as it is to be a decade or two hence; and, while your work in train- ing the intellect is great, it is not as great as your work in training character- More than anything else, I want to see the public school turn out the boy and the girl who, when man and woman, will add to the sum of good citizenship of the nation. It is not my province, nor would it be within my capacity, to speak about your pedagogic problems. You yourselves are far better able to discuss them. But, as a layman, let me say one or two things about your work. In the first place, I trust that, more and more, our people will see to it that the schools train toward and not away from the farm and the workshop. We have spoken a great deal about the dignity of labor in this country, but we have not acted up to our spoken words, for in our education we have tended to proceed upon the assumption that the educated man was to be educated away from and not toward labor. The great nations of mediaeval times who left such marvelous works of architecture and art behind them were able to do so because they educated alike the brain and hand of the craftsman. We, too, in our turn, must show that we understand the law which decrees that a people which loses physical address invariably deteriorates, so that our people Superintendence] RECEPTION AT THE WHITE HOUSE 21^ shall understand that the good carpenter, the good blacksmith, the good mechanic, the good farmer, really do fill the most important positions in our land, and that it is an evil thing for them and for the nation to have their sons and daughters forsake the work which, if well and efficiently performed, means more than any other work for our people as a whole. One thing that I would like to have you teach your pupils is that whether you call the money gained salary or wages does not make any real difference, and that if, by working hard with your hands, you get more than if you work with your head only, it does not atone for it to call the smaller amount salary. The term, "dignity of labor," implies that manual labor is as dignified as mental labor; as of course it is. Indeed, the highest kind of labor is that which makes demands upon the qualities of both head and hand, of heart, brain, and body. Physical prowess, physical address, are necessities; they stand on a level with intellect, and only below character. Let us show that we regard the position of the man who works with his hands as being ordinarily and in good faith as important and dignified and as worthy of consideration as that of business men or professional men. We need to have a certain re- adjustment of values in this country, which must primarily come through the efforts of just you men and women here and the men and women like you thruout this land. I would not have you preach an impossible ideal; for if you preach an ideal that is impossible you tend to make your pupils believe that no ideals are possible, and therefore, you tend to do them that worst of wrongs — to teach them to divorce preaching from practice, to divorce the ideal that they in the abstract admire from the practical good after which they strive. Teach the boy and girl that their business is to earn their own livehhood; teach the boy that he is to be the homemaker; the girl that she must ultimately be the homekeeper; that the work of the father is to be the bread-winner, and that of the mother the housekeeper; that their work is the most important work by far in all the land; that the work of the statesman, the writer, the captain of industry, and all the rest, is conditioned — first, upon the work that finds its expression in the family, that supports the family. So teach the boy that he is to be expected to earn his own livelihood; that it is a shame and scandal for him not to be self-dependent, not to be able to hold his own in the rough work of actual life. Teach the girl that so far from its being her duty to try to avoid all labor, all effort, that it should be a matter of pride to her to be as good a housewife as her mother was before her. Sometimes the kindest and most well-meaning mother, sometimes a kind and well-meaning father also, do as much damage to the children as the most thoughtless and selfish parent could, by bringing them up to feel that the goal of their attainment should be the absence of effort instead of effort well directed. We have all of us often heard some good but unwise woman say, "I have worked hard; my daughter shan't work;" the poor woman not realizing that great tho the curse of mere drudgery, of overwork, is, that it is not so great as the curse of vapid idleness; 214 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington and it does not make any difference whether the idleness is that of the hobo at one end of the scale or the gilded youth at the other. Do not waste time in envying the idler at either end of the social scale. Envy is not the proper attitude toward them. The proper attitude toward them is a good-humored but thorogoing disapproval of the man or woman who is so blind not only to the interests of society as a whole, but to his or her own real interests, as to believe that anything permanent can be gained from a life of selfish and vacuous idle- ness. Such idleness is the poorest investment in the long run that can be ima- gined; and there is no surer way to forfeit all chance of real happiness than to set deliberately to work to treat pleasure as the only aim after which to strive. Teach the boy and girl to work; teach them that their proper duty is in the home; their duty to one another and toward their neighbors. Then teach them more; teach them to build upon this as a foundation the superstructure of the higher life. I want to see our education directed more and more toward training boys and girls back to the farm and the shop, so that they will be first-rate farmers, first-rate mechanics, fit to work with the head and to work with the hands; and realizing that work with the hands is just as honor- able as work with the head. In addition I want to see a training that will make every boy, every girl, leaving the public schools, leaving the schools of the nation, feel impelled so to carry himself or herself that the net result, when his or her life has been lived, shall be an addition to the sum total of decent living and achievement for the nation; and have them understand that they are never going to amount to much in the big things if they don't first amount to something in the little things. The effort should be made to teach everyone that the first requisite of good citizenship is doing the duties that are near at hand. But, of course, this does not excuse a man from doing the other duties, too. It is no excuse if a man neglects his political duties to say that he is a good husband and father, still less is it an excuse if he is guilty of corruption in politics or business to say that his home life is all right. He ought to add to decency in home life decency in politics, decency in public life. So my plea is not that the homely duties are all sufficient, but that they are a necessary base upon which to build the superstructure of the higher life. Our children should be trained to do the homely duties in the first place, and then, in addition, to have it in them so to carry themselves that we collectively may well and fitly perform the great and responsible tasks of American citizenship. Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 21 c DESIRABLE UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION ANDREW S. DRAPER, COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, ALBANY, N. Y. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I can scarcely begin without mention of the fact that my entrance into the affairs of the National Educational Association was twenty years ago, in this month, in this department, and in this city. It was the beginning of personal, professional, and official relations which have been a constant satisfaction to me. I had the temerity to present a paper on determining the qualifications of teachers. It took ground for state regulation, for the subordination of local methods to a state system which would at least protect every district against the relatives, and dependents, and supporters, and adherents, of school officials, unless they could pass examinations and teach; but it stood for the freedom of all who could stand up among men and women and exercise free- dom without harm. If anyone should recall that it was a bit crude, he will at least do me the favor of remembering that the speaker was then very young. Crude or not, it started an intellectual and pedagogical ruction in the depart- ment. But what provided the basis for a very earnest discussion then is everywhere accepted now, unless it be in isolated sections which I lack the hardihood or the courage to mention. The next year at Nashville I became president of the department. The record sets forth that sixteen votes were thrown for me, that fourteen went for Mr. Moffett of Alabama, that there were eight scattering, and that an open resolution, without a ballot, was required to effectuate my election. Mr. Moffett was considerate enough to join in the conclusion very heartily, and I held the office. The next year, with a much larger attendance, I was con- tinued with every expression of unanimity, and the New York and Philadelphia meetings of the department are among the grateful memories of my association with the doings of the schools. I should therefore be false to much that I cherish, and I should attain the heights of ingratitude, if I were not to respond heartily to your invitation to present this address. GROWING UNIFORMITY In the last twenty years the growth of uniformity in the plans and policies of the schools has been marked. We all know the reasons. In part they are internal and in part external. We are good travelers and great readers. We are all moved by the same ambitions. We would have as efficient and progressive schools as any people. We are moved by the very uniform, and certainly the almost universal, advances in the thinking and the doing of the country. We have gained in bigness and in weight, and the inertia which oppressed us before there was a great ball to roll has given place to the new difficulty of safely applying the tremendous energy of a mighty ball in motion. Rejecting the attitude of a wise old man apprehensive about something; new, 2l6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington and without pessimism, of which I have not a grain, I am going to query, tonight, whether our information is not more general than our discrimination in its appHcations, whether the diversity in our situations ought not to play a freer part in the determination of our policies, and whether we ought not even to be upon our guard against a uniformity of educational organization which may either overreach or fall short of the educational need of imperative situations. And, notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, I am going to try to reason out and lay down some propositions upon which we may stand concerning desirable uniformity in the logic, and diversity in the instrumen- talities, of American education. ILLUSTRATIONS IN UNIFORMITY A dozen years ago the president of the University of Illinois had some small part in securing the appropriations for a fine new library building, and then indulged in some pardonable reflections about where it should stand. It was his first experience in the matter of placing buildings in Illinois. He reasoned that it might well be placed so that it would ** quarter" a little upon the course of the sun, so that the rather plain stack-rooms in the rear might be as unobtrusive as possible, and so that the front, when taken in connection with other buildings, might present a sort of crescent to the main entrances to the grounds, and add a little oneness and warmth of feeling to what the architects call "the ensemble." He figured it out, had the plat staked out on the exact ground where all this might be accomplished, and made it all very graphic by causing ropes to be strung around the stakes, so that none could lose the effect. He procured the governor to come and look, and the great head of the state said that it was "good." He led the Board of Trustees to the scene and exploited to them the sentimental magnificence of the prospect. He could not fail to observe that they appeared to have some latent doubts about the matter, but he noted with satisfaction equal to his appreciation of their goodness that their skepticism was suppressed by their consideration for himself. Returning to the council chamber, they too, in formal resolution, pronounced it all "good." Then at high noon of the next day there was an alumni feast which was attended by revelry and mirth and much freedom of talk. In the midst of the hilarity one unsubmissive unregenerate got up and said only this and nothing more: "Before the trustees break ground for that library building, it is to be hoped that they will have sense enough to pull it around square with the w^orld;" and the uproarious acclaim which he evoked drove the information into the soul of the president that his ambitions and ideals about landscape gardening and architectural effect were being quickly prepared for a peace offering to the Illinois reverence for the cardinal points of the Illinois compass. His later information was correct. The ceremony was marked by sympathy for the sacrifice, but by entire firmness and determination; and that building stands upon an exact east and west line with its beautiful face squarely turned toward the mathe- Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 217 matical but evasive great north pole, with what seems to me a serious and worried look because the curvature of the earth defeats its eternal effort. Yet it was well. It is seldom that anything in which we are interested is as important as it seems to us at the time. It was better that the building should conform to common and harmless thought, than that it should for all time be obliged to encounter the universal standards of its owners about the fitness of things. There are some things that are not likely to be changed. The highways of New England will always follow the streams, seek the easy grades, wind about the mountains, and be grateful for the woods; no matter how long, or how crooked, or how heavy, the road may be. The highways of the prairies will always be as straight as an arrow, exactly a mile apart, both north and south and east and west, and they will never get in conflict with magnetism nor with mathematics. But in each case they advance on lines of least resistance, and adjust the advantages of the situation to the uses of the people. There are usages or whims, as well as mountains and streams, which cannot be changed. In the cemeteries about my New York home the graves are laid with reference to the size of the lot, and the trees that are upon it, and the number who are to occupy it, and without much thought of where the sun rises; but about my Illinois home the dead are laid on east and west lines, with the head to the west, so that when the trump of the archangel shall sound, the sleeper shall look to the east upon rising, lose no time in the bewilderment of turning around, and suffer no prejudice in the preferences of the eternal kingdom. It is better to conform to it than to be distressed by futile attempts to reform it. Preaching is a good thing, but much of it is wasted because irrational, unspirit- ual, or aimed at the unchangeable. Uniformity is often a good thing, but it will find its match in the manufactures of Connecticut. Multiformity is often a good thing, but diversified agriculture will not stir enthusiasm among the wheat growers of Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas, the corn growers of Illinois and Iowa, or the cotton growers of Georgia and Alabama. Ignorance is unpardonable. Information comes easily. But what is well depends upon conditions. Reason must deal with facts. Policies must adapt themselves to situations. No matter how informed one may be about a movement which has somewhere been successful, no matter how contagious is his enthusiasm, no matter how good the motive; it is all wasted if the thing cannot go where it is to be tried, or if it must cost in one way or another more than it can come to. If time is of no value, if energy is not occupied, if novices or geniuses are only wandering in intellectual forests and wondering about game, there is no harm : there may be possible good. But seasoned and inten- sive lives cannot wait upon mere possibilities; certainly not upon those that are too remote. Even discovery and invention have come from lives that were balanced and intense, that evolved theories that were rational, and that followed probabilities that were at least within the realm of realization. And no matter how much we owe to research, to discovery, or to inv«ntion, the 2i8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington world's work has been borne and the world's advance has been made by men and women who are able to see what may he done, and who have the force and the discrimination which can do it. NO OBSTACLES TO EDUCATIOI^ Education comes pretty near being the American universal passion. All the people believe in it. If that is not literally true it is so near it that no one can disbelieve in it without ostracism. If one is indifferent to it, it is because he is a mental toper or an intellectual degenerate. All the people believe in all the people having all they will take of it. If there is one who does not it is because he is un-American, out of sympathy with the fundamental philosophy of the nation. All the people believe in all kinds of education for all the people. That belief stirs some troubles of its own. Some do not stop to think whether the kind of education will go in a particular place, whether it will profit a particular people, whether it will make misfits or whether it may break the intellectual and industrial equilibrium of the country, and therefore impair the individual happiness and the moral and economic strength of the nation. Now do not infer too quickly that the speaker may be lost in some sort of a wilderness, may have become blinded to the lights of a lifetime by some stupe- fying and profane influences. Every boy and girl, every man and woman, in America, is to have the utmost of educational opportunity that the country, having regard to the national unity and the rights of all, can provide. Every- one is to be helped to the attainment of any distinct purpose which he may acquire. Everyone is to be given aid in forming his purposes, and cheer on the road to their realization. We are in no danger of ever thinking that lowly birth may be an obstacle to intellectual greatness. We shall be nearer right in thinking that high birth is a greater obstacle. We shall never think that one kind of training is good for one class, and that the people in another class are not to be allowed to partake of it; or that there is another kind of education which is suited to one class, and that none in another class can ever w^ant any- thing to do with it. The suggestion is so repugnant to the thinking of the country that it merits neither refutation nor consideration. The democracy, the very atmosphere of America dissolves social sets, redistributes professional and business inheritances, and intermingles the wealthier and the working classes, very quickly. The boy of poor parents has about as good a chance as any other boy to be the rich man of tomorrow : the child of the wage-earner has as much prospect of intellectual conspicuity or commanding influence in the next generation as has the child of the president of a university, or the president of the nation. Indeed, we carry our philosophy to such an extreme that it often puts an undue handicap upon the child of momentary prosperity. For- tunes in lands and securities, and in mental acquisition and in political pre- ferment as well, are not much transmitted, or they are so much divided in Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION the transmission, or are so dissipated by the inheritors, that they count but little. The exceptional legatee has burdens and troubles of his own. Not much but work counts. It may be by the hand, it may be mental, it may be moral. It counts most if it embraces all. It must be adapted to qualities and environment. It must reckon with conditions and possibilities. It must be incessant, sustained, disciplined, progressive. The worker must regard other workers: the work must articulate with other work. There must be ideals, but they must be rational. It matters little what the work is, if it is of a kind which the world wants done, and if the one who undertakes it really does it. It matters much if it is of no account, or if the one who undertakes it has no habit of taking care, no interest in the process, no pride in the finished product. If it is well done, no matter what it is, the world will appreciate the work and regard the man who does it. And more than by inheritance, more than by situation, more than by favor or by chance, the qualities and the worth of the man are determined by the measure and the fineness of his work. The efficiency of the worker, the fineness of the work, the consequent worth of the work to the country, and the reflex influence of the work upon the worker, turn very largely upon the free and natural, rather than upon the constrained, selection of work by the worker. To assure the results which are desirable he must choose for himself. Of course he must have incentives and inspirations; of course he must have lights and opportuAities; but he must be left to his internal inclinations, tastes, and gifts, as well as to his external inspirations and opportunities, to choose the work which he wants to do, if there is to be much promise that he will do it well enough to be happy in the doing of it, and thus make it of some account to other people and there- fore of more account to himself. I make bold to raise the query whether the educational system of America has not had an overwhelming trend which has taken away much of the freedom of choice and naturalness of selection which are necessary to the best individual and public results from the adaptation of people to work. I suggest a question as to whether we do not have an abnormal, indeed an alarming, number of misfits between workers and work. It might not be amiss to go even farther and raise a question as to whether there is not something in the common thought and common ambitions of the country, and as a consequence something in the prevalent theories and plans of the schools, which actually leaves us with great quantities of work to do which goes undone, and also with great numbers of men and women who are not doing what they might do, and not doing much of anything anyway, when the very unfolding of their humanity depends upon the number of those who do tiring and productive work. Perhaps the difficulty, if there is a difficulty, may be expressed more clearly, and possibly a remedy may be signified, in this way. There are great, powerful, and productive nations where the overwhelming and successful policy is to keep the masses down. The laws are so made, the professions so guarded, 220 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington the expression of political opinion so obstructed, the political assemblies so unrepresentative, and the social classes so incrusted and segregated, that the door of opportunity is practically or completely closed to a child of the people. The thing is definitely fixed and steadfastly maintained in a way which will enable the few, and their children for indefinite generations, to enjoy privileges which they never earned, thru the political subordination and the physical labor of the multitude. We hold all that in abhorrence in this country. Our political fathers, no matter where our natural parents lived, determined that any law or usage which affected or continued such conditions must go down wherever the flag of the Union should signify the thought of the nation. We have not departed from the attitude of our fathers. We have worked out their philosophy in a largeness of fact and thru a wilderness of difficulties of which they never had the slightest expectation or conception. We are now committed to that philosophy, not only because it was the philosophy of the fathers, but because it has gained strength thru the difficulties it has experienced, and shown its beneficence thru its practical applications. We have undoubting confidence that we have the brains and whatever physical strength may be necessary to work it out completely, no matter how wide the territory over which the flag floats and no matter how many or how diverse the people who live beneath its beautiful folds. And we surrender no tithe of all this when we raise the question whether, in the severity of our determination to avoid the subordination of the many to the few in other lands, we have not gone too far toward the other extreme and advanced conceptions which, acting upon the susceptible and ambitious temperament of the people of the United States, have led too many to think that they can succeed by wits without work, and can manage the business of other people before there is evidence that they are able to manage their own. In our rhetoric and declamation every American is a king. This is idealistic but very often it is misunderstood. For any practical end it lacks the necessary discrimination between kings and between people. On the whole, it must be admitted that the kings have been rather a poor lot, and on the whole it must be said, if we say anything about it, that we have plenty of people who are kingly in that sense alone. In the theory, 'the intent, and the outworking of our pure democracy, every man stands equal with every other man in the making and the protection of the law. But that is far from all. The rest depends upon himself. As to the rest, he is unequal with other men. And the rest is largely in liquid state until it is given form and consistency in the schools. The schools are filled with fallacies. The boys are pointed to the million- aires, to the inventors and discoverers, to presidents of banks and railroads, to military and naval heroes, and to the presidency of the nation. One who lacks ambition for these places is deemed to be hardly worth the counting. Ambition, training in the culturing studies, wits, and luck are thought to be the stairs to eminence and glory. Yet the men who have reached altitudes Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION by such means are rare in the extreme, and with rare exceptions they have been unsubstantial and unreliable when they got there. The men who have attained eminence and held it securely have been hard, severe, long-continued, uncom- plaining, and unrelenting workers. The sign boards at the cross-roads in the courses of the schools have pointed the boys to professional occupations. The road to these seems easy to a boy, and it is a rare boy who will not choose the easier thing. Yet, as a good friend, a natural lawyer, an honored judge, and a senator of the United States, wrote in my autograph album when I was a law student, "The successful lawyer, above almost all other men, must earn his bread in the sweat of his brow." The physician who is not a system- atic, joyous, seasoned laborer is a dangerous character to have about your house. It is so with clergymen and engineers and bankers and merchants and all the rest who make any real impression upon life. The schools not only overlook or undervalue the processes which are essential to any success worth talking about in commercial, professional, and political life, but they are exceedingly undiscriminating about the situations in life which are of most account to the particular liver, as well as about the studies and processes and the hard labor by which they are to be reached. The man who has a craft, and comes somewhere near being the master of it, is to be envied in comparison with the man who has got into a bank or a print- ing office and cannot get to the fore in it. And the man who has developed a farm, with all of its interesting and inspiring attributes, is a veritable king when compared with those who have taken rooms in the basements of the professions. Neither the successful craftsman nor the efficient farmer has to ask special favors. Both grow balanced and hardy thru the demands and the limitations of their work, and both are doing work which the world has to have. Both are as independent as need be, and independence makes for influence and respect in the common life. But the control and direction of children have been much relaxed, and we have had a pretty hard attack of something which has attacked educational values, rejected known roads, indulged in novel speculations which can neither be demonstrated nor disproved, which points to everything and gets nowhere. The trouble with the schools, certainly the lower schools (and there is trouble with the lower schools, at least) is that they lack definite aims, unless they are aims which ought not to appeal to more than a moiety of the people. They do not train into the child the habit of taking extreme care, and they do not demand clearness of process and completeness of result. They do not sufficiently recognize the imperative demands of labor and exactness as the essential basis of a national system of education. So much must come first, in any event, and after that there may be free choice when the child is old enough to make a choice. There is not only the lack of the essential founda- tion, but also of the opportunity for the subsequent free choice. The over- whelming influences of the schools are all in the direction of a superficial culture, altho sustain«d and successful work is the instrument of all true culture; 2 22 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington and of professional and managing vocations, altho the places are over-full. Children have to leave the schools to escape their trend. If they do not leave for that purpose, they certainly do leave because it is not made worth while for them to stay. But one-third of the children in the elementary schools continue to the end. Only a part of these go to the high schools, only one- third of those who go to the high schools remain beyond the second year, and only one-sixth to one-tenth of those who go continue to their graduation. All the rest drop out along the way, because the need of the children's help to earn the family support is pressing and because they think that it is more to their advantage to have their children leave school than to remain. It is not saying that a child should not have his free choice in determining what he shall do ; nor is it implying that he shall not be helped to any oppor- tunity for which he wants to try, to say that there is exclusiveness and repres- sion in such a situation, and that in the outworking of our democracy in our education the forcing of children to such an alternative as that must disappear. Freedom of choice does not imply that all our children shall have a literary or professional training; it does not demand that in all parts of the country there must be the same kind or the same grade of schools; it does not demand that in its name children shall be guided into vocations that are overstocked, or for which they are not adapted; it does not demand, most certainly, that children shall be led into vocations that misfit them, or given the alternative of going without training for a vocation which they might want, and which it would be profitable for the country for them to have. The demand of our democracy is for equality of opportunity. We have gone too far or we have not gone far enough. We cannot avoid the question. We cannot escape the attitude of the Constitution: but perhaps we may understand it more perfectly. The demand of the economic situation and of common justice, that there shall be schools suited to the needs of all people and leading to all manner of voca- tions, will have to be heeded. The fact is that we men and women of the schools keep close track of one another. The news of the schools is all printed and we read it. We travel a great deal. We each undertake to keep up with all the rest. The discus- sions have all been of the same general character, and the projections have all been in one general direction. We have each added whatever subjects of a culturing curriculum the people would stand, and brought in all the incidental novelties the conventions could suggest. The school boards have been almost paralyzed. Obstacles to education are not allowed in this country ; but may not some obstacles to some education in some places be healthful ? There has been skepticism, but no one has felt just confidence enough in his skepticism to say bluntly, "Pull that building around square with the world before we go any farther about it." SCHOOLS TO SUIT CONDITIONS We are eternally conforming and standardizing. What we want is not schools that are alike, but principles that are fundamental and schools as Superinteudence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 22:1 diverse as the conditions are. Of course, all schools must have standards, but they must be standards of sense, standards of character, standards of informa- tion, and not standard or uniform courses, or uniform methods, for all the schools of a state or of the country. The universal comparisons between state systems and between city systems, and the universal effort to have as good as any other state or city has lead to results which are as remote as can be imagined from the needs of the greater part of the constituencies of the schools. What is needed is to bring the teacher and the parents and the children near enough together to make it possible for them to understand the needs and make the most of the possibilities of one another. For years the tendency of one enthusiast after another in the commu- nity has put more and more upon the schools. There are societies to effect everything that ever developed in a dream, and an average school superintend- ent or an ordinary school board is a weak defense against the onset of a society of enthusiasts, particularly of women enthusiasts. Politeness and platitudes have to suffice, where policemen and fortifications are necessary. Newspapers agitate, just as a matter of "newspaper policy," which means a policy which will sell more papers. A mere sentiment comes to be a cause of the people, and that which confuses and takes from the concentration and efficiency of the schools gains a place in their curricula. Authorship and the publishing business play a part in the multiplicity of studies, and a worse part in prolonging and attenuating studies beyond their right. The school life of the child is within limits of age. It is none too long. It is precious time. Whatever takes more than its right subtracts just so much from something else that is vital to the rounding-out of the child's life to its utmost. Whatever does not give him added power to do makes for insipidity and saps his strength. Say all we will, and say it truly, about a child needing a complex education to fit him for life in a complex civilization, the fact remains that the things which make for complexity should not be permitted to begin so early as to endanger his imperative need of oral and written language and of the simple processes of mathematics. We are a considerate and tolerant people. For a score of years good people whose minds seem to live in an inflated atmosphere have pretty nearly monopolized the attention in the schools where teachers are prepared. In the colleges and universities — their proper field, if they have a proper field— their doctrines and propositions are rather sharply resisted by other departments, and the zone of their research and confusion is healthfully circumscribed. But ''researching" in the normal and training schools has few limitations, and the consequent uncertainty attains a density that brings average minds to prostration. The effect upon the young girl teachers is pathetic. They are not only called upon to do more things than they can do, in order to meet the demands of enthusiasts, but they are invoking the aid of occult sciences, and feel obliged to accomplish ends by constrained methods and devices which are destructive of that freedom which is the essence of effectiveness in teaching. 224 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington Useless illustration and exploitation consume time, if they do not obscure thr point and defeat the end. Out of it all the children do not have trained into them the ability to do some particular thing. The parents are confounded. The school boards have become pretty nearly helpless. The general public is restless and anxious. It is imperative that there be a closer adaptation of schools to situations, and that schools have more and longer control over children and move forward to definite ends. There is being much said now, and it is necessarily said, about the development of technical and trade schools in the towns. But that is but one manifestation of a wider difficulty. The schools must meet the needs of a particular people, whether these needs are high or low, academic, professional, commercial, agricultural, or manufacturing. We cannot expect the people to adjust themselves wholly to schools We must adjust the schools in very considerable measure to people. For some reasons it is better to describe a farm by saying that it is in the north- ern half of Section 20 in Township 9 in the north range No. 3, west of the 6th prime meridian, as they do in Nebraska, than it is to say that 83 acres, more or less, are in the town of Aroostock in the county of Skowhegan, and bounded by stone fences or lanes, monumented by a blazed tree, a deer's antlers, a fox's hole, or a red heifer, as they may do in the Maine woods. But one system will have to prevail until a better one comes in, and there are more important things than prime meridians in locating boundary lines, when the lands go down in the family, and you don't have to give, and nobody wants to take, a mortgage upon them. It is well if a people have got far enough to need and to support high schools and colleges, but if they have not, there is even greater need that they shall have elementary schools suited to their exact needs, and whether they have or not, their elementary schools must be adjusted to their conditions and look forward to their work, or the bottom will fall out of the high schools, or there will come an educational cleavage which is repugnant to that theory of government which has been the backbone of our prosperity and is the hope of our future. We hear a great deal about consolidating schools and carrying children long distances to central schools in order to have graded schools and finer buildings. It is well where the people with such lights as they have, or will have, want it so, but there is no pedagogical reason why it should be forced upon them. There are difficulties about children being carried several miles to school, and there are pretty strong reasons why it is well to have a school within walking-distance of every home. Graded schools have troubles of their own. A school does not have to be a big school in order to be a very good one. The teacher who has to reckon with the life of the family and the out- look of the child, may be, and often is, doing much better teaching than the teacher who is bent upon conforming her processes to the creed of a training school or the philosophy of the books, without such an understanding of doctrine as will enable her to know that dogma is not of much account where Superinteadence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 225 it fails to meet situations. The percentage of strong and balanced characters who come out of the country schools, where the teaching is more personal and direct, is greater than of similar characters growing out of schools where classi- fication is imperative and the teaching necessarily more impersonal and indirect. Modern conveniences are lessening the difficulties of the country schools. There is no overwhelming advantage in huddling people or pupils together more than they do it themselves under the necessities of the case. And it is a great pity that there is so much educational confidence or courtesy as to keep some doctrines about conformity in education from meeting with some- thing like the frigid reception which bulls about conformity in religion would encounter in the General Assembly of my church. Sweeping generalizations are as inapplicable in one field as in the other. This principle holds as good in the upper schools as in the lower ones. Some are "standardizing" American universities just now. You cannot standardize American universities any more than you can standardize the color of American apples, or the height of American women. There are apples that command the top of the market even tho they are not red, and there are women who are mighty, even tho they do not approach the alti- tude of the Broadway squad of the Metropolitan police. So there are colleges and universities which are first-class, even tho they have less than a thousand students and do not attempt many things that the larger ones make much of; and there are others which are second-class or third-class with two thousand or three thousand students, who are offered everything that can be named in an educational bill of fare. Classifying and standardizing are difficult and often dangerous processes in this country. They are impossible in American education. If it is a mere matter of association or congeniality, none will object, for that is a harmless matter of feeling and of tastes. If it is a means of educational helpfulness, it might well use better descriptive words. If it is a process of discrimination, of exclusiveness, of depreciation, then it must end where all meanness in education eventually does. There is no conclusive argument against the big college or the little college, the rich college or the poor college, the classical college or the industrial college. It is a question of fitness and efficiency, of adaptation and of accomplishment. No matter what other attributes it may have or may lack, that college is of the first rank in America which sends its flag farthest into the ranks of ignorance and meanness by turning out the largest percentage of true and productive men and women. A few years ago Harvard University put the entrance requirements at the schools of law and medicine upon the basis of an approved baccalaureate degree. That was well. The schools suffered somewhat in attendance, but advanced scholarship gained by it. Then other universities discussed it, some attempted it, and a small number accomplished it. It was all well enough. But there was an assumption in the discussion that a move which might be a good one at one institution must be good at another. That is not 226 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION IWashingtuii necessarily true. By far the greater number of professional schools could not exist upon that basis, and it is desirable that such of them as are honest and doing the best they can shall exist. All intending professional students cannot follow a prescribed course of scientific training until they are twenty- six or twenty-eight years old before they are allowed to begin practicing a profession, and all people cannot afford to pay the fees which professional men so trained feel entitled to exact. You may tell me that I am standing for the lower rather than the higher ideals in scholarship. No, I am standing for the rational, the serviceable, and the fruitful ideals in scholarship. I am standing for schools that can serve the country. I am glad that some institu- tions are reaching the highest altitudes, glad that the time has come when students no longer need to go to foreign universities for the very best instruction. But every school is to have its chance, and every student is to have his chance. You may well believe that the time will never come when all or nearly all of the great men in any profession will be enrolled in the alumni of a single professional school, no matter what its admission requirements may have been. A full proportion of the great men will always come from small or weak schools in which there is some ordinary teacher who fires their lives. Schools are to meet situations that exist, and uplift constituencies of their own. They cannot do that by merely copying or conforming. LACK OF AIM AND EFFICIENCY The advanced schools, or their departments, have become so much dif- ferentiated that each has a very definite aim. By the time students are old enough to enter them they have gained rather clear purposes, and they select the school and the department which can do for them just what they want to have done. That is so in some measure, though much less so, with the middle schools. They are too often afflicted with more of a desire to undertake the natural work of the colleges and the professional schools, which they cannot do well because they cannot have the instructors, the equipment, or the basis of preparation for it, than they are endowed with a proud ambition to do the legitimate work of schools of their grade, so that when pupils have finished, it is known that they are in possession of the information and the power to do some definite thing which can be given a valuation in the world of education and in the world of fact and of affairs. Still, the pupils who remain after the second year in the high school do begin the process of satisfying ambitions which have begun to take definite form; and if they are clear enough of vision and strong enough of purpose, they often find the helps which their particular ambitions stand in need of. There is practically nothing of this in the elementary schools. That is a most serious and menacing fact in American education. If it is said that there cannot be because of the immaturity of the pupils, it is answered that it is not so in other great national systems of education, and that the pupils are quite as immature there as here. The only aim in our lower schools is Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 227 the grade above, and the one above that, and the road leads either to intellectual culture without any definite vocational aims, or to employments that are professional or at least semi-professional in character. As a result the multi- tude tires of it. The minority follows it, and, notwithstanding the steadily increasing exactions, more gain access to the professional and managing voca- tions than is good for them, good for such vocations, or good for the country. But the majority quit the road all along the line because they cannot see that it is going to lead to any definite acquisition that is going to make it to their advantage to remain. It is a very common impression among the poor, and among some who are not so poor, that there is really more advantage to the child in going to work than in continuing in school. And if there was really work for them, and if they were actually being trained into it, how many of us could justly say that the conclusion is devoid of reason ? But the grave fact is that the 60 per cent, of the children who drop out of the elementary schools without finishing them are not prepared for any definite work, no matter how simple, and the work they find does not lead to their improvement because it is of a kind which grinds the heart and bone out of them for the enlargement of dividends. There are other facts associated with this one which must be mentioned but need not be argued. Any great work having relation to both sexes impera- tively claims the co-operative effort of both men and women. The number of women teachers, the consequent low basis of wages, the agitation about equal pay for similar work in spite of all economic and educational considera- tions, and particularly the pernicious manipulation of party politics by organi- zations of women teachers in the larger cities, is preventing, speaking generally, the stronger men from engaging in teaching, and is forcing out some who have already commenced. For obvious reasons it is a menace to that balance in the work of the schools which is imperative to the interests of both boys and girls who are to form ambitions and find employments in a balanced world. The doings of the primary schools in the great cities have undue influence upon the operations of the primary schools in the entire country, and this is particularly illustrated in the growing disposition to make a teacher's position a comfortable subsistence for life, protected by law, rather than an imperative and responsible instrument of common needs and of the best public opinion. Of course it has grown out of the very largeness of the system, and the unjust and reprehensible treatment which has ^metimes been inflicted upon teachers by weak, or worse than weak, superintendents and boards of educa- tion. It all illustrates the difficulties which justice and effectiveness have to encounter at the hands of democratic government, and it particularly exem- plifies the importance of thrusting all partisanship out of the management of the schools. These things contribute to a situation which wastes the lives of pupils. With the unnecessary studies, the undue prolongation of studies thru a series of ])ooks in a single study, and thru the undue emphasis upon mere 228 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington methods and exploitation; with the fact that the pupils are not reaching forward to some definite thing in which they are interested; with the further fact that the home is no longer of much help because the character of the home has changed, and because the work and processes of the schools are so changed that parents are unable to comprehend them, there is little wonder that the work is often behind the age of the pupil, as it is. Then there is the further fact that there is a very common national indifference if not repugnance to enforced attendance upon the schools. So there is no lack of explanation of the wastage in the work of our elementary schools, and of a percentage of illiteracy in the United States which exceeds that of any other favored nation in^the world. ''all men are created equal" What is the matter and what is to be done ? Our democracy has often been misinterpreted and misunderstood. It is not strange that it has been misinterpreted, because there has been no other democracy like it. Some- thing very important happened in this country on the 4th day of July, 1776, and because of that, some things even more important have happened since. Our independence enlarged the freedom of a people who inlierited and never gave up their full share of the liberty of the nation which had gone farther in making laws, and in defining human rights under human laws, than any other nation in the world. Independence of itself gave us some rather inflated ideas about freedom, and those ideas have been still more inflated by the rather loose thinking of the millions who have come to us with the notion that freedom was offered and exemplified by the absence of the army or of the police, more than by the free play of moral sense, the equal rights of all, not some, of the people, and binding obligations and limitations of moral as well as civic law. The trouble has been that in the prevalent thought freedom has been regarded without much thought of the foundations upon which it must rest, and the limitations within which it must operate, and the processes by which it must be enlarged, if it is to be secure or is to be enlarged at all. For a familiar but excellent illustration of this, see the difficulty we have in getting children into and keeping them in the schools. The attendance upon school is more irregular in the United States than in any other nation with whom we would be willing to be compared. It is not merely because there are people here who are indifferent to schools. There are such in all nations. It is not because we have more of these than other peoples have. It is because the measure of control is less here than there, and because of the common misunderstanding in this country of what freedom truly is, and of how it is to be retained or enlarged. In a word, it is because public sentiment is not quick about seeing the need of, or keen about sustaining the processes for, enforcing attendance upon the schools. We hold out more freedom of choice than other peoples. Our schools attempt more than theirs. They do what they undertake more completely than we. The habit of sending all children to school is much better established with them than with us. It has been I Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 220 established by law and by force. Our fallacious reasoning about freedom forces upon us a percentage of illiteracy several times larger than that of any other very well-organized and well-governed country in the world. What is to be done? Laws and educational systems — and educational systems are one expression of laws — have to be recast frequently in order to correspond with the growth and progress of peoples. It is not necessary to conclude that our national and political fundamentals are wrong, as some seem disposed to do. It is only necessary to give those fundamentals a rational interpretation and erect a more perfect superstructure upon them. One says, ** Everybody who is well informed now sees that the declaration that 'all men are created equal' is only a glittering platitude." This is not true. That phrase was neither perversity nor a pleasantry. Far from its being mere rhetoric or bombast, it is, in my conception of the great soul of the nation, a tremendous basic fact, and I am proud of being one of the people who have confidently entered upon and successfully moved along the rugged road to its most complete realization in human history. I do not believe that the men in the Continental Congress were capable of mere bumptiousness or that they were incapable of expressing what they intended in very good English phrase. Of course, their manner of expressionVas of their day and generation. Within that limitation they succeeded very well in expressing the things to which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Has anyone ever supposed that, when they declared as a political truism that all men are created equal, they intended to say that men are equal in height or in width or in weight ? Has anyone supposed that they intended to say that all men are equal in the tenseness of their feelings, or in the direction and the strength of their thinking ? Or has anyone imagined that they intended to be understood as thinking that all men are equal in their possessions, their attributes, or their opportunities ? Washington's armies fought for no such idle contention, for no such absurd ideal, as this. It was a lawyer's phrase. It was the phrase of good lawyers and it was a good phrase. The lives and training of the men who framed it, the only logical hypothesis upon which it can be made consistent with all the other things they said, and the only interpretation which makes the Declaration worth the struggle of the Revolu- tion—all combine to make it clear that the laws of this country were to guar- antee all men and women an entire equality of legal protection and legal right, that the common power should not be used to keep one down nor to lift another up, and that the laws of the land should articulate with God's justice in holding out to everyone the legal right to the equal chance to make the most of himself. All that we have to do in order to enable our schools to promote our national ideals is to go back to the fundamentals of our political faith, square our I theories with their obvious intent, and create instrumentalities which enable rational ideals to run their natural course, as the waters of the uplands follow their even channels to the sea. 230 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington any law of the government or any usage of the people. It is not to be long hindered by the lack of educational instrumentalities which may aid it. Of course, the large factor is in the personal qualities which are looking for a chance, which can recognize a chance when they see it, and which have wits, and force, and endurance, and patience enough to make the most of it. But these are not the only factors. A child's destiny is not settled in this country by the circumstances of birth. It is a great thing to live in a land where experience proves that riches quite as much as poverty, the city quite as much as the country, and conceit quite as much as necessity, are barriers on the roads to the elevations. But even this is not all. A child's future is not to be clouded or obstructed by any assignments which a teacher may make, by any false valuations of the prizes of life, by any fallacious theories about the kind of success which is of the most worth, by any wasting of his time in order to accom- modate the rigidity of an organization, or trying out the vagaries of pedagogical speculation, or by any forced misfits which must logically follow official, legisla- tive, or professional misconceptions of the relations of our democracy to the free opportunities of men and women. It is time to stop practicing upon children in the schools; it is time to stop implying that work with the head is better than work with the hands ; it is time 'to stop forcing them into grooves which satisfy notions that are too common, but in most cases lead to a loss of every kind of efficiency and to ends which are alike humiliating to the individuals most con- cerned, and opposed to the general welfare of the nation. It is time to put the emphasis upon work, no matter what it is about; it is time to inspire expert- ness, no matter what in; it is time to help qualities adapt themselves to produc- tivity, no matter in what direction. Charity is not to be confused with the work of the schools. The right to an education is inherent. With that right the child must sink or swim, and more will swim if there is no confusion about it. But the schools must reach every child, no matter whether his parent wills it or not. We must have more definite aims, and we must assure more con- crete results. We may expect the complexity of the educational system to meet the complexities of our modern civilization, but in some way each school must have a simpler life which will help, and not confound, all who are con- cerned in it. Every American child must have an open, free, clear, legal, American chance. So far as he is constrained or guided, it must be only in aid of his own freedom and in the direction of his own best possibilities. UNIFORMITY IN PRINCIPLES To help everyone gain his best chance, we must know what we are after. We must have a better understanding of the principles which we are trying to make good. Every child, everyone in the land, must be recorded, to the end that his rights may be assured. Everyone must have an elementary education, and before everything else an elementary education must mean the power to read and write and master the simple processes of mathematics Superintendence] UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN EDUCATION 231 The school must have equal respect for every manner of work. It must know that without application and endurance there is no hope, and that with them there will be some result of just as much moment as any other result which it might have gained. The work of the school must have definite aim, and its ends must be assured. There is too much scattering. Before a child is permitted to leave the school it must be known that he has a definite possession which can never be taken from him. The schools must carry him as far as, under the conditions of his life, the schools can be of help to him. The schools must train for every vocation for which there is any reasonable demand, and the child must be under the control of the school until there is ground for confidence that he has some need of finding his chance, some desire and application, some fitness for employment which will enable him to begin to earn a living. The child must be allowed his free election of vocation after he has acquired the simpler work of the elementary schools. But he must know that he is not to drop out and not to be allowed to waste his time, at least until he reaches an age or a situation where the case is apparently helpless and hopeless. The work of each school, being simpler and more definite, must be more intensive. Unnecessary time is consumed. It is worse to waste the time of a child than to take away any other right that he may have. He must get the larger part of his culture thru his work. It will be a finer and truer culture. Culture that comes thru mere instruction is well, but it is secondary and must wait upon the essentials. The same with mere information. If he has the elements which give him the power to get it, he will get it when he needs it or when he wants it. If he does not, the public cannot help it. All the children of the United States are entitled to be taken out of the list of the illiterates and to be taught to do some definite thing, and to be made to know that their success depends upon their doing it better than others do. Then the unexpected and the surprising successes will doubtless be multiplied, and whether they are or not, the nation will be the stronger for it. DIVERSITY IN MEANS AND METHODS With some reasonable agreement about the measure of opportunity which the educational activities of the nation are bound to hold out to every American child, and with our abundant knowledge of what is going on in every part of the country, there will be all of the uniformity desirable if we encourage the freest diversity and individuality in means and methods. It is not necessary that the schoolhouses be of the same height and color. They do not all have to have heating plants that balk when called upon for special effort, and forbid an open window at all times. The schools do not all need to have identical courses of study, and there is no reason why they should use the same books. The teachers need not have the same convolutions in their brains that have formed in the brains of those physiological psychologists who fall down in 232 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington their physiology and get beside themselves over their psychology. It is of less moment what one knows when he enters a school than what he knows when he leaves it. It is enough if he has the power and the will to do the work. With some reasonable promise of that, he is to have his chance. The most unpromising freshman often develops into the particular star of the Commencement morn- ing. There are to be standards, but they are to be the standards of individual institutions. The degrees of all of the colleges ought never to be expected to represent the same thing. We are to prevent fakes and frauds. It is well for a state to protect academic terms from such abuse by fixing the attributes which an institution must have before it can hold itself out to be a high school, an academy, a college, or a university. But being within the legal require- ments, and being honest, it must find its" own level and abide its own doings. The pupil, the student, and the teacher are to use the means they have or can get, in their own way, to their own advantage, and to the common good. THE FUNCTION OF THE SCHOOL IN TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT • MARGARET E. SCHALLENBERGER, PRINCIPAL OF THE TRAINING DEPARTMENT STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, SAN JOs£, CALIFORNIA Few people think. Man is born into a religious, social, and political world. If his mother be a Presbyterian, he is a Presbyterian; if he is bom under the Stars and Stripes he is predestined to believe in the equality of man and to shout lustily with his fellow-countrymen the battle-cry of freedom. In reality he is no more a Presbyterian than a Methodist, no more a free man than a slave. He is merely living in the atmosphere of Presbyterianism and his mental action — such as it is — is conditioned by the significance of the flag which floats over him. There may be occasional slight movements of the gray matter, but if snapshots of brain formation could be taken from time to time thruout life tlie pictures would be almost identical, for the activity in the brain cells is never sufficient to change the pattern of their arrangement. Whose fault is it ? Largely yours and mine. But we educators think ! Some of us, yes, and so did the mediaeval philosophers when they disputed about how many angels could stand on the point of a needle. It has frequently been pointed out that the progress of civilization is not marked by a steadily upward curve, but that there are great heroic periods in which such powerful thinking has been done that the very foundations of society have trembled and the solidly built pillars and posts of accumulated thought have swayed and fallen like slender twigs. Invariably this tremen- dous upheaval has been the work of the few, and immediately these periods have been followed by an almost slavish idolatry of the many to the "new thought," or what is worse, by an ignorant unemotional acceptance of it as truth. Always miniature heroic periods are in progress. Always there are the few who are thinking and the many who are thought for. We educators who, Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT ———____ ^63 like all the rest of the world, are thus classified into thinkers and thought for, fall into our places naturally, and it seems to us logically, with a certain calm conviction that because it always has been so these positions are a part of the eternal fitness of things. We do not seem to realize that it is our function not only to think, but to think to some purpose, that purpose being the pro- duction of thought in others, whoever the others may be. If these statements are accepted even thinking educators may be thoughtless. Neither the best school principals nor the most brilliant and painstaking superintendents are altogether thoughtful; if they were they would provoke more disputation and receive less adoration. But altho it is true that as a rule few people think, on the other hand there may be conditions physical, civic, or religious that stir into violent action even the most sluggish intellects; and then we have whole communities thinking out loud. Oregon, occupied during the last three years with the prosecution of those concerned in the gigantic land frauds of the Northwest, has succeeded in convicting more than two dozen men, among them a United States attorney, a United States senator, and a congressman. Oregon today is thinking out loud. And San Francisco, dearly beloved city of our Golden West, laid waste by earthquake, girt round by fire, and betrayed by her own self-chosen rulers and trusted citizens; San Francisco, the proud warden of the Golden Gate, bowed down with sorrow, humiliated, trembling with indignation, but refusing to be conquered by any combination of circumstances; San Francisco, aroused, alert, sadder and wiser; San Francisco, too, is thinking out loud. And all the world is listening, but, unfortunately, not to learn. San Francisco is not a bad city — as cities go; she is better today than she has been for long years; far better than other cities which have not yet begun to think. There is more interest in civic affairs, there are more "good citizens" in California today than there have ever been in the course of her history, because there are more people thinking. Bartly P. Oliver, foreman of the grand jury that indicted Abraham Ruef, the city boss, and Eugene Schmitz, the corrupt mayor, and a long list of business men and city oflficials for extortion, said to Lincoln Steffens: I don't know whether this work will have done any good to San Francisco .... but it has done good to us jurymen. I wish the law required twenty or fifty thousand men on a grand jury. If that many citizens could sit there as we have, see what we have seen, hear what we have heard, they would all become good citizens; citizens first, I mean, and business men and heads of families second. They would save San Francisco. Not fifty or even twenty thousand men sat on this grand jury, but hundreds of thousands of men followed with keen interest the problems with which the grand jury were confronted, and, in following, did, perhaps, the most profound thinking of their lives. The result is even now apparent. San Francisco, knowing her sins; San Francisco, confessing her sins; San Francisco, publishing her sins; San Francisco, repenting her sins; San Francisco, atoning for her sins, is a better city to-day — God bless her ! — than she has ever been before. Let us be fair. All of our great cities are full of corruption. Not one of them would "show up" well under the searchlight of a Heney, a Langdon, a 234 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington Bumes, and Spreckels. And smaller communities are not better; they are merely untried. What has all this to do with the subject under discussion — The Function of the Schools in Training for Right Conduct? Everything. These cities and communities are made up of men and women trained in our schools. There is no evading the question of our responsibility. To be sure we can dodge like cowards behind the high board fence of excuse and lay a large part of the blame upon the home, the church, the press, the stage, the saloon, and the community at large. These excuses may be valid enough, but it is not "good form" for us to make them. The individual continually explaining why he has not done and why he cannot do as his reason and conscience dictate is mentally and morally dead, and it would be better for the world if he were physically dead; there would be more room left for the doers. What is true of an individual in this respect is true of an institution. It goes without saying that there are excuses to be made for the failure of the schools to produce true citizens, but in the name of all that is in good taste, let us not be the ones to mention them. The public school, then, to whom the state intrusts its children for training, is not succeeding in the moral training. What are we going to do about it ? That is what we have met here from all parts of our country to consider. That is what we are here to think about. We cannot hope to do much in a few short hours, but may we not search out some of the vulnerable points in our teaching and aim our arrows at those points ? May we not offer one or two suggestions as to method of procedure ? A. In the first place it will be necessary to agree upon a few fundamental principles. Training for right conduct means training for good citizenship, and training for good citizenship means training for social efficiency. There seems to be absolute unanimity of opinion among those who have given the subject most thought that social efficiency is the meaning of all education. All that the boy is in school, all that the man is in the world means social efficiency or social unfitness. Schoolmen, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists are agreed upon this major premise. B. This being true it follows that enormous emphasis should be put upon training for right conduct and that this emphasis to be most valuable should be given by the right people, at the right time, and in the right way. I. Who are the right people to train our hoys and girls in good citizenship ? Anyone of average intelligence who devotes even an hour to the answer of this question, dwelling upon it earnestly, honestly, and thoughtfully, will know that the right people are not necessarily the holders of teachers' certificates, or the proud possessors of normal-school diplomas, or of college degrees, even if the latter contain the euphonious letters M.A. or Ph.D. We spare you analysis of the ideal teacher for the training of citizens, not, to be honest, from lack of time, but from lack of ability to do the subject justice. A few points, however, might profitably be mentioned. First, then, our ideal teacher Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT knows about things, knows a little about many things, and a good deal about one or two. Secondly, the j-ight man to be a trainer of American citizens is the one who voluntarily chooses to be a teacher; he has not been driven into the teaching ranks by force of circumstances, because he has failed to make a successful lawyer, or because he hopes to make one. He is proud of his calling and embraces every opportunity to advance it. He thinks more deeply and more often upon the meaning of education than upon the logical sequence of a course of study. He is sympathetic in his attitude toward children, remembers how it felt to be a boy, and believes in what Chester W. Rowell calls "the glory of youth." He is so happy in his work that he fre- quently forgets he is earning a salary. He has not obtained his position by a "pull," nor does he countenance this method of placement in others. Being a citizen in a democracy he does not take upon himself the prerogatives of an autocrat. And last, but not least, he is not merely a schoolman, but a man among men, interested in the general welfare of the community, taking his part actively and thoughtfully in the duties of citizenship, never neglecting his obligation to vote for the best man. This last point is important. How can he hope to impress upon his boys the responsibilities of citizenship if he himself is indifferent to one of its most binding obligations ? It is his very participation in the civic problems of his country that makes him a fit inter- preter of the fundamental principles underlying a democracy. Wide awake and patriotic himself, he discusses with his boys and girls the essentials of good government in the home, the school and the state, enriching the dis- cussions with concrete current illustrations that he can obtain only in active political life and vitalizing them by an enthusiasm, a personality, if you please, that no amount of poring over facts in the latest textbooks could give him. Therefore, in behalf of the state, we beseech you, principals and superin- tendents here assembled, when placing men in your schools to select big, honest, clean, whole-souled voting men. Now let us be consistent. Statistics show that only 24 per cent, of the teachers of our public schools in the United States are men. In the New England states the proportion is much lower, about 8 per cent., and there is a steady decrease from year to year thruout thfe country. About three-fourths of the training then for social efficiency or, in other words, for good citizenship, must be done by women. Where are they to drink from the fountain of interest? How are they to be brought to think deeply upon questions of civic purity ? How are they to widen their personalities ? Where are they to obtain that subtle but essential qualification of a good teacher, prestige ? Do we not say over and over that impression without expression is futile, that patriotic emotion without action is despicable ? Obviously then it were better for women teachers to have no impressions regarding civic questions and no emotions. You may have observed a few such women in our pub- lic schools. Would it be surprising if it were found that they were the first to find the weight of their souls unbearable and to part company with them 236 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington at the schoolroom door; if they were the first to become infected with what Dr. Frederic Burk, in a recent essay, aptly, if, somewhat inelegantly styles "the dry rot" ? But this we know, present conditions of political life do not tend to make women the most intelligent citizens possible, yet women do the greater part in training citizens. 2. Training for right condiict in the schools should he given at the right time. — What is the right time? At a superficial glance this seems easy to determine. Beginning with the child's entrance into the schoolroom, it ends with his departure. This statement rolls off the tongue too glibly to carry with it much meaning. It is one of those dangerous ready-made, thought-destroying propositions. If the aim in training for right conduct is to be social efficiency, then its expression is manifold. Shall all the forms of conduct be taught to all of the children all of the time, or is there a develop- ment and growth in the moral life corresponding to that which conditions our action as regards the child's physical and mental life ? Undoubtedly there is, and tho here is a great field for legitimate child-study, yet enough has been done to establish the general law and to give us a basis for thoughtful pro- cedure. To attempt to give to the six-year-old child the principles of good government underlying school and family life would be nonsense, while it would be equally foolish to expect of an upper-grade boy or girl the same kind of obedience exacted of the first-grader. The adolescent period so tur- bulent and sensitive requires the most skillful and delicate treatment, and calls into play the teacher's widest experience of life, understanding of Utera- ture, and sympathy with youth. Each group or grade of children has its own moral problems, and each has its right time for their solving. No human being, save the teacher herself, can tell just when this time is to come, but she should know what her special problems probably will be and that there is a right time for their solving, and should educate herself to recognize the time and to be ready to meet it. The great point is to choose the time when the children can best be led to think upon the problem. But aside from the fact that children can be grouped in the large, accord- ing to their mental development, and trained in right conduct, there are those who need individual attention. The right time for them is not in the presence of the group. Indeed most children need private conferences oftener than we realize. The mere separation from the others, and the setting aside of a special time for a personal interview emphasizes the importance of the subject, tends to arouse deeper thought, and impresses the child with the delicate feeling of the teacher. No one understands this selecting of "the psycho- logical moment" better than the wise and tender mother of whom the hero- ine of The Widow O^Callaghan's Boys is an excellent example. You remember how, wishing to get the willing consent of her eldest son, Pat, to a plan, upon the success of which depended the general welfare of the family, but which demanded on his part a real sacrifice, she waited impatiently until evening when the other children were in bed, soliloquizing during the day as follows: I Superintendencel TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT o-,^ "^^ There's toimes to be spakin' and toimes to be kapin' stiUl Niver a word mu«t I be sayin' till the rest of 'em's abed, and it's hard waitin', so it is. It's my belafe that's what makes some b'ys so unruly— takin' 'em at the wrong toime. Sure and b'ys has their feeUn's loike the rest of the world. Spake to 'em by their lone silves when you've aught to say to 'em. There's niver a man of 'em all, not even Gineral Brady himself, would loike bein' bawled at in a crowd about somethin' that needed thinkin' over. She speaks truly; if we want right conduct, we must first obtain the '^thinkin' over," but too often the being "bawled at in a crowd" destroys the "thinkin' over," at least of the question under consideration; it has been known to start a very vigorous line of thought, however, concerning the boy's opinion of the teacher. There is another sort of right time, a time conditioned by the needs and ideals of the age. The twentieth century has its own special virtues and vices and sins, the product of new desires, temptations, opportunities, and responsi- bilities. Our moral catechism, while founded upon the everlasting principles of brotherly love, is a much larger volume than is found between the covers of the little primer of Rules for Righteousness, written when life was largely restricted to the experiences to be found in a community bounded by a day's journey on horseback, and in which all the inhabitants lived the simple life. New conditions are arising every day, tending more and more to confuse the thoughtless and weak-minded as to what is right conduct, and giving opportu- nities for the socially unfit to riot ad libitum in selfishness, greediness, criminal negligence, thievery, and even murder. Partnerships of good and bad quali- ties, of right and wrong action in the same individual, definite partnerships entered into for the purpose of "getting on" in the world are among the most prominent evils of our day. A man entering into such a partnership with himself makes his virtues the tools of his vices. Smug respectability, certain forms of generosity, and even of fair dealing, temperate habits, and exem- plary conduct as regards family life leave a man free to exercise his ingenuity in the adulteration of foods, the erection of unsanitary buildings, the manu- facture of unsafe machinery, the slavery of little children, the obtaining of special business privileges, the exemption from legitimate taxation, the bribery of public officials, in other words leave him free to lie, to steal, and to murder. Professor Edward A. Ross in his brave little book. Sin and Society, describes for us most graphically this new American variation. He names him the criminaloid, and he tells us why we suffer him. He says : The real weakness in the moral position of Americans is not their attitude toward the plain criminal, but their attitude toward the quasi-criminal. The shocking leniency of the pubUc in judging conspicuous persons who have thriven by anti-social practices is not due, as many imagine, to sycophancy It is due neither to sycop.hancy nor unthinking admiration of success, but to perplexity. If this countenance of immorality by the people is due to their perplexity; if the state is calling at this special period of its history for civic reformers, then the school must clarify thought and must answer the call. It must send out citizens prepared to meet the crimin^loids; sane, clear-headed 238 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington fellows, honest and fearless as our Heney, who will tear away the masks of these "grafters'* and reveal the hideousness beneath. But the state needs not only educated leaders, but also educated followers. Not every boy and girl can be trained for leadership, but we can at least do much to relieve the public mind of perplexity. We can teach our children to look behind masks and to call things by their right names. We can substitute knowledge for ignorance, certainty for douh)t, clearness for confusion. We can teach our children to think upon the problems that need to be solved in their own day. And this brings us to one of the most difficult details of the subject with which the school is confronted: that of the time for the teaching of right conduct in relation to the daily school program. Shall it have a fixed place among the other school disciplines, or shall it be taught incidentally as occasion suggests or demands ? It is, of course, true that we should train for social efficiency all the day through, that each subject is but a means to this end, otherwise we may very well be educated (if one may thus misuse the word) criminals instead of citizens. This utilization of subject-matter selected apparently merely to give mental and physical efficiency in the interests of social efficiency is admirably treated in several books, published within the last five years, and it is to be hoped that teachers may not only read but heed what is said therein. The teacher who even attempted the utilization of subject-matter selected apparently merely to give mental and physical effi- ciency for the teaching of social efficiency could not fail to keep before her own mind, at least, the true goal of education and that would be a great point gained; for the truth is that the rank and file of our teachers^ while acknowl- edging as a logical deduction the supremacy of right conduct as above what passes for right arithmetic or right geography, yet do not demonstrate their so-called belief in actual practice. It is probably partially due to the fact that only the best teachers are able to teach in this way. The others moralize, and — the sentence is stronger unfinished. All teachers possess, however, that evasive, unanalyzable characteristic called personality, and the teacher's personality is with the children literally all the time, leading always toward or away from right conduct. Far more of a point should be made in the education and selection of teachers of personality. Personalities can be strengthened, widened, and made beautiful. Trainers of teachers are much to blame when they graduate weak, narrow, ugly personalities. But, taking our schools as we find them today, taught by men and women intellectually brilliant, average, and dull, technically trained, self-trained, and untrained, earnest and careless, enthusiastic and blase, shall we recommend that training for right conduct have a definite place upon the school program ; shall it be taught incidentally or shall it be taught directly at all ? To hark back to one of the first conclusions of this paper, the schools at large are not making a success of their training in right conduct. We must do something about it. Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT 2^0 Mr. Frank Cramer in his admirable essay on ''Moral Training in the Public Schools" says : Nothing like a general effort has been made as yet to formulate the requirement that can properly be laid upon the schools, or the materials and methods with which to meet them. We are standing now with our feet in the edge of the water and shiver- ing, like the naked little boy, more from fear than cold, deterred from going back by shame and from going in by the goose-flesh conviction that we shall never be able to do it Swimming is best learned by going into deep water Though we are still very far from a general agreement about what things ought to be taught, how they should be taught and the order of teaching in our purely intellectual work of the schools, yet enormous progress has been made. The inference is, of course, that the same progress will be made in moral training if only we once seriously begin. And we must begin with the same solemn earnestness with which we begin any great undertaking. If only we will listen to the warnings of the state, if only we will watch those who are fighting the great social evils of the world, if only we will observe the sad confusion and perplexity in the minds of our well-meaning citizens, if only we will follow the lowering of our business ideals and their influence upon our politics, surely we who have so much opportunity and ability for the righting and preventing of these wrongs for the state will not dare to wait. Of course we shall make mistakes, of course we shall make failures; but the trend of the curve will be upward. We ought long ago to have taken definite action regarding training for right conduct. When we are all thinkings then the actual work will begin. What I mean is to make it a great national move- ment, for no one is so ignorant as not to know that heroic work is being done here and there thniout the country and especially in the great cities; but it needs big supplements, the inspiration of big thought and the strength of mighty co-operation. A form of incidental training for right conduct — if training it can be called and if right conduct it can be called — ^has always existed even in the worst of our public schools, the conduct being merely action conformable to the will of the teacher in order that his work might be made easier, and the training therefore being appeal tp fear of bodily pain. The incidental method, then, tho radically different in character today, has the sanction of custom behind \i, and doubtless some of the very best training for right conduct in our schools today is done in this way. Education itself is sometimes defined as ability to see and to seize opportunity; and the thoughtful teacher, alert, wise and tactful, seeing and seizing the incidents of the everyday life and turning them to account for the inculcation of principles of government and norms of conduct is fulfilling her duty nobly. The careless teacher, on the other hand, allows the "psychological moment" to pass by unheeded, crowded put by the petty details of the day's work — examinations, promotions, or the best method of teaching partial payments. The dull teacher is blind— she does not see the opportunity; the blase teacher is indifferent— she does not seize the oppor- mnity; and the untrained teacher is crude and deals with cases requiring the 240 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington utmost delicacy so hurriedly and thoughtlessly that she does more harm than good. Indeed, the greatest adverse criticism to be brought to bear upon this method is that it does not require sufficient thought on the part of the teacher. Even those who use it most successfully are apt to depend entirely upon the thought furnished by previous experience vitalized by the inspiration of the moment; but too often this inspiration, being merely the excitement of a passing emotion, containing no life-giving quality and ready-m.ade thought, even if it be one's own, is deadening. The incidental method of training for right conduct cannot be universally accepted as all-sufficient, and a definite portion of the day must be set aside — perhaps the first part of a morning hour before fatigue sets in — for the thought- ful discussion of ethical questions. What ethical questions ? The teacher, aided by the principal or superintendent, must decide The discussions must never take the form of sermons, nor should the subjects for discussion be made to order for the teacher, following a logical chart or scheme. That is the way we used to teach the other school subjects until psychology and so- ciology taught us better. Formalism is the death-knell of originality or enthusiasm. I know a city in which the superintendent prides himself upon the fact that at any selected hour of the day every child of a certain grade is being taught exactly the same lesson ; if it be the arithmetic hour the children are solving the same problems; if the language hour they are learning the same poem; if reading, they are reading the same selection, etc., etc. Could any device serve better to take the sparkle, the initiative, the very thought out of a teacher? These discussions then must not be logically blocked out; on the other hand they must not be haphazard and must fit in with the life of the child. They must be those that in general appeal to a particular group of children. They must meet the needs of the age. They must not be too hard or too easy of solution, for above all other virtues they must possess that of arousing and sustaining thought. A teacher's notebook for the jotting down of subjects based upon concrete instances awaiting their future arrange- ment is helpful. But it is not proposed at this point to enter into a considera- tion of the method of conducting these conferences, but rather to suggest that we decide to give some definite portion of the day to this work. To be sure, the careless teacher will be careless, the dull teacher will be dull, and the blase teacher, blase. The regularity of the discussions will, however, serve to emphasize the carelessness, the dullness, and the blase attitude. It will bring these facts insistently to the attention of the superintendent and of the community, and may result in the removal of the inefficient. On the other hand, the necessity for having something to say will force the lazy teacher to think, the mediocre teacher to think more deeply, while the wise and thought- ful teacher will be given time to do artistically what she has been hurriedly pushing thru ''between classes," and best of all, it will allow time for the children to think, to weigh evidence, to study conditions, to suspend judg- ments, to clear up perplexities. Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT _J4i 3. Training for right conduct should he done in the right way.—\i we could be sure of training for right conduct being done by just the right people and at just the right time— in every sense of the words ''right time"— then the right way would follow logically, and we should be living in Utopia. But America is still some distance from Utopia; we cannot be certain of either the people or the time, so it is necessary to speak of ways of training. In what ways then shall we train for right conduct ? There is time to con- sider but a very few, but the training should be 1. In a way to arouse and sustain thought. 2. In a way to produce excitement. 3. In a way to stimulate good action, rather than to emphasize bad. 4. In a way to develop proper humility. 5. In a way to develop responsibility for the welfare of others. 6. In a way to form standards of conduct appHcable anywhere. 7. In a way to produce right conduct. I. In a way to arouse and sustain thought, — Few people t^ink. The schools are to blame. The great need of our day is clearness of vision. Not many people aspire to be "arch fiends," yet a goodly number attain that distinction. Hiding under the cloak of respectability, conforming to many of the accepted principles of good citizenship, probably temperate in habits— that was one of Abraham Ruef's striking virtues — clean physically,. generous to the few, providing liberally for the family, loyal to the clan, the criminaloid's ambition is ever to make a good appearance among his fellows, to bear a good name, to be known as a good citizen. Even his crimes are disguised under the term "business irregularities." Suggestion is a potent factor in condition- ing mental processes, and one can readily understand how such a man may not only persuade the world but even himself that he is really a pretty good fellow. Do we find anything analogous to this in our schools? Some of the most popular high-school fellows "crib," that is, lie; "swipe" anything from a physics' folder to a freezer of ice-cream, that is, steal; sign their parents' names to letters of excuse, that is, commit forgery; evade or defy laws made for the public good, that is, sow the seeds of anarchy. The boys do not commit these crimes in order to be bad, but rather in a spirit of daring or bravado. They do not look upon their misdeeds as crimes; under their new and catchy slang names, they are mere school "irregularities." What can we do about it? Suggestion is a potent factor in the conditioning of mental processes; it may be made to function for good quite as well as for bad conduct. Suppose at the time set aside for the training in good citizen- ship (one advantage of the selected time as opposed to the incidental method is that the questions involved can be approached more easily indirectly), suppose at this period a wise teacher could bring before his class the larger questions of business ethics and political honor in a series of inspiring, intellectual, serious, but not sentimental talks, illustrating freely from current events, and delicately carrying the discussion sometimes into the very border land of 242 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington school life, leading the class to think and letting them draw their own conclu- sions. His work would do much to dispel the clouds of ignorance in which boy mind is enveloped. I am thoroly convinced that if boys could be made to see that their "irregularities" were crimes they would not commit them. In a certain sense these sins against society are far more dangerous for society than the more personal vices of drinking and smoking, e.g., to which the schools have given always a good deal of emphasis. Heaven forbid that I should plead that our boys should not be wisely instructed regarding the effects of these drugs upon the growing body; but there are other worse vices to which we seem almost indifferent. The honest working man who takes a glass of beer with his luncheon is a prince of purity compared with a man like Abraham Ruef, even if the latter should never have tasted a drop of liquor in his life. These beginnings of sins — these sins themselves — committed in school life are sins against society, and our children must be led to think about them in this light. 2. In a way to produce excitement. — Training in right conduct must not be tame. Undoubtedly one of the greatest incentives to crime is the excite- ment involved. It must be interesting as mere intellectual gymnastics to lay big schemes of any sort. The scientist has his theories, the poet his dreams, the business man his plans, and the politician his diplomacies, and there must be great pleasure in watching their development, and enormous excite- ment in overcoming obstacles to their successful achievement. The fact that his schemes are laid for the purpose of duping and defrauding people falls into insignificance in the mind of the criminaloid when he considers the pleasure to be derived from their skillful manipulation, and final con- summation. Even lesser crimes partake of the same excitement. The sneak thief who deftly and perhaps artistically removes a man's watch from his waistcoat pocket undiscovered must experience a thrill that is akin to that of the valiant army officer skilled in military tactics crawling stealthily upon the enemy to suprise them unawares. Mentality is all of a kind; it is only the purpose for which mind functions that differentiates a saint from a sinner. Judge Lindsey tells us that he himself was tempted as a boy to rob a hen roost, not for the sake of the possession of the fowls in question, but largely from the excitement in it, and he frankly adds that he was preserved from the fulfilment of the act not by a realization of its wickedness but by an overpowering feeling of cowardice. Most of the vandalism committed on holidays and after school is due to this desire for something to happen. A great deal of the attempt to evade rules and law is merely the uncontrolled temptation to match mind with mind and see who wins out. Our training for right conduct ought to take on a more lively, attractive aspect. Being good and doing good is made too tame. In the vernacular of the child, "There's nothing doing." There is no reason at all why the exercise of good conduct should not often be very exciting. To use but one of many illustrations, probably the element of surprise in all schemes is one Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RICIIT CONDUCT 243 of the most pleasurable. Let us have surprises, then. ''Not possible," you say, "in school life?" Then socialize the school life and make it possible. At Christmas time. Thanksgiving time, St. Valentine's Day, May Day, and on various other holidays rather elaborate surprises can be arranged for; but all thru the days opportunity may be given. Invalid friends can be surprised with gifts made in school, parents and other relatives can be surprised on their birthdays, absent classmates may be written surprise letters— often they are surprising indeed. Literary, musical, and dramatic programs, themselves intrinsically exciting, planned with the utmost secrecy, may cause any amount of pleasure to the surprisers and to the surprised. Sometimes a class luncheon is planned to be eaten on the lawn or a ''banquet" in the hall, and the principal is supposed to be greatly impressed as well as enormously astonished when he discovers that the banqueters have provided not only edibles but toasts. These surprises give rise to a good deal of scheming, and active minds are kept busy outwitting others equally as active; but mentality is functioning in the right direction ; for the aim of those who are scheming is to give pleasure and not pain to those whom they succeed in outwitting. There is nothing wrong in scheming if its methods are square and its purpose high. As we say in San Francisco, "It takes a Heney to outwit a Ruef." ^. In a way to stimulate good rather than to emphasize had action. — Train- ing for right conduct should be affirmative rather than negative. One of the dangers of the incidental method of moral training is that the incident chosen is almost invariably the commission of a wrong act which the teacher tries to bring the children to see and to acknowledge is wrong, and in which, there- fore, they must not indulge. Subtle suggestion is not so easy for that reason. The class know from the beginning that the incident is the text, and that its treatment is to be a good deal like a sermon. Then, too, the negative charac- ter of the incident emphasizes the everlasting "don't," always depressing and sometimes demoralizing. But if there were a time for it the teacher could speak frequently of the good deeds going on in the world, in the country, the state, the city, and some- times in the school. I say sometimes in the school, because there is always danger of making children self-conscious and of developing not good citizens but goody-goody prigs. Again sensitive children like the Widow O'Calla- ghan's Pat hate "bein' bawled at" before others quite as much when they have done right as when they have done wrong. As a type of what seems to be a wise use of an occasional emphasis of good conduct in the school, let me quote from a newspaper clipping the following item. I omit the name of the place and the school. "The grammar-school graduates of the X Grammar School, now members of the Y High School, who have received straight 'A' records for this last month's work (allow me to say in passing that in this high school there is no undue stress put upon marks, A being, however, evidence to the child that the work outUned is being well done) were tendered a reception and banquet by the grammar grades of their former 244 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington school. Toasts were given and resolutions drawn up expressing the children's pride in these high standings attained by their former classmates " Pride in the honestly acquired successes of others and expressive appre- ciation of it tends to inculcate brotherly love, one of the chief factors in social efficiency. 4. In a way to develop proper humility. — Much stress in all books upon moral training is laid upon the cultivation of self-reliance and self-respect. In doing this care must be taken to avoid what might be called self-sufficiency. In the adolescent period boys and girls tend to become laws unto themselves ; not only do they resent restriction because it interferes with their desires, but they chafe at it because they do not believe in its necessity. They feel perfectly sure of themselves; they trust implicitly and unquestioningly their own judgments; they are abnormally self-reliant. Small doses of simple psychology for these young egotists prove effective. If not able to take up the abstract question of what mind is, they can, at least, know some of its laws and how its working is conditioned. Nothing fills us with greater humility than the fact that we cannot always trust our judg- ments, that tho they may be true in the sense that with the apperceptive basis furnished they could not be otherwise, yet nevertheless other judgments based upon a richer experience may more nearly reach actual truth. When once this fact has been grasped — and it does not take long to teach it, because psychology, new and mysterious, is always interesting to children — they will be found much more open to conviction and will even voluntarily concede points of whose truth they acknowledge they are not convinced. This con- cession is by no means to be confused with blind obedience. It is the volun- tary suspension of one's own judgment until a broader basis for forming it can be acquired, meantime trusting in the wisdom of more-experienced friends. Sometimes this humility has to be taught quite early in life, and, if traced to its source, self-sufficiency is found here also to be due largely to lack of knowl- edge. But children must learn that, if they cannot be brought to see the right as we see it, to mistrust their judgments and to rely for the time being, at least, upon ours. We ourselves do likewise when confronted with questions too difficult to be answered by our weak intellects, as Professor Barnes so well points out in his latest book, Where Knowledge Fails. We stop trying to know what baffles our intellect, and ''where knowledge fails" give ourselves trustingly into the friendly arms of faith. Surely no one will deny that a certain amount of humility might very well be made an influence in the con- duct of the average American youth: " 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished," but can never be accomplished by unceasing reiterations as to the crudity and foolish characters of his judgments. He must be taught to mis- trust them and to have faith in ours. 5. In a way to develop responsibility jor the welfare 0} others. — Much of the so-called discipline in school could be avoided if bays and girls were im- pressed with a sense of responsibility toward their schoolmates. For instance, Superintendence] TRAINING FOR RIGHT CONDUCT 245 the boy who disturbs his class by foolish pranks, who will not settle down to serious work, because it is more interesting to act the clown while the class applauds, will be greatly benefited, and the characters of the class greatly strengthened, if they, realizing their responsibility for their neighbor's conduct, refuse to be amused by his silly or even witty tricks. Children should know that it is the privilege of boys and girls to attend school, and that only those are suspended or expelled whose bad conduct is influencing others unduly. If now they refuse to be influenced they may be the means of winning back into the ranks of good citizenship a fellow-being who otherwise may be forever an outcast from society. Too often the incorrigible is actually made by the atti- tude of those who not only suffer but applaud his doings. There are schools, however, in which the pupils are so interested in the conduct of one another and feel so strongly their own responsibility concerning it that when a child must be sent away from among them, they are deeply sorry, and, blaming them- selves, wonder what they might have done to prevent the necessity of the expulsion. I am not advocating children's preaching to one another, tho sometimes a child's advice is taken kindly, especially that of a girl to a boy, but we might, at least, impress the fact that enjoying and applauding bad conduct make the applauder a coworker with the wrong-doer; and — what seems to be more easily understood and accepted — ^lead directly to his downfall. Each one of us is his brother's keeper. This is a responsibility put upon us, God-given, not to be avoided. 6. In a way to jorm standards oj condttct applicable anywhere. — A so- called well-organized school may be so well organized and so schoolish as to furnish very narrow limits within which conduct can function. That is one advantage of a self-governing system, like the George Junior Republic. There the youth meets exactly the same problems as will confront him in adult life and he early learns to see things in their true light and to call things by their right names. While this extreme discipline is not possible, or for the average American child necessary, yet it is highly desirable that our schools in their functioning more nearly approximate the activities of the larger world. Especially, it seems to me, should children be given opportunity to form ideals of business methods. Honor in business dealings is a fact upon which Americans have justly prided themselves. Children should know this and be taught to keep the standard liigh. Square-dealing between man and man is still, thank heaven, the American ideal. y. In a way to produce right conduct. Training for right conduct, begun in thought, must end in conduct. No amount of thinking about social effi- ciency will necessarily result in conduct. Too often teachers leave off their training just at the point of its going into effect, e.g., perhaps some of the best work attempted in the correction of wrong conduct in the personal interview is left incomplete. The child, brought to see the error of his ways is honestly repentant, and full of good resolutions for improvement. And here the teacher feels the climax is reached, and he is aUowed to go on his way re- 246 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington joicing. Probably he falls into the very same trouble the following day and perhaps the interview is repeated, ending at the same point and so on indefi- nitely. Bad habits are not broken by means of mere resolutions, nor are good habits formed in this way. The teacher should ask, when the point of repentance is reached, "Now what are you going to do about it ?" A child accustomed to the old form of procedure in which the resolve is the end of all things is always surprised at this question, and it must be confessed, his repentance and sorrow sometimes visibly weaken when he gets the full force of the suggestion. If he is not able to block out a course of action, then the teacher must help him and help him also in keeping it. Older boys and girls are greatly interested in the psychology of habit, and are charmed to find that the laws of habit are not hard to prove, while the so-called repent- ant, full of empty resolves, is easily brought to a realization of their futility when he learns that "there is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but never does a concrete manly act." In our training for good conduct we have put too much emphasis upon intention and resolution, and not enough upon conduct itself. We are prone, having gained the resolution, to take the conduct as a matter of course. The deduction may be logical, but it is far from psychological. SUMMARY 1. Few people think. Failure to think rightly, failure to think deeply, failure to think at all are the great causes of social unfitness. 2. It is the function of the school to train for social efl&ciency. Social eflSciency must be based upon thought. Much of this thought must be ethical in character. It should be directed by the right people, at the right time, in the right way. 3. Professional schools, departments of education in universities, and superintendents should strongly emphasize these points. RECOMMENDATION Since it is a function of the school to set standards of conduct for the citizens of the state, and since incidental training for right conduct is too uncertain a method to be generally accepted, therefore, definite training for social effi- ciency should have a place on the school program of each school in our country. THE SCHOOL AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CHARACTER-BUILDING I. REED B. TEITRICK, DEPUTY STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION HARRISBURG, PA. Every view of life proves the pressing need and the paramount importance of moral training. It is a subject not easy to deal with. It bristles with difficulties both real and apparent and it is certainly worthy of the earnest thought of the broadest and best-cultured minds. When in the midst of learning, dishonesty and immorality flourish, not because of education, but in spite of it; when we find men weak and irresolute where they should be strong and purposeful; when we find hands untrained to practical uses, minds unable to grasp the common wants and rights of existence, hearts in which high ideals of character Superintendence] THE SCHOOL AND CHARACTER-BUILDING 247 and strong impulses toward true usefulness are overswept by indifference and selfishness, the need for increased effectiveness in moral training becomes imperative. Whether we consider essentials for character-building or observe petty weaknesses of society and flagrant violations of moral and civic law, we are lead to form these conclusions: First, more effective moral training is imperative. Unselfishness must supplant greed for gain, purity in politics must supersede political intrigue, "honest work for an honest wage " must succeed inefficient service and doubtful business methods. The need of today in the physical world is not so much for giants as for strong, well-developed normal men. In like manner in the moral world we do not so much need heroes as men and women whose moral vitality rests upon plain living, high thinking, and righteous doing. When we inculcate right ideas of life and labor, and a sound morality in what are termed the small affairs of life, we have laid the cornerstone of true character-building. Second, citizenship demands moral qualifications. Personal morality is the morality of the state. The annals of a nation portray the virtues and vices of the mass of its people, and its rise or retrogression is measured by the moral standards of its citizens. The repub- lic in its plan of self-government recognizes the necessity of individual moral excellence. Government by the people can reach its summum honum only by perfecting manhood and womanhood. The secret of progress for the state, the key for all problems, the solution of all vexed questions lies in lifting up the individual. It is not enough that the voter, juror, or public official be efficient and intelligent, he must possess the moral fiber which makes him unswervingly resolute and unimpeachably honest. Third, the state has a right to expect moral training from all of her institutions, but especially from her public schools. Except the church, no public institution can be com- pared with the public school in its influence on the character of the people. The public school is the state's chief instrument for character-building. Future citizens work together side by side on the same footing in the public schools and are governed by common laws. A proportionately large number of the hours of youth are spent in school and childhood impressions are well-nigh indelible. It is true that the primary object of the school is intellectual development and train- ing, but much harm would result if brain were fed and stimulated while cunning of hand was neglected and heart and soul were left to starve. The chief responsibility for moral training during youth undoubtedly rests with the home, but the school forms an invaluable adjunct in supplementing and fostering such culture. We should observe the distinction between moral training and moral instruction, since moral instruction is only one of thf avenues of approach to moral training. Direct moral instruction in school work is necessarily limited but the moral training afforded by the public schools is practically unbounded. The public school, as an instrument of character-building, achieves results in two ways: First, it may give moral instruction. Altho we recognize the truth that morality is not developed by precept or mere repetition of a code of ethical laws, it cannot be ques- tioned that moral instruction in the public schools when timely, earnest, and possessed of living interest is most helpful in forming right habits of thinking, doing, and living. Such instruction must possess the quality of reality to be effective. It must yield both inspira- tion and strength to appropriate living truths. Morality held in theory is like seed without the sowing, ripening, and harvest. Whatever touches the heart influences character. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." Vast wealth of material for moral instruction is found on the pages of history and biography, and in the literature of song and story. The rise of the righteous, the triumph of truth, the power of the patriot, the devotion of lovers of liberty, the victory of the just, the tales of physical bravery and moral courage as depicted on the pages of history are all full of moral inspiration. In biography the youth may walk with the world's choicest 248 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington spirits and be inspired and ennobled by the records of their works and lives. When we consider the man, Lincoln, the fact possesses rare significance that as a boy his constant companions were the men and women of the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare, and Plutarch. Patriotism, devotion to duty, fidelity to trust, sacrifice of self for others — all that belongs to an intense and vital spirit urged on by great desires and high moral pur- poses speak to the boy or girl from the records of the world's worthies. The literature of song and story is a great storehouse of food for the nurture of character, and its garners are ever overflowing with legends of the great and good deeds of all ages. Moral teaching fed from such reservoirs as these must be fruitful and will be satisfactory. Second, it gives indirect or incidental moral training. Perhaps the school performs its highest mission as an instrument of character-building in the incidental training in morals which it affords. The common school is the best possible image of society. It is a larger edition of the home and a smaller edition of the nation. The general tone, atmos- phere, and management of the school should show proper regard for moral principles and be such as to promote individual morality. Environment and atmosphere are more powerful than formulated ethics. Mental images arc being formed continually; and it is not so much what is said but what is that leaves an indelible impression upon the child - mind. In this connection it should be observed that a good teacher is the important factor, a teacher whose personality walks beside the pupil pursuing his homeward way, sits beside him at the evening meal, pervades the atmosphere of the whole evening and draws him back in the morning with irresistible force. Not only does the general environment of school life build and strengthen character but the actual work of the school is most helpful in this direction : 1. Thru the branches taught. — Not only does the mere effort required to do mental labor yield valuable moral discipline but each branch in the school course develops and strengthens certain moral attributes. Every operation in mathematical work enforces the unchangeable principle that a certain line of action is bound to bring certain results; that there is no way but the right way. This is one of the most necessary and valuable lessons in the whole field of moral culture and corresponds to that inviolable law of the spiritual realm, "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Reading unfolds to the youthful mind the inspiration of the vast and varied realm of literature. Gram- matical work cultivates the power of making close distinctions and logical inferences. Geography gives broad views of peoples and industries and indicates the natural causes for the lives of nations. The nature of physiological instruction is such as to teach purity in "the care and use of the body and reverence for its Maker. 2. Thru the mechanical work of the school. — Whatever develops the personality of the child develops character. Writing and physical exercises are chiefly valuable in this line in so far as they give control of the body and direct self-activity. One of the ulti- mate aims of drawing is to open the mind to the beauty and significance of nature and art. Manual training aids in developing self-reUance, self-control, and a sense of power. These are elements that tend to produce strong character. 3. Thru discipline. — Public-school discipline is a potent factor in character- building inasmuch as it tends to establish right habits. The general organization and management of the school are such as to make such habits necessary. The mere regular and prompt attendance at school is in itself a valuable training. When there are added to this such other school requirements as system, industry, obedience, self-reliance, and regard for the rights of others, what a mine of moral training is revealed ! For character is ultimately a habit; its base rests in countless small achievements, and it rises into noble and towering strength because numberless victories are wrought into it, as the cannon captured from many foes were melted and molded together to make the majesty of the Vendome Column in Paris. Morality means strength and self-control, courage to defend the weak and to stand alone for the right, unflinching devotion, transparent truth, stainless honor. We cannot Superintendence] THEISCHOOL AND CHARACTER-BUILDING 249 lay too much stress upon the imperative necessity of using and keeping pure the fountain from which such far-reaching influences flow. II. HENRY G. WILLIAMS, DEAN OF STATE NORMAL COLLEGE, OHIO UNIVERSITY, ATHENS, O. The words "instrument" and "building" found in the subject assigned for discussion at this hour indicate clearly means and end, or means of production and the resulting product. The implication is that one of the functions of the school is to produce char- acter. I wish to go a little farther and say that the one all-inclusive function of the school is to produce character. It is character, in its true sense, rather than the school, that is the great necessity in our moral, social, and economic life. The school is sunply one of the means to this end. Given : A rational creature in a rational world, with an afjinity of the one for the other, and time in which this rational creature may learn to know his environment, and an education will result, even without the school. But the school has been organized to aid and direct the individual in his search for such truth as will make his life efficient in its contribution to the sum total of the world's happiness and goodness; to enable him in life to do well some part of the world's work and in death to bequeath to the race some heritage of accumulated wisdom and some improvement of the world's ideals of individual and civic righteousness. The one fundamental and ultimate aim of education is the production of a vitaUzing, propelling character that shall be the exponent of the world's highest thought and achieve- ment in its intellectual, moral, physical, ethical, and aesthetic efforts. We iiave been too prone to practice our profession as tho the work of the school were to be confined to intellectual achievement alone. This is the greatest weakness of the school today. Our education has become so exclusively intellectual in its scope that we hav6 educated too many of our boys and girls away from the domain of the manual arts. If the world's work is to be done and civilization is to be advanced thru the doing of this work, we must educate and train men and women for social efficiency, to do their work and not leave it to the hands of the untaught, the indifferent, the time server, the non-idealistic, the individual without aspirations, the pessimistic fatalist. Man is something more than a fated fact among the blind forces of nature. Every individual possesses the consciousness of an unrealized self, and such a consciousness is as natural as the power to think, but it must be appealed to early in life and so encouraged and trained that its possessor will early realize that he is the architect of his own ideals. Here is a most important sphere of activity for the school. Two goals should be set up for the pupil to reach: one goal he can be led to see clearly; the other lies hidden for a time beyond it. The first goal repre- sents the immediate aim of education— the mastery of the lesson for the day, the successful completion of a subject, or of a prescribed course of study, the possession of a coveted diploma, or the assignment to a long-sought position as the result of patient, diligent preparation. But the holder of such position has not yet begun to do the world's work. The guiding hand of the teacher is no longer felt upon his shoulder. The man with the diploma and the position is now called upon to initiate and to direct his own course. The first goal has been reached and he is now ready to pass it, but what shall be his guide, his inspiration ? He finds he needs to have another goal set up before him. That goal is character— the ultimate aim of education— and if the two aims, the immediate and the ultimate, are not in direct line from the point of starting, there is something radically wrong with the system of education under which he was trained to reach that first goal. The way to run a straight line across a field is to have at least two stal^es ahead of you, then keep yourself and the two stakes all in one straight line, and keep going. The ultimate stake must be over in the next field, a point which you may not expect to reach, but a point whose location is just as necessary for your guidance as any other goal in the line. That ultimate stake, or goal, is the ideal, and is an ever-advancing goal. It is too sacred to touch— you cannot reach it, altho you may reach the place where it was. It advances 250 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington as you advance. It lures you on, and if the ideal is a well-rounded, efficient character, you wiU always find it straight ahead. There is entirely too much zig-zagging in our methods of instruction. If our methods are sound, they will always take us straight ahead toward that great ultimate goal, character. I contend that there is little value in subject-matter alone unless by its mastery the child or the student becomes more efficient in doing something the world needs to have done. There is today much extraneous matter in the curriculum. Some of it affords merely intellectual training or discipline; some of it is nothing but mere rubblish. Unless subject-matter not only affords opportunity for mental discipline, but arouses the dormant self-hood of the child, and, as Bishop Hunting- ton once said, "rings the rising bell in the dormitory of the soul," it has but little place in the curriculum. Character is a growth, not a spasm, and the school must supply many of the condi- tions of such growth. Nothing that has the power to grow can grow hy and 0} itself. Growth comes from within and is not imposed from without, but the conditions of growth must always be supplied by forces entirely outside of the thing that possesses the power to grow. To the seed containing the latent possibility of growth must be supplied light, heat, moisture. But all these could not put life into the seed or change the nature of that life. So it is with the child. The school must supply conditions of moral, intellectual, and physical growth. With our changing conditions in the social, political, and industrial world, we find the home is not able to give the physical and moral training it once gave. We cannot depend upon the home or upon the church to do all for the child that he must have done for him in the way of moral training. The public school must shoulder a large general responsibility in this direction, and thru its ethical and aesthetic training, do for the child what the home primarily ought to do. Not only must the school assume much responsibility for moral instruction, but for instruction in the manual arts as well. The days of the apprentice have passed. The days when each home was a factory are gone. By the passing of these two institutions, the child has lost much of the heritage of the fathers, and is sent to school to have his intellect trained and his hands neglected. By such a system we are educating our children away from the domain of manual labor and the sense of honor in toil. The world's work must be done, and it ought to be done by those whose minds as well as hands have been trained. Unskilled and uneducated labor is a great curse to any country with an ideal. If char- acter means a well-rounded development for efficiency in living, then our children need not only to know things but to know how to do things. Character means more than negative goodness, and more than mere morality. There are many people who live a sort of goody-goody life who do not possess much virility of character or steadiness of purpose. They are not the people who do the world's work. Those who have been taught to use their hands, to honor the worker and praise his work, are people who live a positive efficiency. They can build better cities than their fathers did and make better bread than their mothers made, because they have a sounder, more wholesome character than those who have been educated to ignore the worker and despise his work. The great masses of laboring people in this country do not want your sympathy, but they do want your interest and confidence in the work they are doing. The public school must not educate the boys and girls of our land away from manual labor, but educate them into it. The boy who is already on the farm should be so educated that he may become a better farmer than his father ever was. Agricultural education must become an integral part of our system of public education. Manual training and home economics are more vitalizing in the production of character than cube root or the split infinitive. Character is a growth, and no man ever grew good over night — nor bad, either, for that matter. The things the boy thinks and does and sees work silently but fatefully to shape his character. Knowledge of the right alone will not save a man. His will and his hands must be trained to do the right. The personality of the teacher will also do as much as the curriculum in the building of character. Superintendence] A PLAN OF MORAL TRAINING ' 2 CI We were told yesterday by President Roosevelt that our work is a most important one, and in these words: " It is idle for any man to talk of despairing of the future of this country or feeling unduly alarmed about it, if he will come in contact with you here, and with the forces that you represent." And also in these words in that memorable ad- dress yesterday: "While your work in training the intellect is great, it is not so great as your work in training character." Let me close with the words of the same great exponent of civic righteousness, used by him in an address to the National Education Association on a former occasion : The most characteristic work of the Republic is that done by the teachers, for what- ever our shortcomings as a nation may be, we have at least firmly grasped the fact that v^c cannot do our part in the difficult and important work of self-government, that we cannot rale and govern ourselves, unless we approach the task with developed minds and x^ath that which counts for more — with trained characters. THE SCHOOL AND THE FAMILY MRS. JOHN M. GLENN, BALTIMORE, MD. {An Abstract) Mrs. Glenn gave an interesting account of an examination into home conditions of school children in South Baltimore, Md. Lack of sufl&cient and proper food and of home care was found to furnish abundant reasons f6r failure to make progress in school. The examination showed that the family, not the child, is the unit, and that the family and the child must be educated together. The school, the church, the charity agent, and the health depart- ment must co-operate to educate the child as a member of the family. There is great need for "parent-teacher associations" in every city and in the rural communities as well; in the former to mitigate the hardships of congestion; in the latter to relieve the isolation by bringing together the parents with the teachers and children in helpful social intercourse. The great problem of child-labor, which is as serious in the country and the small town as in the city, can best be solved thru parent-teacher associa- tions in which the real needs of the child and his preparation for life are freely and fully discussed. In this way, teachers come to find out what is in the home and often to find what is really strong and good and ennobling. There should be a very positive attitude on the part of the teacher and the school toward the social life in the home and the community. School gardening associations and schoolhouse improvement clubs all work for the betterment of the community, and these societies may find opportunities for their work in every school, whether in city or country. A PLAN OF MORAL TRAINING MISS JANE BROWNLEE, EDUCATIONAL LECTURER, NEW YORK CITY [An Abstract Prepared by the Atdhor] This plan is not a theory but has been in use in one school for ten years, in another eight, and for shorter periods in other schools thruout the east, west, and northwest. It has ceased to be an experiment. Its purpose is twofold: to awaken in the child a consciousness that he is, 252 * NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington and that he has a mind and a body; to arouse in him a sense of responsibility for the care of his servants. Five or ten minutes are to be consumed at the opening of the morning session, the thought to be alluded to during the day as opportunity offers. Thru questioning, the child is led to tell about his body: "Why do you eat food?" "Suppose you refuse to eat, what then?" "Can anybody eat your food for you ?" This is the beginning in the child of self -responsibility. He learns that here is something he must do for himself just as long as he lives on earth, and very much of his success and happiness in life depend upon the way he does it. In much the same way, he is led to see that the mind must be properly fed, lessons forming the greater part of its food. He is then led to consider the real child, the higher self, who is master of the two servants, body and mind. The food of the real child is thoughts. Just as nobody can eat his food, or learn his lessons for him, so no one can do his thinking for him. A subject for thought is selected, and is held by the entire school during the month. The child is taught how to put this particular thought into practice in home and school. Among the subjects used are kindness, obedi- ence, courtesy, regard for the rights of others, truthfulness, honor, loyalty, and courage, physical and moral. ROUND TABLES A. ROUND TABLE OF STATE AND COUNTY SUPERIN- TENDENTS TOPIC: COUNTY SUPERVISION I. WHAT A COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT SHOULD KNOW J. W. OLSEN, SUPT. PUBLIC INSTRUCTION FOE MINNESOTA, ST. PAUL, MINN. It is generally conceded that the city needs for school superintendents men of broad general scholarship, special professional preparation, executive ability, and experience, varied by actual work along different lines of school life. Now, tho the fact is not so generally conceded, the country district needs supervision quite as scholarly and efi&cient. The county superintendent should be a man of scholarship just as broad, preparation just as professional, as that of the city superintendent, and should, moreover, be a man having an intimate acquaintance with country schools and their needs. The man who would be a county superintendent worthy the name, therefore, will take steps to equip himself with the knowledge implied by a liberal education and professional experience, plus that knowledge which is the result of practical contact with rural-school conditions. Whether we impart knowledge simply for its own sake, or as a means to the end of right conduct in life, the imparting of it and the desire to get more of it is the largest concern of our schools. Huxley suggests that knowledge is useful in proportion as it tends to give people right ideas, which are essential to the foundation of right practice. Only tempo- rarily and accidentally can th« schools of a county get beyond the ideals of its superintend- S.iperintendenre] COUNTY SUPERVISION — — DO ent. Time and again it has been said that "the function of supervision is to realize the ideals of the supervisor." How can he properly frame a course of study that will meet the general and the individual need unless he himself possess such knowledge of science, mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, as will give to his vision a comprehensive survey of the vast field of education, making clear the relation of the part to the whole, the whole to the part, as will give him wisdom to select from this store that which will best suit those for whose education he is, as supervising officer, directly responsible? His personal equipment must be acquired by observation and experience, be assimilated thru a process of hard, conscientious thinking Its value to those dependent on him will be measured by his intelligent, common-sense application of it to the problems confronting him. He must know, not only things, but men— and children, the coming men; must have an ideal ever before him of the manhood and womanhood into which he would have the boyhood and girlhood under his care develop. This means practical child- study, practical man- and woman-study. A friend of mine has given an excellent address on the subject, "The Best There Is in the Child; How to Find It; and What to Do with It When Found." It is part of the work of the county superintendent to find the best there is, not only in every child, but in every man and woman of his parish, and to use that best for the highest good of the whole. He should reaUze that the complex civilization of the twentieth century demands more of the school than ever before; but his professional knowledge must be so rooted in the principles of sound pedagogy that he can distingviish between the fad and that move- ment which has in it the elements of life — which will be of real and permanent value. As the result of his ovm experience, he should know what is education, what is culture. He must have learned that he cannot give save from his own supply; he cannot arouse intellectual ambition nor kindle the spirit of social service, unless he have the love of knowl- edge and of humanity strong within him. Only life begets life. He should know that only by superior qualities of head and heart can he inspire his teachers and ofl&cers with that confidence in him which will result in cheerful following of his lead toward the larger education. To be more specific — he should, as soon as he has the superintendency in view, to the best of his ability familiarize himself with general conditions in his county, so that his energies, after he goes into office, may lose no time in directing themselves toward certain special improvements. He should know and be able to plan for the best in rural-school architecture, includ- ing heating, lighting, ventilation, and sanitation, so that the buildings for which he is to a considerable extent accountable may be models of usefulness, comfort, and beauty. He should be able to guide in the purchase of libraries, textbooks, and apparatus. He should know the difference between good teaching and bad — how to praise the good so that it will become better; how to transform the bad to good. He should so know the school laws of his state, with the opinions of constituted authority as to their interpretation, that his advice in matters of difficulty will be simple, direct, and easily followed. Both in personal interview and in public address he should be able so to present the needs of his schools that parents, officers, and taxpayers will not fail to appreciate their privilege of immediate and future reform. And he should know not only what is required for his own county, but the needs of the entire state, so that he may be in a position to co-operate with the department of public instruction and other central authority in creating the best public sentiment and in securing necessary legis- lation. As time passes and he learns the general need, he will also acquire considerable knowl edge, more or less intimate, not only of the individual teachers of his county, but of the individual children, with their home surroundings, helpful or hindersome. If he is a college man—and the time is coming when the county superintendents will be college men— he will be in all the better position to make a plea with the parent for the broader •ducation when the fettered abilities of the child cry out for it. 254 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington He must know not only how to keep aloof from local animosities, but must have the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove for the healing of neighborhood strife. Retaining his own independence of character, he must at the same time know how to be "all things to all men." Tact does not necessarily mean insincerity. Besides making the machine run smooth, oil has a beneficial influence on the machine itself. At the same time, those county superintendents so unfortunately situated as to be in states where re-election depends upon the whim of the people should know that they cannot be leaders, cannot do their best work, without that courage that does what conscience- inspired judgment dictates, regardless of whether it wins or loses votes. The county superintendent should be a real forerunner of progress. In an excellent address on supervision, Superintendent Babcock, of Oil City, Pa., said: " Confronting every human being is the unknown world. To comprehend this world in terms of its own thought is the task fate sets for every soul." In this suggestion as to the captaincy of the individual soul lies the suggestion as to the infinite possibilities of our work — a work that does not terminate " When the lessons and tasks are all ended, And the school for the day is dismissed," but is taken up in continuous session in the university that knows no graduation. Those who were present at the conference of a year ago will perhaps remember my pointing out that, under the prevailing system of general election, we cannot hope to attract to and retain in the county superintendency our best men and women. It is to be hoped that Commissioner Draper, Superintendents Gunnels, Nelson, and others engaged in heroic efforts to raise the country superintendency to the dignity of a profession, learned, able, permanent, and affording chance of promotion, will accomplish that for which they II. HOW CAN TRAINED COUNTY SUPERINTENDENTS BE PROVIDED AND HOW SHOULD THEY BE SELECTED? FASSETT A. COTTON, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, INDIANAPOLIS, IND. I. DUTIES OF THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT The county is one of the important units or divisions in the state government; in some respects the most important. Being such a unit, it naturally determines many things vidthin its borders. The county is responsible for its schools and their proper organization, the principal work of such an organization being to bring about equal op- portunity for all children. It would probably be impossible to find anyone who would maintain that the countr}- child should not have educational opportunity equal to the best that is provided in the state. The claim for equal educational opportunity for all would doubtless receive uni- versal sanction, and yet educational opportunity is so unequal in this country that startling injustice is done to many of our children. With short terms and poor facilities, with inexperienced and often poorly prepared teachers overburdened with classes, and with little supervision, the country school, in its effort to train the children for country life, has not been able to compete with the city school in its effort to train the children for city life. Put six months, and in many instances a shorter term, over against nine or ten months; put a poorly located, poorly heated, poorly ventilated, poorly equipped single-room schoolhouse over against a centrally located, well-built and well-equipped modern building; put a reasonable distance, with good walks or streets, over against a long distance with poor roads; put well-quahfied, experienced teachers, with daily supervision, over against meager qualifications and inexperience; put the richness of social life, with libraries and lectures, over against a dearth of these ad- vantages, and the real situation may in a measure be vmdetstood. Of all the hindrances that keep the country child out of his rights the poor teacher Superiuleiideuce ] COUNTY SUFERVISION 2CC —————— ———^—— —^——^^^—^— ^_____^ _— ^ should be placed foremost.- The school exists for the children, and the school can be no more than the teacher. With a wide-awake, well-prepared teacher even the shortcomings of a limited term with poor equipment would be reduced to the minimum. Short terms, single-room schoolhouses in isolated districts, many classes and poor facilities, with good' teachers, are infinitely better than the finest equipment with incompetent teachers. In the last analysis poor teaching is the chief cause of unequal educational opportunity. The supreme need, then, is a sufiicient number of well-trained teachers to take charge of all our schools. It might well be contended that with such teaching as we have in many schools at present the terms are long enough and the provisions are good enough. With a real teacher in each schoolroom in this country for four or five years further argument for better things would be unnecessary. The supreme work of the county superintendent, then, is to bring about better condi- tions in the country schools — to insure the country child educational opportunity equal to the best that is provided in the state. In light of the above discussion the duties of the county superintendent fall naturally under the following heads : 1. To unify the work of the county in education, including such questions as — a) Keeping constantly before the people definite aims and methods. b) By indicating well-worked-out courses of study for both the elementary and second- ary schools. c) By perfecting educational organizations such as township (town) and county institutes, county associations, reading circles, industrial clubs in connection with the public schools for boys and girls. d) By bringing about close co-operation between the county farmers' institutes and the teachers of the county. Notice that the county superintendent is to make the work a unity and not necessarily to bring about complete uniformity. He is to encourage individuaUty in the teacher and to commend always any power of initiative. If the work is made so uniform that the sys- tem is a machine and the teacher is merely a puppet, then it would be better to have no county superintendent of schools. 2. To set the pace or standard in educational progress — a) By skillful leadership for a very large majority of the teachers. b) By being a sharp goad for some of the teachers — a very small majority perhaps. Teachers need inspiration. The mere presence of an educated, professionally trained, responsible leader with the license power, is very valuable. In some states the examina- tion of all teachers is placed with the state instead of the county superintendent. The work of selecting first-term teachers should be placed in the hands of the county superin- tendent, who is constantly mingling with the teachers and examining the work of the chil- dren in the upper grades of the public schools, and who, on account of such work, is better able to select beginning teachers. A county superintendent who is a close observer and a good judge of human nature can select bright boys and girls from the seventh and eighth grades in the public schools and encourage them to prepare to teach school. He can watch their careers thru these grades and the high school and from these he can select his teachers with much more intelligence than it is possible for a State Board of Education or State Superintendent of Public Instruction, or any other state authority so far removed, to select them. The county superintendent, then, should license all first-term teachers. The state should examine and license teachers after they have had one year's experience, refusing always to license anyone who has not the endorsement of the county superin- tendent or of the proper city or town superintendent. 3. To supervise : that is, to set up some pedagogical or professional standard as in city and town systems; to correct errors, and to suggest better ways. In other words, to take to the teachers sympathetic, constructive supervision. In my judgment a superin- tendent's success can be determined as largely by the number of good teachers he makes out of poor material as by the number of teachers he can dismiss from his system on account of poor work. 4. To aid in the choice of teachers, both in granting licenses and in locating teachers. One of the most important duties of the county superintendent of schools is that of helping minor school officials to select teachers for the several schools under their charge. 5. To make the standard of the county as high as the best school in the county, thus making the county rather than the township (town) or the district the unit of efficiency. 6. To keep the schools of the county in close touch with the best thought m the out- side educational world, and more particularly in the state. 256 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington II. CHARACTER AND EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS? OY THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT It goes without saying that the county superintendent of schools must have broader scholarship, larger professional training and greater zeal than any of his teachers. He must also maintain as high a standard of morality as his teachers. In fact, the standard should be higher if any difference. The county superintendent is chosen from the ranks of the teachers and can be reasonably expected to uphold the honor and dignity of the calling. Any question here probably hinges upon what the standard of morality of the teacher is to be. In discussing this standard it must be remembered that the real teacher is always more, much more than a mere instructor. While consciously imparting knowl- edge, the teacher is unconsciously teaching infinitely more than the mere facts in the sub- ject in hand. Imitation is one of the strongest factors in education. Unconsciously the children take on the physical bearing of the teacher, his manner of speech, his mode of dress, his ways of thinking, his very character. The teacher becomes the model of the children whether he will or no. It is not sufl5cient then that he be a good instructor merely. He must possess that subtle something called personahty which by its very presence teaches. Recognizing this as true, the people, almost as a matter of fact, have come to set up a higher standard of conduct for the teacher and superintendent than for others. And this is perfectly proper. In our school work we set up high standards of character. In history, in literature, in physical culture, every day we are placing before the boys and girls the loftiest ideals of manhood and womanhood. The county superintendent of schools occupies an ofl5ce of highest importance and dignity. No official in our school system, or in any other department of our state or county government, has it in his power to do so much good or so much harm, for he is dealing primarily with teachers, many of them young both in years and experience, and with school children. The choice of a man for the position should mean that the best teacher in the community has been promoted; that he is not only teaching boys and girls both by precept and example, but that he is a leader of men and women, a teacher of teachers. In order to be this he must have scholarship equivalent to that of a full four years' course in a standard college, and professional training equivalent to that in the best state normal schools in this country. The best county superintendents of schools have done notable work in building up high schools, in erecting modern school buildings and in spiritualizing country life by establishing consolidation and by introducing agriculture into the high schools and con- solidated schools, and by organizing corn clubs for boys and cooking and sewing clubs for girls. Such work has enlisted the farmers and the best people everywhere in school work and has made them feel that they have a part in that work. Perhaps the best work of most of the superintendents is in looking after the individual teacher. Many of the county superintendents in Indiana have done notable work during the last five or six years. For the last three years one county superintendent has printed his plans for the year and has explained fully at the preliminary township (town) institutes, one in each township (town) in the county, exactly what is expected in reading, writing, history, geog- raphy, industrial work. etc. This enables him to expect definite things when he visits the teachers later. At the close of the first week of school he requires a report. This report calls for the names of pupils and enables the truant officer to know from the superintendent's office at the close of the first week of school all pupils who are not in school. It calls for the program, and enables the superintendent to secure music and drawing and industrial work in the high schools, and history and language in the lower grades. He writes many letters to his teachers about their programs and other phases of school organization as soon as this report is received. The report also calls for the condition of the building, and supplies needed, and enables the superintendent to "go after" the school trustees for the Superinleudeuce] COUNTY SUPERVISION 2^:7 things needed at the beginning of school. He seldom fails to get the needed supplies when he goes to the trustees in this way. This superintendent's visits to the schools are not mere social calls. If he finds a teacher below par in any respect, he tells him so frankly and agrees to see him again within a short time. In writing about his work recently this superintendent said: "Yesterday I visited a teacher who had so improved in order and discipline that it did not seem to be the same school." On the other hand, this superintendent stands for the teachers' rights and interests with his trustees until all know that he is always for the teacher, when the teacher is right. When he criticizes his teachers he invariably suggests methods for im- proving their work and in such spirit as to make them feel that he is their friend and is ready to give them any promotion they are ready for. As a result of this relation the teachers consult with their superintendent freely and tell him of their difficulties as they arise. This superintendent makes use of the township (town) institute which afifords him an opportunity to follow up the things that he has seen while visiting schools. In these meetings he talks over the work frankly, especially mentioning all examples of superior teaching or discipline, and urging the other teachers to visit these stronger teachers. This superintendent is a graduate of the Indiana State Normal School and of a university, hav- ing taken his master's degree in the latter institution. III. THE GREAT PROBLEM IS THE PROBLEM OF EFFICIENCY In order to provide trained coimty superintendents in every county, it will be neces- sary for the several counties to pay larger salaries. There is no other way to secure such men. In the present agitation all over this country for better things in education there are a few fundamental propositions that teachers, citizens, and legislators every- where need to keep in mind if anything is to be accomplished. The first of these, and the one that overshadows and conditions all the rest, is that we have come to a stage in educa- tional affairs in which the question of efficiency is involved. It is not a money question at all. It is not merely a question of securing more pay for teachers and superintendents. That is a secondary purpose. Primarily it is a question whether we can any longer, under present conditions, secure and maintain eflSciency in our schools. The worth and pro- gress of any calling depend upon efficiency. Its rank and dignity are determined by the competency of its men and women. The professional plane of any calling depends finally upon the quality of its own members. Teaching is not yet a profession in this country. The salaries are so low that teachers cannot make extensive preparation for the work. As a result there is practically no pro- fessional test and the scholarship requirements are very low. Despite all this it ought to be said that thousands of competent men and women have deliberately chosen the calling and have prepared themselves to be teachers, superintendents, and college professors, and are doing efficient work; but the existing conditions make their work difficult, and even call their efficiency in question so that the public is in danger of losing their services sooner or later. IV. EFFICIENCY IN SCHOOL WORK DEMANDS COMPETENT MEN AND WOMEN So we have come to a time when something definite should be established in the teacher's work. There is a problem of teaching or there is not. If there is such a problem every teacher who takes up the work should have studied it. Teaching should be put upon a professional plane. Certain definite requirements should be fulfilled before any one is permitted to teach school. That is, a standard of efficiency should be established and maintained. There should be distinct tests of personality, scholarship, and profes- sional ability. The General Assemblies of the several states can help the cause of educa- tion and materially hasten the day of larger efficiency by eliminating the unprepared and incompetent from the ranks of the profession. 258 NA2UONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington V. COMPETENT MEN AND WOMEN COMMAND GOOD SALARIES But at the same time the state sets up new standards of efficiency for teachers it must hold out larger inducements in the way of salaries. The compensation for teaching has always been inadequate; and while it is true that real teaching cannot be paid for in dollars and cents, we have come to a time when the public must more nearly recognize its worth. The laborer is worthy of his hire, and the teacher is no exception to the rule. Teachers hitherto have seemingly been afraid that the public would think they were teach- ing for money, and the kind public has saved them from this humiliating reputation. With the demands made upon the purse in keeping awake and alive to the interests of the school it has been almost impossible for men and women who have no other source of income to remain in the calling. Somehow the pubUc has gone on demanding that teachers appear as well as other people, that they buy books and magazines, and at the same time the public has not concerned itself about the funds with which all this is to be done. It would probably be a revelation to many good people to know that the average teacher must stop to consider whether he can afford to spend five dollars for books which he really needs in his business. The teachers themselves have been altogether too modest in the matter. They have waited for the public to right their wrongs. They have not organized and gone after their rights. The teachers have permitted the public to fix salaries instead of fixing them themselves. And the public has drawn a distinction between what teachers and other people need to live upon. Here is a principle which teachers should insist upon — that salaries are not to be fixed for teachers, but for citizens for whom the public has a high regard. It is probable that the public would consider it a great joke to talk about teachers living as well as other people. But why is not this the proper basis ? Teaching is difficult work; it takes skill and brains and vitality. Why should it not bring as much as writing briefs, or dispensing medicine, or selling dry goods? Why, indeed! Simply because teachers have not demanded it. The remarkable thing about it all is that we have gone on all these years with such miserable pittances for salaries and have accepted them like so much charity. Let us say again that the question has come to be one of maintaining efficiency in our schools. And it must be borne in mind that increased efficiency, increased salaries, and increased funds must come together in the solution of this problem. VI. INCREASED SALARIES AND HIGHER STANDARDS OF EFFICIENCY Another principle ought to be kept in mind in considering this whole question, and that is that this is not a fight for higher salaries on the part of teachers. It is a struggle to maintain the present efficiency of the schools and a demand that the calling be put upon a plane that will make larger efficiency possible. To this end teachers want conditions established which will make merit the sole measure of tenure and pay. At the same time the pay is increased it ought to be made impossible for unprepared, incompetent teachers to profit by the increase. Otherwise the calling will be commercialized and cheapened Competent teachers are not begging; they are simply asking for their own. This point cannot be made too strong. While good teaching cannot be paid for in dollars and cents, poor teaching is paid infinitely too much. Anyone who knows anything at all about the schools knows that there are scores of teachers in this country who earn less than nothing. These should be taken off the payrolls, and it ought to be made impossible for them ever to get back. Any new provisions which would make it possible for them to continue and to draw larger pay would put teaching on a lower plane than it now is. And so every teacher who has the right view is insisting that a new standard of qualifications and in- creased pay must come together. More pay is not what we want, but larger efficiency and more pay. Finally, to impose a new standard of efficiency without increasing salaries is useless. That kind of a scheme cannot deceive teachers any longer. They have finally realized that they cannot live on high ideals. With eggs at thirty cents and butter at thirty-five ii Superintendence] COUNTY SUPERVISION j^g cents this has come to be a simple bread-and-butter problem. And so raising the standard of qualifications without increasing wages would simply make it impossible to fill the places at all. We have probably said enough to show that it would be unwise to raise the standard and increase the salaries without providing means for paying the salaries. VII. HOW SHOULD COUNTY SUPERINTENDENTS BE SELECTED? The second half of the question, "How Should They Be Selected," remains to be answered, and this is the most diflQcult part of the question. The Indiana plan, with some slight modifications, is, in my judgment, a very desirable one. The township trustees in the several counties elect our county superintendents for a term of four years. The candidates are required to hold the highest grade state, common- school certificate. They are required to be actively engaged in school work. VIII. SUGGESTED METHOD OF ELECTING SUPERINTENDENTS Our township trustees are not required to possess any educational qualifications. This is the weakest point in our system. The system should provide for both a township trustee, and a school trustee; the former to look after the roads, ditches, poor, etc., and the latter to look after schools, assessing all property for taxation, etc. The two should elect a third man to be known as the principal of the township schools. This man should receive his certificate and qualification from the state and should be superintendent of the schools of the township, and a member of the county board of education. This county board so constituted should elect the county superintendent, and should not be limited to the county in selecting a man. The minimum salary should be $2,000. The superintendent should be elected and then allowed to serve during good behavior. I have mentioned some of the more important duties of the coUYity superintendent; indicated his qualifications, and suggested the minimum salary for such qualification and services, and described the best method of electing this official. With some such standard of qualifications, duties, and method of election, the country schools of this nation would soon provide an education for all children as good as that provided in the best city sys- tems in this country. DISCUSSION J. M. GuiNN, department of education, Tulane University, New Orleans, La. — In discussion of the above suggested that the matter of preparation must in some sense be in doubt until the superintendent has discovered what problems are to be met. He further said: A school, therefore, for superintendents in which problems of such character may be discussed, scholarship kept alive, and the progress of the work brought to attention would be a great help in such cases. The question was asked as to how many states elected their county superintendents by popular vote, and eleven superintendents indicated that this was done in their respec- tive states. It was also discovered by question that seven of the states represented in the Round Table require the county superintendent to hold a state Ucense. State Superintendent Aswell, of Louisiana, stated that in Louisiana the county superintendent is selected by the county board without regard to the section of the state or county from which he comes. Politics exert but little weight in his selection, and efficiency is considered the chief qualification . State Superintendent Stockwell, of North Dakota, gave his hearty indorsement to the statements made with reference to the removal of the office of county superintendent as far as possible from political influence, but expressed the opinion that this was hard indeed to do. In this statement he found a hearty second in State Superintendent Ackerman, of Oregon. State Superintendent Nathan C. Schaeffer, of Pennsylvania, stated that since 1854 county superintendents in Pennsylvania had been elected triennially by the school 26o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington directors of the several counties, and that the state superintendent was authorized to pass on their qualifications. The salaries of the county superintendents in Pennsylvania range from one thousand to eight thousand five hundred dollars, and many of the superintendents have held office from twelve to twenty years. The office in his state is non-political; he himself has served nearly twenty years under various political regimes. Popular elec- tion is the way not to be followed. Dr. Schaeffer also objects to the stressing of the expert idea, as experts are ordinarily developed by years of experience. State Superintendent H. A. Gass, of Missouri, stated that local option prevailed in his state with reference to county superintendency; that in fourteen years only twenty counties had adopted the plan; in the other counties the office of county commissioner obtains. He expressed the opinion that the method was a failure. State Superintendent F. G. Blair, of Illinois, asked the following pertinent ques- tion: How can a good superintendent be retained in office, if politics be allowed to enter into the election ? The answer to the same was by common consent deferred indefinitely. III. WHEN INSPECTING SCHOOLS, WHAT SHOULD A COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT SEE AND DO? G. G. JOYNES, county SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ONANCOCK, VA. As a summary answer to this, I would say he should see all that is wrong and set about to right it. This answer assumes that a county superintendent of schools is a trained man — educated, experienced as a teacher, and better if promoted to the office from the rank and file of teachers for general fitness and good sense, essentials necessary in this day of professional "line-up," if a man is to see what ought to be seen and do what ought to be done in school inspection. Let us suppose a superintendent is aptly appointed, and notice some of the things he should see and do : First, outside the schoolroom. The environment should be carefully looked after. The fences and outbuildings should be neat, clean, and white-washed or painted. The grounds should be laid off — separate playgrounds for boys and girls — ^trees planted. On the girls' side arrange for plants and flowers, leaving room for such games as tennis and basket-ball. On the boys' side arrange for and encourage manly athletics. The superin- tendent should note the character of the games, and, acting thru his teachers, give such general direction as to do away with teasing or imposing on smaller and weaker pupils. The general conduct of the boys should be noted — whether polite and kind, or given to rowdyism and the use of bad language, cigarettes, etc. I once found a principal of a large grammar school in the habit of smoking cigarettes on the'school grounds. His large boys left the school grounds a short way to do the same thing. Another principal of a high school, an A.B. from one of our strong colleges, joined his large boys during noon recess to go off behind a barn near the school grounds for a smoke, out of sight of the smaller boys. These. were valuable teachers. It occurred to me that teachers in such close touch with the boys could lead them from this habit. The suggestion was made, the evil remedied. By seeing and knowing what to do, most of the playground evils may be removed and the introduction of pure and clean school athletics made easy. This is very important. Eight out of ten of our most serious troubles in the rural schools begin on the playgrounds. A superintendent can do much along this line to improve the general discipline and well-being of his schools. To do this, however, he must have tact and good sense enough to be in easy touch with his teachers. To sum up : a county superintendent should see all conditions and should set in motion among the teachers, the pupils, and the patrons plans most conducive to a good environment and healthy development of that which is best in the social life of the school on its playgrounds. Second, indoors. The ventilation of many rural schools is so bad that usually this rvil will force itself upon a superintendent, and should be remedied permanently. The general appearance of the room — its walls, whether bare or ornamented with pictures and Superintendence] COUNTY SUPERVISION 261 best work of pupils; the blackboards and character of work thereon; the floor, if clean; the furniture, if abused; the general appearance of children, if tidy or otherwise; the general deportment of children, if orderly, attentive, studious, or the opposite; the general bearing of the teacher— how the teacher conducts the recitation, how the children recite. The daily schedule of exercises, which should be prominently posted in every school, should be examined to see that no time is lost, and that a proper division of time to each subject has been made. The grading and classification should be noted. Oftentimes new or inexperienced teachers make grave mistakes in these, causing much trouble, which the experience of a practical superintendent can at once relieve. By all means, the superintendent in rural schools should look over the character - book. This book should be accurately kept by every teacher, open at all times to super- intendent, trustees, and visitors. In it the name, date, and conduct of each and every pupil who has violated any school regulation or who has dona something worthy of praise should be entered. The wisdom of this is far-reaching. It gives the pupil a written school record. This has been known to regulate the deportment of the entire school which before the introduction of this method was not at all satisfactory. A superintendent and his school board visited a rural school a few days ago numbering 180 pupils. The character books showed that one boy had been spoken to four times during the school session, and that over 90 per cent, of all the pupils had given satisfactory school deportment. In looking over this book, a few words kindly spoken by the superintendent has proven a great help to refractory spirits. In no case should a superintendent talk to the school too much. All talks should be short, pointed, and illustrate some truth or subject familiar to the pupils. Nothing should be said or done to disturb the friendly relation between pupil and teacher, or to unsettle the authority of the teacher. The real value of a superin- tendent is not measured by the length of his tongue, but by what he has the ability to see and his power to do. Finally, what a county superintendent should see and do in a general way. When necessary he should vi'^it the patrons to establish order and harmony and proper relations in the school work. To illustrate, a boy about fifteen years old not long ago moved into my division from New York City. He had been very refractory in the schools of that city, in fact came from a house of correction. He entered a rural school, taught by a very kind and even-tempered young lady. She had a great deal of trouble with him. He would not study, was continually in devilment of some sort; finally, one day, for rank insub- ordination she was obliged to suspend him. Before leaving, he cursed her, threw coal thru the window-panes, frightened the smaller pupils, and left in a rage. The matter was promptly reported. I called next day to learn particulars and see upon what terms a reconciliation, if possible, could be made, that the boy might have what he much needed — the benefit of a good school. I visited the home. The father was absent in New York at work. Found the mother, had a talk with her, and after some time she persuaded the boy to come into the room. Around the fireside I told the two what had been done, showed the teacher's side, showed the boy's side, and the boy's need. Tears fell from the mother's eyes as I tried to reach out in love for the heart and confidence of her wayward boy. Love and truth won. They will always win. A pair of handsome brown eyes, that at first flashed defiance and disobedience, softened into a kindly radiance, when the boy rose, and from behind his tears said: "Mother, I want to go and ask her pardon, and if she will take me back she shall never have trouble with me again." The boy's life was changed from that day. He stood to his word. The school was benefited by his trans- formation. Again, rural schools outgrow their buildings. The superintendent should be quick to see this, and arrange to give the school suitable quarters. In my division this has occurred very often in the past five years. One school did this recently, when the district was already so much in debt it could not take up the case. I called a meeting of the citizens, presented the facts, appealed for aid to accommodate the children seeking the benefits of 262 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington that school. At once the community organized, raised the money necessary, and the annex is now just completed. In a section where there are a number of small single schools, the superintendent should study the situation and see when consolidation is necessary to improve conditions. In bringing this about he should not be too hasty, should not invite antagonism, but see what can be done and then do it. One of the first strictly rural, that is, out-in-the-country, consolidations arranged in my section was the Hunting Creek Grammar School. There were schools located at the angles of a triangle, not far from the shores of the Chesapeake. One a deserted, rickety, old store; another, a two-room, one-story shanty (could see day- light thru it anywhere); the third, an abandoned old church. I saw the necessity of consolidation. The trustees came into the plan, then a few of the leading citizens who could be relied on to help — these quietly looked about and found where a good lot about the center of this triangular section could be purchased; then a meeting of all the citizens of this section was arranged. This took place one afternoon in the spring on the lot selected for the new building. After explaining the school work in the old buildings and showing the possibilities of a good grammar school in a modern school building to be erected, I asked the citizens present to express themselves. When the vote was taken only one man in the whole crowd voted against the consolidation. The school board was present, and before the crowd left the lot was bought, and arrangements made to clear off the forest trees except such as were to remain. The following fall the school entered a modern, up-to-date, four-room building. Need I add that three years after, two pupils from this school sent prize work to the Jamestown Educational Exposition — one, the best map of his county; another, the growth and development of the Diamond Back Terrapin, a marvelous exhibit of nature-study work, which piece of work is now in the National Museum of Argentina, S. A., by special request of the commissioner of education from that country. A superintendent should see the trend of public sentiment and turn it in favor of good schools. I have in mind a community carrying a school population of 413, located on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, nearly opposite the mouth of the Potomac River and fifteen miles from Onancock, formerly a part of Lee School District, all trustees living on main- land, none nearer that fifteen miles. There were two old stores and two old churches used for schoolhouses. The Legislature passed a bill allowing Tangier Island to be made a separate school district. A few of the leaders who had some influence with the Lee District School Board opposed this. Nevertheless, upon every visit to this community I called a public meeting and discussed some phase of the school work, usually closing my effort by showing the wisdom of having their school affairs in their own hands. In less than eighteen months the situation was ripe for a separate school district, the con- solidation of the old schools into a central school at a cost for building alone of $5,500 — this in a district where the district (township) tax amounted to $85, from a community of working people, li\dng from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay by handling oysters, fish, clams, and crabs. They did not ask state or district for money, but every man, boy, and many of the women, and the young women contributed. One Saturday night the commit- tee needed $500 on building fund. Sunday morning the pastor of the Island, who was heart and soul in the work, announced before preaching that $500 was needed to carry on the school work. He preached a sermon on education, and in a few minutes raised the needed $500. Tangier now has its own school board, manages its own business, pays the maximum school tax, and perhaps the finest school building on any of the many islands of the Chesapeake, from Havre De Grace to Cape Henry, stands on Tangier Island, a mere sand spit, one-half mile (widest inhabitable part) by three miles long. From the third floor, or grammar-school department, can be seen all the shipping of the great bay in daily transit for twenty miles to sunset side, and to the east twelve miles away to the shores of Accomack. Public sentiment put every dollar into this plant, and then equipped it from top to bottom. The boys and girls helped to pay for the desks. They saved of Superintendence] COUNTY SUPERVISION 26^ their earnings, in Uttle barrels, spare pennies, and when the committee announced a "barrel-rolling" day for them to meet and open their barrels and hand in their contri- butions for school furniture, they had saved a bail-bucket full of pennies, in amount $166.71. One little fatherless girl of thirteen years, with ankles bare and brown, and dress worn, worked in her small flat bottom boat over the mud bars of Tangier Sound, catching and selling crabs, supporting herself and helping her mother, and without asking aid from anyone dropped into her barrel as her contribution for desks $1.36. Public sentiment crystallized and properly directed will bring results. In conclusion, a superintendent should see the existing conditions of his schools- each school — cut out the evils and the useless, and be quick to put in the best methods, the safest plans, for a harmonious development of child-Ufe, thus helping to usher in the era when our Reptlblic shall be the world's acknowledged leader in all great achievements. This can best be facilitated by wisely guiding American child-life. IV. WHAT CAN THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT LEAD THE PEOPLE TO DO? LAWTON B. EVANS, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, AUGUSTA, GA. The county superintendent is something more than a schoolman. He is a public officer in charge of a great trust. He should bear in mind that the school system belongs to the people, not to him. They constitute the court of last resort, and have the power and the right to abolish the whole thing if they want to. He has mainly duties, while everybody else has rights. If the public is to be led, it must be enUghtened. There is nothing in a school system that should be concealed from the people. It is fair to say that the schools should be kept before the people's notice and made conspicuous, not for the sake of the superintendent and his glory, but rather for the cause of which he is the exponent and trustee. The public can be taken into one's confidence regarding plans for the future. They want to know why more money is needed, why better teachers should be employed, why new houses should be built. And knowing all these, the school funds are more readily enlarged. Do not be afraid of the people. Individuals may rant, but the great silent mass will stand by the man who is .right. The people should know the real intent and meaning of the modern school, and what is going on in other places, and what the masters think on great educational themes. Further than that, the home training and rearing of children, their habits, companion- ships, diet, and health are all facts of which the general public is ignorant. What training a child should have before he comes of school age, what should be expected of the home after he enters school, to what extent parents should help with the home studies, and co- operate with the teacher, and many other such topics open the way for the superintendent to lead the thought of his people toward a high, noble, and useful system of correlation of home and school. It is only when the public is led to know what a really great school system is that the superintendent can count on them for great things. The first and greatest of all things is a wilUngness to vote heavy appropriations for school purposes. To advocate concealment of why money is needed is to invite suspicion and to court disaster. To prove one's case is generally to win it with an enthusiastic public. What the public wants is knowledge, and the reason why. There are few communities where the funds are withheld if only the superintendent be brave enough to state and maintain his propositions. Every superintendent should have an ultimate plan and should work out his system in accordance. He should know where he is going and add a bit, year by year, toward its attainments. He should not work in the dark nor at haphazard, but definitely. He should announce his plan, and enthuse his people for its early accomplishment. Let him state boldly and definitely what his people need, and they will become as impatient as he is 264 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington to see the results. Let him have an end in view, a complete plan, an aim, and if he be wise and enthusiastic, the community gathers momentum like water down hill. One great purpose of the superintendent is to steer the schools clear of the rocks of county politics. I am reliably informed that in some places the politicians mark the schools as political spoils. It is the duty of the public to let the schools alone, especially in the matter of selecting teachers. The most baleful influence upon the school systems of the country is the political influence of powerful men who seek to make the schools the source of support for indigent gentlewomen. They may be needy, they may be worthy, but it is a crime to support them at the expense of the public and of the children, if they are not good teachers — and this latter the superintendent alone should decide. How many weary battles have been fought for the schools, for the children, and for the pubHc itself, by the superintefldents of the land, who have bared their breasts to the storm and said they would have none of it, that the schools were for the teachers, and not for the kinf oik, or poUtical allies, and friends I So long as teachers are employed upon any other basis than that of schoolroom ability, the system is doomed to inefi&ciency. Everybody will recognize the truth of the statement, in his calmer moments, that school teachers should not be selected upon a basis of sympathy or political reward. Even the board members recognize that. Therefore, when there is no election pending, when the waters are calm and no instance is up, and nobody to be made an example of, then is the time to get the board to bind itself by formal resolution to do the right thing when the next time comes. Then when the crisis arises and a few wish to override the schools, there is a rule against it which the superintendent and the board may fall back upon to protect the schools. The superintendent should have the power to prepare an eligible list of candidates from which the board agrees to elect the teachers. This power being granted, the superin- tendent should make it his earnest duty to find good teachers by all means in his power. By all these means we see the duty of a superintendent toward the public may be stated in these propositions: 1. To inform them of what is going on in the school system, to conceal nothing, to have everything open to their view and comment. 2. To enlighten them regarding the nature of public schools, their mission and purpose, and the means by which any one community can be kej)t in line with the best community. 3. To hedge the schools about vrith every safeguard against the unworthy influence of the politician who wishes to use them for his own benefit, and to protect them against sympathetic men who wish to make them a refuge for indigents. 4. To create that spirit among the people that will make them AAdlling to vote large sums of money for the improvement of the schools, and to put their best men in charge of the school afifairs. This may be hard but it is not impossible. By wisdom and tact, and, above all, by patience, a superintendent, recognizing his limitations and his powers, can lead the people year by year to build better, tho it be little at a time, until he can at least leave the schools better than he found them and his successor can take up the good work where he left ofi". \. BY WHOM SHALL TEACHERS BE SELECTED? FRANCIS G. BLAIR, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, SPRINGFIELD, ILL. A free common-school system maintained by public taxation is justified on the ground that the welfare and safety of a democratic state demand an educated citizenship. In the management of a system thus conceived and thus supported there are at least three large interests which demand attention in the solution of every large question which arises. These three interests are the interests of the state, the interests of the taxpayer and the interests of the children. In the practical operation of the common-school system it is the general practice to have a board of men or wonien appointed or elected who shall be responsible for the successful conduct of the school and who are supposed to be Superintendence] COUNTY SUPERVISION 265 somewhat familiar with the large interests involved and able to treat them all justly When a board of education meets to consider the building of a schoolhouse they are sup- posed to understand the interest which the state has in the proposition, the attitude of the taxpayer, and the needs of the children who are to Uve and work in the building. It is well-nigh impossible for any board thus constituted to do equal justice to all of these interests. The taxpayer is usually present to insist that the appropriation shall be kept within limits. The board of education will constantly be reminded of his interests. They will have their window open toward the broad acres of ground that must be assessed and taxed; toward the herds of cattle and horses, the flocks of sheep; toward the town lots, stocks and bonds, and bank balances. They are, as a usual thing, not given to neglecting the interests of the taxpayer. The law will constantly call their attention to the requirements of the state in the matter, but the interests of the children, though ever present, may sometimes not make as strong an appeal as do the interests of the taxpayer. I believe that any board of education or any body responsible for the management of the public-school system will come more nearly to serving all of the interests justly when they seek earnestly to serve the largest and best interests of the boys and girls who are to attend the school. But the purchasing of a lot or the building of a schoolhouse is not the paramount function of a board of directors or a board of education. They perform their greatest work when they meet together to select a teacher. While I am not given over much to religious forms, I believe that a board of education might do well to have at least a period of silence in which they should try to think of the children whose interests that teacher is to serve. If any discussion comes up as to whether the taxpayer will be willing to pay such and such a salary or not, or whether it would be wise to take on local talent rather than to go outside, or whether it would not be wise to take the graduates of their own high school in preference to better-trained teachers, I say, when such questions come to the front, I should like to have someone touch a button and have the children whose teacher they are trying to select come into the room, and to have someone say: Gentlemen, these interests which you have been considering are all worth while and you should seek to do justice by them, but here are the children whose interests you have been elected to conserve. These children are to sit at the feet of this teacher for five days out of the week and nine months out of the year. They also have rights in this matter. A trustee who robs the minor heir of his lawful portion is no more guilty than that school director or trustee who deprives a child of his district of the very best teacher that can be had. T believe that the common-school system must be kept close to the people. They are a part of it and it is a part of them. Therefore, the oflScers who administer it must be elected by the people to represent them. In administering most of the aflfairs of the school, a board thus constituted and thus elected is the most satisfactory method which can be devised. One of the finest exhibitions of unselfish service for the common good is this vast army of men who give their time and services free to this great institution of the common school. It is doing them no discredit, however, to say that there are certain matters which come before them upon which they may not be competent judges. I am inclined to think that this is the case when it comes to selecting a teacher. There are certain elements in the make-up of a teacher which a board of education may be com- petent to judge. The looks of a teacher, her language and manner, all that complexity of things which we usually call personality, may be as well discerned by a board of busi- ness men as by an expert in education. I have been greatly surprised several times to see how a member of a board of education vdW detect a flaw in the personal make-up of a teacher which has escaped entirely the eye of the expert schoolman. The personal appeal which the candidate makes to the board will, in the main, be the same sort of an appeal that his personality makes to the children. But there are at least two other large elements in the make-up of a teacher, neither of which is a matter which can be easily judged by a board of directors. The teacher must know the subject which he is to teach. There is 266 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington no substitute for this. In most cases the board of education assumes that the possession of a certificate is a guarantee on this matter, but certificates are sometimes so general in their character as to give little information concerning special knowledge of special subjects. Here is clearly a demand for the judgment of an expert to ascertain the fitness of the candi- date in this particular respect. I have found boards of country school directors employing individuals who had certain superficial manifestations of learning, but who were so shal- low-minded and ignorant that they could not hold the respect of the children for a week. The teacher must not only know the subject, but he must know something of the mind of the learner and the ways in which he acquires knowledge. He must also know how to take the subject-matter and the child's mind and bring them into that economic educa- tive relationship out of which grows, buds, and blossoms the child's education. This skill is not a matter which an ordinary board of education can discover. It demands the educational expert. It seems to me that in the selection of a teacher for the country schools the county superintendent is the proper person to select and nominate the teacher, the board having the power to confirm or reject the nomination. In this way boards of directors in a county, where the director plan is used, could hold the county superintendent responsible for the kind of teacher placed in their schools. And the county superintendent would have this decided advantage: he could place teachers in the various schools who had the fitness to do the quantity and quality of work which he wished to have done in his county. He would have an opportunity to carry his ideas and plans throughout the system of schools. I hear the testimony every once in a while from perfectly competent supervisors that their plans have failed in many instances where boards of directors have persisted in employing teachers who were either incompetent or unfit to do the work, or who in some instances were antagonistic to the general plan. In cities, the city superintendent is the person who should select and nominate the teachers. The board of education ought to act as trustees of a business concern, selecting a man in whom they have confidence for the head of their system, letting him have the power to nominate the teachers who are to serve under him in order that his ideas may receive the right sort of treatment throughout the system of schools. The board could hold the superintendent responsible for the success or failure of the schools This suggestion has nothing new about it. The plan, in some form or other, is being used in various parts of the country. I believe that when our facilities for preparing teachers have greatly increased and when their selection and nomination is placed in the hands of educational experts that our school system will be greatly strengthened and the rights of the children wiW. be much better served. VI. THE RELATION OF THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT TO THE SCHOOL BOARD A. C. NELSON, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH In the short time allotted to me to discuss the relation of the county superintendent to the school board, it will not be possible to enter into details in the treatment of this important subject. Yet, if the few observations that I shall endeavor to make will be appropriate and contribute in the least measure to the merit of the program which has been outlined for this department, I shall be gratified. The work to be done by the county super- intendent and the school board is of such importance in the administration of our educational system that it would be difl5cult to emphasize too strongly the necessity of exercising great care and judgment in selecting these officers. And still, frequently but little thought is given to this vital question. But, perhaps, under present conditions, we may not expect the average member of the school board in the country districts to possess any great degree of special training or fitness for the work he has undertaken. This makes it all the more evident and imperative that the county superintendent must be a person of culture, char- SuperintendenceJ COUNTY SUPERVISION 267 acter, training, and education. His teaching ability and his leadership must be such as to give him recognition In his community. Diogenes, when taken a prisoner and sold as a slave by the pirates of the Mediter- ranean, was asked his trade or occupation. The sage replied: "I govern men." The county superintendent, to establish and maintain a relationship with his school boards that will be conducive to educational interest and growth, must be able, if not to govern men completely, to influence them to concerted and harmonious action. In a school system good courses of study, good schoolhouses, good textbooks and appliances are all important, but none of these alone nor all of them combined will accomplish much without proper school organization. In order to obtain this result the work and experience of a well-trained, efficient educational leader is required. The superintendent must possess a strong and pleasing personality. He must know men. Many a superintendent who is honest, active, reasonably intelligent, and able to perform the duties prescribed by law, falls far short of accomplishing what he otherwise might because he is not a leader among men, because he cannot gain their good-will and confidence. Frequently he may fail to gain their confidence because he does not take them into his confidence. He may overestimate and put too high a premium upon what he may term his prerogatives, and look with an eye of jealous suspicion upon a suggestion which might be offered by his co-laborers — for such should the school board be. While it is essential for him to lead and to have the power of initiative developed to a high degree, yet he must be willing to recognize and act upon any commendable suggestion offered by the school board or a school patron in advocating measures for the betterment of educa- tional conditions. It is an indication of skill and leadership in the superintendent, not only to accept suggestions properly given, but occasionally, if not frequently, to have others urge and stand sponsor for measures which are distinctively his own. How often do we find in legislative bodies men, not only defending, but earnestly urging, the passage of a bill which they had no influence or interest in framing, but to which they now give their untiring eft'orts because they have been requested to introduce it. So the superintendent, to succeed to the greatest limit, must be diplomatic. He must organize and marshal- the forces which are within his reach and command them to subserve the legitimate purposes he may desire to have accomplished. To establish this harmonious action the superin- tendent must have the school board's willing support. He will find it to his advantage to consult and counsel at frequent intervals with the different members privately, and espe- cially should he do this with the more influential members. In doing this it is not at all necessary for him to compromise his honor or his dignity. Nor will such a course in the least impress the board with an idea that the superintendent is weak and inefficient and must come to them for professional aid. The assistance he seeks from them is largely of an administrative nature. As a rule men feel complimented when they are consulted on matters of importance and it is a vicious man, indeed, who does not put aside his pre- judices and bias under such circumstances and honestly give his best judgment under an appeal that has a tendency to place responsibility on him. When the county superintendent has succeeded in establishing the relation of friend and co-laborer with the respective school boards under his jurisdiction, he has brought about a condition that will, in most instances, enable him to bring about a high standard of educational growth. Many a superintendent fails in bringing about this standard be- cause the importance of this co-operation is overlooked. He devotes his time almost entirely in making plans for his teachers and reports for his patrons. I would not give out the impression that it is unnecessary to give attention to this part of his work, but it must not be emphasized to the exclusion of all else. While it is eminently necessary for the superintendent to meet frequently with his teachers in institute, it is quite as important for him to have frequent meetings of the school boards. The day has passed when a superintendent may be a mere passive official. He must be a positive force in every field that has a just claim to his attention 268 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington In my own state, the school boards, in all the larger counties, meet several times a year to discuss matters of educational interest and importance. These meetings are at- tended with commendable regularity and it would be diflBcult to place too high a value upon the results that have come from them. It is not unusual for our school boards to attend the regular county teachers' institutes each month. In our State Teachers' Asso- ciation they have a section which is always attended by a large representation from all parts of the state. This, together with subscribing for and reading some valuable school journal, has resulted in creating a strong and continually increasing educational sentiment. In most of the states, county school boards have the right by law to employ teachers. This is an important duty, a duty that is almost sacred, and it should be performed with great care and judgment. Thru the co-operation which has resulted from the conditions that I have briefly indicated, in Utah county superintendents are consulted in this important work and in many instances boards have delegated to them the authority to select the teachers who are to train her future citizens. The ideal relation of the county superin- tendent to the school board is that of teacher, leader, organizer, and educational inspirer; and that of the board to the superintendent of friends, assistants, and supporters. VIT. THE RELATION OF THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT TO THE STATE SUPERINTENDENT W. W. STETSON, AUBURN, ME. Authority that wins its own recognition has its basis in service. Those who are most interested in the welfare of the schools are ambitious to see the head of the national depart- ment of education a member of the president's cabinet. This promotion will not come until a portion of the expense of maintaining the public schools is paid from the national treasury. If the ofl&cers having the matter in charge should neglect to make repairs on a few of our battleships, ample funds would be available for this purpose. When the national government contributes its portion toward the support of the public schools the department will be authorized to prescribe minimum courses of study, minimum con- ditions of licensing teachers, and a minimum school year, all of which will be of such modest standards as not to be embarrassing to any state. Many state educational departments are not rendering the service of which they are easily capable, to the local communities. When each commonwealth provides one-half the amount necessary for the support of the public schools, then the state superintendent will be given the power to prescribe a minimum course of study, minimum conditions for licensing teachers, minimum salaries in the common schools, minimum grounds and buildings, and a minimum school year. These minima will be somewhat in advance of those established by the national department. The local taxing unit will be held responsible for raising the remainder of the funds (i) necessary for the proper administration of the local schools. It will be authorized to establish maximum courses of study, maximum conditions of licensing teachers, a maximum school year, and maximum salaries. National and state aid vrill be paid to those com- munities only which comply with the conditions enumerated above. When the nation has done its duty and the state has assumed its responsibility in the matter of providing better school privileges for all the children, then there will exist an intimate and responsible relation between the county and state superintendent. This relation will be personal, professional, and ofl&cial. The county superintendent will be courteous in the most distinctive sense of that term, and as cordial as his limitations will permit. Professionally he will hold himself responsible for having a thoro knowledge of the aims, methods, and means approved and recommended by his ofiicial superior. Offi- cially he will be inspired by that kind of loyalty which defends without asking questions and devotes itself to crowning the contest with victory. This position has no place for one 269 Superintendence] COUNTY SUPERVISION who is wreathed in smiles while facing his chief and whose face automaticaUy assumes a grin when his back is turned. When speaking to experts and from experience one is warranted in leaving many things unsaid. On occasions like this it is not necessary to say: It is good to be good, it is bad to be bad, and you must not be naughty. VIII. THE RELATION OF THE STATE SUPERINTENDENT TO THE COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT J. Y. JOYNER, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, RALEIGH, N. C. The relation of the state superintendent to the county superintendent is twofold- first, general; second, specific. The work of the state superintendent must be done and all his plans executed largely thru the county superintendent. The general relation between them, therefore, should be one of confidence, respect, loyalty, sympathy, and cordial co-operation. The state superintendent and the county superintendent should be bound together in the closest relationship by the cohesive power of a common, unselfish purpose, the noblest ever put into the heart of man, the elevation of mankind to a higher plane of civilization, citizen- ship, and service thru the education of childhood. In the accomplishment of this high purpose the county superintendent should un- consciously and irresistibly look to the state superintendent as a trusted leader and an indispensable, sympathetic co-worker. In all things the state superintendent should be to the county superintendent a counselor and friend, easy of approach at all times, from whom the county superintendent will be sure of a patient, sympathetic, and courteous hearing and answer in all his struggles, perplexities, and complaints; and to whom he can look for help in his honest failures, and encouragement, appreciation, and commenda- tion of his conscientious work and his real success. In criticism and correction, the state superintendent should be candid, but kindly, never dogmatic or dictatorial. In conse- cration to duty, in courageous discharge of it, the state superintendent should seek to be an inspiring example for the emulation of the county superintendent. For the establishment and maintenance of this general relationship, I believe it to be absolutely necessary to have personal conferences between the state and county superin- tendents. Nothing can take the place of a hand-grasp, a face to face talk, a personal touch, a spoken word of encouragement, a sympathetic exchange of experience and con- fidence. These can be secured only thru general conferences between the state superin- tendent and all his county superintendents, and thru personal visitation of the county superintendent by the state superintendent in his particular field of work. In my own state, this relation is fostered and strengthened by an annual conference between the state superintendent and the county superintendents in a state association, which every county superintendent is required by law to attend unless providentially hindered, his expenses being paid out of the county school fund. In addition to this state association, the state is divided into five districts of about twenty counties each, with an association for each district, meeting also annually for conference between the superintendents of all the counties of that district and the state superintendent. In this way the state superintendent meets personally every county superintendent at least twice each year; and the county superintendents have an opportunity to meet and confer with him and each other at least twice in each year. In these meetings, there is the fullest and freest exchange of ideas and experiences and practical discussions of all phases of educa- tional work. They have proved invaluable for strengthening the personal relation between the state superintendent and the county superintendent, between county superin- tendent and county superintendent, and in securing uniformity, unity, and harmony, and in enabling each county superintendent to profit quickly by the successful experience of 270 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington p. very other county superintendent and of the state superinlendent in any particular lin of work. The state superintendent also spends as much time as he can spare from his office duties in visiting the counties and helping the county superintendent in his own field. In the long buggy rides frequently taken with the county superintendent to meet his appoint- ments, the long talks, and the close personal association sometimes for several days, the state superintendent and the county superintendent come to know and to understand each other better and to sympathize with each other more; and the state superintendent acquires information about the progress and the needs of the work and about the difficulties of the county superintendent that could be acquired in no other way and that is absolutely necessary for him to sustain the proper relation to the county superintendent and to direct intelligently the work of the state. In considering the specific relation of the state superintendent to the county superin- tendent, it is necessary to consider first the general nature of the specific work of the county superintendent. Speaking in general terms, the county superintendent's work may be divided into civic, professional, and executive. His civic work has to do with his relation to the general public. In a democracy, a successful system of schools must have its roots in the minds and hearts of the people, and must be shaped to meet the needs of their life and to elevate that life to a higher plane. The school cannot do its best work unless the people are behind the schools. The school will generally be as good as the people desire and demand and no better. An important part of the work of the county superintendent, therefore, is the cultivation of public sentiment. The pubUc must be led to see the importance and necessity of education in an age like ours, in a government like ours; to realize the needs for regularity of attendance, for proper equipment in houses and furniture, for school terms of sufficient length, for suitable environment in schoolrooms and school-grounds, for competent teachers, for adequate salaries, and for the money to supply all these. Interest and pride in the local school must be stimulated. Co-operation between the home and school must be fostered. For the cultivation of that mysterious but potent force that we call public sentiment, and for bringing it to the point of insistent public demand for all these, a tactful and almost continuous campaign is necessary. This campaign must be directed by the county super- intendent. In its direction he should have the help of the state superintendent. The state superintendent can help by furnishing facts and arguments for general circulation thru printed bulletins and thru the newspapers. He can also render valuable assistance by public addresses, by helpful suggestions to the county superintendent and by plans and programs from time to time. For the successful direction of this part of his work, the county superintendent must have the respect, confidence, and good-will of the people. If he deserves these, the state superintendent can strengthen him and help him by well- timed expressions of confidence and approval, printed and spoken — in other words, by holding up the hands of the county superintendent wherever they deserve to be upheld. The professional work of the county superintendent has to do with the teachers and the course of study. This is in many respects the most difficult and delicate part of his work. He has a right to look to the state superintendent for help and direction in this work. In fact, under the present conditions, in the South at least, at present salaries, for the rural-school teachers at least, the rank and file of such teachers are mainly dependent for professional study and improvement upon the provisions made and directed by the state and county superintendents for home study and training, thru teachers' associations, county institutes, and reading circles. In order to have any uniformity, continuity, and correlation in this work for the home training of the rank and file of the teachers, the state superintendent must maintain the closest personal relationship to it, and, in fact, must largely plan and direct it thru the county superintendent. In my own state, the course of study for the public schools is prescribed, prepared, printed, and distributed by the state superintendent. To aid the county superintendent Superintendence] MENTAL GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE 271 in the professional training of his teachers, bulletins upon the teaching of different subjects, containing also a Ust of the best books for teachers on those subjects, have been prepared i printed, and placed in the hands of every teacher by the state superintendent. The state' superintendent also has in preparation now a bulletin containing suggested courses of reading and study for teachers, typical suggested programs for teachers' associations, and classified lists of the best books for teachers. These bulletins will be distributed to assist the county superintendent in the successful conduct of his county teachers' associations and in the successful home training of the rank and file of those teachers. The executive work of the county superintendent, in the sense in which I have used the term, has to do mainly with the business side of his work. This is perhaps the most tiresome and trying part of his work. As the real executive head of the county-school system, he must look after the finances, must be responsible for the performance of their duties by all other county-school officials, and for the general execution of the school law. He is in danger of having his entire time consumed and his entire energy sapped by the innumerable, deadening details of this part of his work, and of sinking into a mere office machine. The state superintendent can greatly lighten this part of his work by the prepara- tion and distribution from his office of labor-saving blanks and record books for school committee-men, teachers, and other school officials, and by aiding him in systematizing the work. Every state superintendent knows that the relation which he must sustain to the county superintendent in this part of his work must be one of loyal support, so far as the facts will justify that support, in cases of complaints and appeals, and one of sharing cheer- fully the burden with the county superintendent and assuming frequently a responsibility for the relief of the county superintendent. From the very nature of the case, the office of the state superintendent must be a sort of clearing-house for executive troubles. I am sure that other state superintendents have learned, as I have, that it is safest to refer all complaints to the county superintendent and local authorities and to hear their side of the controversy before answering the complaint, and that such a hearing is due the county superii^tendent. In other words, the relation of the state superintendent to the county superintendent in his executive work should always be one of co-operation and loyal sup- port instead of antagonism, in so far as the facts will justify him. I am sure that every other state superintendent has learned from experience, as I have, that it is frequently a great relief to the county superintendent to have one somewhat farther removed from the scene of action and from local influences and prejudices to whose shoulders he can shift an unpleasant and embarrassing responsibility, and that the state superintendent owes it to the county superintendent to assume that responsibility for the relief of the county superintendent. How often have we ourselves sighed for the blessed privilege and opportunity of having somebody else a little higher up and a little farther removed to whose shoulders we might shift a disagreeable duty or a hard responsibility with rehef and profit to ourselves and to our work. It is true that some things can be better done by higher officers farther removed from aggrieved complainants. The state superintendent should be willing to help the county superintendent in his executive work to retain the confidence and good-will of his teachers and his school officers and the general public. B. ROUND TABLE OF SUPERINTENDENTS OF LARGER CITIES CONDITIONS OF MENTAL GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE JAMES M. GREENWOOD, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, KANSAS CITY, MO. In opening this discussion I shall present a background upon which the intellectual progress of principals and teachers depends after they have been once regularly employed 272 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington to teach, and then briefly indicate the lines of activity along which I have worked with the principals and teachers of the schools of Kansas City. I. Under the conditions of intellectual growth, it is pertinent to inquire what effects, if any, it produces on the character and disposition of the individual, and what energy and power it communicates and engenders in his mind. If no perceptible changes in mental habits are produced, then the attempt has been valueless. It should be stated, however, that all knowledge to be useful in its effect in the formation of right mental habits must be liberal and accurate. This implies that every branch of knowledge has a beginning, a middle, and a present but vague boundary which is continually receding. To a learner, whether young or old, the beginning is always new and strange; at the middle stage of a branch the learner has gained some knowledge and has a wider outlook in that direc- tion, and has added somewhat to his intellectual insight. As he proceeds toward the boundary, he begins to get some true notion of his own power and strength in the mastery of one branch. From what has been enunciated, it is evident that there is a low or begin- ning stage in which the learner is engaged in collecting material, and in adjusting himself to the process of shaping the crude material into groups and masses of knowledge, and that he gradually passes into that higher stage of knowledge in which he can begin efifectively to apply his thoughts to his collected groups, and to use them as helpful material for his mind to work on, A beginner is always inaccurate and remains subject to this defect till he has acquired something more than the mere elements of the branch he is studying. It is for these and other reasons that I am fully convinced that every principal and teacher ought to investigate thoroly some one or more branches of knowledge early in life, and those who have not done so seldom learn any one branch thoroly in later years. The value of accuracy cannot be felt till one has made considerable progress in some one branch of knowledge, and he begins to look back on his own meager attainments. If he realizes his own weakness, this is the best index of his need of essential growth. Knowledge quickly evaporates from that mind which holds it in fragments, or small quantities. Consequently, those who have given deep attention to one or more studies can learn, and frequently remain learners, to the end of their lives, and are able tj retain and apply large or small quantities of other kinds of knowledge, however distinct the fields of investigation may be. From these reflections, it is obvious that , owing to so much surface work in secondary and higher institutions of learning, and the numerous options offered in courses of study without serious and deep work in any one branch, a very large majority of principals and teachers vegetate, but never grow, after they once feel secure in their positions. II. Practical methods of working with a corps oj principals and teachers. — (a) What I shall say under this head appHes directly to the working plan I have pursued in Kansas City, and it may be impracticable elsewhere. The first kind of a meeting to which I invite attention is the regular monthly meeting held on Saturdays at which time all the principals and teachers assemble at 9 a.m., and the session closes at 1 2 m. These meetings are held in the auditorium of the Central High School which will seat comfortably two-thousand persons. Upon assembling a few minutes may be required to make any special or general announcements. Immediately after the announcements, if any, the assembly breaks up into three or more sections — the principals and high-school teachers forming one section; the fifth-, sixth-, and seventh- grade teachers another section; and the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-grade teachers the third section. These section or division meetings continue till 10:30 a.m., and after a fifteen minutes' inteYmission they reassemble in the Main Hall. The programs for the two divisions of the grade teachers are made out during the summer vacation by the assistant superintendents who assign two persons to lead in the discussions, the first to have a paper of twenty or twenty-five minutes, and the second of fifteen minutes, and these programs are announced at the preliminary meeting held on Saturday before the schools open for the year the following Monday. The grade sections Superintendence] MENTAL GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE 273 elect their own presiding officers, and select persons to carry on the discussions in five- minute talks after the leaders have read or spoken their allotted time. During the latter half of the year, class exercises are frequently given before each section, designed to illustrate some phase of school work, and after the pupils have passed out, these exercises are commented on. In the high-school and principals' section a similar plan is pursued half the time. By this is meant that every other meeting is broken up into departmental meetings in which papers are presented and discussed. At the other meetings subjects are presented as in other associations having a formal program for all the ])rincipals and high-school teachers. The program is made by a committee of this section. Upon reassembling at 10:45 a.m., the exercises of the hour are usually introduced by a musical selection, after which a general address is delivered by some celebrity either resident or from abroad. All the section meetings are wholly professional or semi-professional and bear dis- tinctly on the whole system of school work from the kindergarten thru the high school, while the formal addresses are informational and cultural — liberahzing. b) Half-way in point of time between the monthly meetings are held the principals' meetings. These meetings begin at 9 a.m. and close at 1 1 .-30 a.m. and are held on Saturdays. The superintendent during vacation makes out the yearly program for these meetings and assigns two speakers or essayists for each topic. The first prepares a paper not to exceed twenty-five minutes, and the second, a paper not to exceed ten minutes. After the reading of these two papers the subject is open for general discussion allowing each speaker five minutes, and in which all may participate. Free discussions are regarded as very valuable features of all teachers' meetings. It affords an o[)portunity for one to talk forward as well as back. c) There is a literary club, called the Greenwood Club, which has been in existence for a third of a century. While it is composed largely of principals and teachers, in it all kinds of public questions are presented and discussed. About thirty meetings are held each year. These meetings are held in the Assembly Room of the Public Library on Friday evenings. The session begins at eight o'clock and closes at ten o'clock. One paper is formally presented, after which any one present can speak for five minutes. This is a sort of public safety-valve to which all persons are invited. Any one present is a member. There is no fee for membership. d) For the purpose of enabling teachers to prepare for the annual professional pro- motional examination, I talk to them and to all others who wish to avail themselves of the privilege, on Saturdays from 9 a.m., to 10 a.m. when the monthly teachers' meetings or the principals' meetings are not in session. At these meetings professional subjects are presented in such a manner as to enable the teachers to get a better insight into educational theory and practice and a historical basis upon which these depend. e) At the beginning of each school year two or three of the best recent books on educa- tion are recommended for the principals and high-school teachers to read, and to write a review or criticism of one of these books of not more than six hundred words, and hand it to the superintendent. One or two good books thus read and analyzed each year will keep principals and high-scliool teachers in close touch with much of the best current educational thought. /) Frequently, during the year I call the attention of the principals and teachers to such new books as I have read or examined on special lines of work. Recently a book on How to Teach Reading came under my notice, and it was such a book as would be exceedingly helpful to grade teachers, and I mentioned it, and more than fifty of these books were called for by grade teachers that afternoon. g) There is hardly a day that teachers do not ask me what new books I have recently read, and have I not read something or do I not know of a book that would help them in their general work or along special lines in which they are interested. 274 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washingto* — ^ ^ -— — f h) Many of our grade teachers are working for degrees at the University, but I do n6t find that their school work suffers or is even sHghtly neglected on that account. It is ihy deliberate opinion that a large, full-flowing fountain of pure water is a far better stream for a learner to quench his thirst from than a tiny rill that is almost stagnant. THE SUPPLY OF TEACHERS AND THEIR TRAINING AFTER APPOINTMENT MR. GEORGE S. DAVIS, ASSOCIATE CITY SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, NEW YORK CITY In every large city school system the provision of an adequate supply of properly prepared teachers is one of the most difficult problems with which we have to deal; and the training of these teachers after appointment is co-ordinate with, if it does not transcend in importance and magnitude, the problem of a sufficient supply. This latter problem cannot be regulated or solved by an artificial system or arbitrary arrangement, because it is almost entirely controlled by economic conditions. In prosperous times other occu- pations pay better than teaching, and the supply lessens automatically. In times of financial disturbance or depression, the supply, especially of women teachers, increases. The loss of position, the reduction in wages, or the curtailment of business opportunities for the men, in many instances impels the women of the family to seek remunerative occupations outside the home. This was abundantly evidenced during the recent busi- ness panic by the number of applications for reappointment as teachers on the part of women, both married and unmarried, who had formerly followed that vocation. The work of training teachers after appointment, however, can be and has been systematized with methods that are fairly satisfactory and permanent. In the city of New York 1,472 new teachers were appointed last year; while the number of vacancies during that period was nearly 1,800. From these figures may be seen the large number of new teachers absorbed annually into our city school system, and the extent of the task of training them to become eflicient workers is apparent. This influx of new material each year, amounting to over 10 per cent, of our entire teaching corps, places upon the supervisory staff a constant and onerous task. These teachers come to us from various sources, each giving a different preparatory training which has to be harmonized with the actual practical work of the schools. It is found that those coming from the city training schools adapt themselves to our conditions more readily than the others. This is due to their six months' substitute and observation work in the schools, which forms a part of their two years' course of training, and to their consequent better acquaintance with the course of study. It is in this respect that the supply from other sources, with their less practical training, find themselves at a disadvantage at the start. For the beginner in the profession of teaching, the essential element of equipment is a thoro knowledge of the subject-matter to be taught — an element that is frequently lack- ing. To this should be added a knowledge of a few fundamental principles and methods, some knowledge of child-nature, an interest in human affairs, a love of the work, and an ambition to succeed. Accurate knowledge of the child-mind is a thing to be hoped for, but it is rarely, if ever, acquired by any of us. Upon this equipment, to which, in the case of our own training schools, is added the desirable element of experience, we can base an effective system of training subsequent to a teacher's appointment. In the city of New York this system comprises the following direct active agencies: the board of superintendents; the district superintendents; the directors of special branches, with their assistants; and the principals, upon whom rests, most directly, the responsibility for the proper and eflScient training of the teachers appointed to their schools. A brief consideration of the means employed by the last of these agencies, the principals of schools, will be of more interest than a consideration of any of the others. In different schools the problem varies both in difficulty and extent. Some schools SuperintendenceJ ATiCiVr^L GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE 275 wiU receive at one time two or three new teachers; others will receive as many as ten, or, as I have known, as many as eighteen, all of them inexperienced. This, at times, is unavoidable and the problem has to be met. The first step in the teacher's training is to see that she is property assigned to grade and class. Sometimes the principal is restricted by conditions, and the assignment can- not be in accordance with the teacher's present abilities; but in general, an attempt is made to suit the assignment to them. This gives the teacher confidence and makes her feel that there is an intelligent and sympathetic mind guiding her. Her subsequent train- ing by this means, in the process of gaining efiiciency, requires an assignment of greater difficulty, when a measure of success has been attained. It should range gradually thru several grades or years of work, with classes of both boys and giris, if possible. The changes of grade, however, should not be so rapid as to prevent accurate acquaintance with a definite field of work. Otherwise there is confusion and discouragement . The period of probation in our city extends over three years. At the end of that time, most teachers have found themselves and receive their permanent licenses as an official acknowl- edgment of their promise of continued success. Their training, however, by no means ends here. It is continued in various ways during their whole career. The next step is to require the new teacher to make a plan of her work for the term, based upon the course of study. This makes certain that the teacher analyzes her field of labor and enables her to see its scope. If this is insisted upon by the principal, and no copied plan of some other experienced teacher is accepted, the novice is much strengthened. The plan submitted should be carefully criticized and returned. It may be that the plan proposed by the teacher is not one that is profitable to work, with. It should then be suggested that the teacher compare it with those of other experienced teachers on the same grade, with a view to modifying it, if necessary. Her next attempt will probably produce an acceptable scheme of work. These first plans should not be exhaustive nor minute, but general in character. They are chiefly to make sure that the teacher realizes the amount and scope of the work to be done in the time at her disposal. Care should be taken not to require too much in the way of plan books, notebooks, and progress books. These things are often carried too far and tend to make the teacher mechanical and to deprive her work of its life, freshness, and spontaneity. In all schools, one of the general means of training teachers, both the experienced and the inexperienced, is the conference. Usually, these are held twice a month; in some cases, oftener. Sometimes they are general in nature, according to some prearranged plan of the principal; at other times, particular; the subject being suggested by observa- tions made during the work of supervision. They are held for the purpose of helping those teachers that are in need of inspiration, confidence, or knowledge of method. The teachers themselves take a prominent part in them, the principal guiding the discussion to accomplish the aim desired. Probably the most effective of these special conferences are those arranged by grades. In these, the teachers of the classes of the same grade come together and discuss some phase of their work, their difficulties, their expedients for overcoming them, their methods, or the results attained. At times, the teachers of the grades above and below that being discussed may be called in, so that they may see the -relation of the work of their respective grades. There is much enlightenment to be derived from this plan. It gives perspective and prevents teachers from becoming mere piece- workers. To make these conferences effective, the principal must visit the classes sub- sequently, to see that the points brought out are heeded. General conferences and lectures, with large bodies of teachers, are usually ineffective, especially when they are planned from a central bureau and attendance upon them made compulsory. A conference is valuable only when there is something of interest to confer about, but not when it is held merely for the purpose of complying with a schedule. Another means of training made use of freely and effectively is the visit by the teachers to other classes in the school, or to some other school, for the purpose of observing some- 276 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington thing definitely determined beforehand. It may be to see some special method of teaching, or it may be to get inspiration or a new point of view from the observation of good regular work. With the younger teachers, those in need of training, the observation of good regular work is productive of most good. These visits should be made with the main purpose of learning, not of criticizing; and the principal should know in advance just where such teachers should go and just what subject to observe. The opportunities to make these visits will sometimes be sought by the teachers; at other times they are sug- gested to them. In the latter case, the teacher may be getting into a rut; or, perhaps, it is thought that seeing the greater difficulties under which other teachers labor and do good work will be a source of encouragement and content. Under our by-laws, a teacher may have three days each year for these visits, without loss of pay. Reports are required, and these reports are frequently made the subject of discussion at grade or general conferences held immediately afterward. By these visits, many good things are spread from school to school or brought in from schools other than our own. The only drawback noticed in connection with this system of visitation, or hospitation, is that some schools doing especially good work in certain subjects have, at times, been overrun with visitors, not only from our own schools but also from schools outside the city. Some principals, therefore, have had to restrict visitors to certain days and even to special appointment, as their genera^ work was being interfered with. Much may be accomplished in the training of young teachers by helpful suggestions in their reading. At this point of their career, I do not think that reading upon the general theory and history of education is profitable. It should rather bear directly upon their daily work. It must be remembered that they are now face to face with the problem of learning the art of education; and their efforts should have reference to the acquisition of that art. Standard books on methods and the practice of teaching, good educational magazines well edited, and not given to the over-elaboration of trivial things, or to the careful development of the obvious, supply good material. The intimate and practical suggestions of the latter appeal to the beginner and often prove helpful. But this, like all other matters, must be watched. Nearly every school in the city of New York has an excellent reference library which is used by the teachers and principals in aid of their daily work. Some of our principals reinforce and illuminate their suggestions by referring their teachers, as need arises, to certain passages, paragraphs, or chapters treating of the matter under consideration. They do not burden them with whole books, but give them just enough to cover the point. One principal has tried, with good results, the plan of withdravdng from her work, for an hour or so, a young teacher who, perhaps, is tired from her efforts with a large or troublesome class, and setting her to work with a request to read up some special topic. At these times, the principal may take the class or put it in charge of a teacher in training assigned to the school temporarily. The teacher, in this way, gets a new grip on her work thru rest and abstraction from classroom duties, and, at the same time, acquires something useful in her teaching. Of our great public libraries, of the opportunities offered by our colleges and uni- versities which are largely attended by progressive teachers and which constitute a great attraction for. teachers from outside the city, it is unnecessary to speak. These, with the art galleries, the museums, and other potential facilities for culture and amusement are advantages that have a strong influence in the broader training of the teacher. For the young teacher, the beginner, I do not advocate university work. This is better deferred for a few years. Often, when it is not deferred until some mastery of her profession is attained and felt, the school work, the study, and the health of the teacher all suffer together. Her professional reading, during the apprentice period, should be devoted to the acquisition of a thoro and accurate knowledge of the subject-matter to be taught and of good methods of teaching. Such a knowledge of subject-matter we might fairly assume, but it is not safe to do so. I have had young teachers inform me that they were Superintendence] MENTAL GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE 277 studying for academic degrees; and at the same time their classes were poorly disciplined, their work unorganized, and the pupils uninterested. For the beginner the class and the class-work present all the material for study that the average teacher can successfully cope with. All the time that teachers, in the earlier stages of their career, may devote to study and maintain themselves in proper physical condition, will be needed for the fitting preparation of their work from day to day. Unless this preparation is thoro, they cannot present their lessons interestingly and with confidence; and their energies, in consequence, are absorbed in disciplinary problems which gradually induce a loss of self-control, a personal quality absolutely essential in a good teacher. I do not believe that the organization of all these elements or means of training into a formal system of conferences, visits and reading courses with compulsory participation for all beginners and weak teachers, would be effective. Efficiency in this work must, in the end, depend upon an esprit de corps, engendered by those who lead. If this is lacking, the training is either perfunctory, mechanical, or haphazard. The nearest that we have come in New York City to any compulsory work for self-improvement is a proposition to adopt the plan in operation in Chicago, I believe, by which teachers showing weakness in any line of work may be required to attend a certain number of hours at the training school for the purpose of correcting the defect. If compulsory, this arrangement might act in the way that the power to inflict corporal punishment is said to act. This is, the mere existence of the requirement would make its use practically unnecessary. I cannot imagine a teacher going back to training school, even for a brief period, without some loss of dignity and self-respect. Yet, the feehng that this might be required would, perhaps, be a great stimulus to those that are lax or indifferent in their work, simply from the desire to avoid the requirement. But above all conferences, except those with individuals, above any system of visiting or course of reading, we must place the efforts of the principal of the school, put forth intimately and sympathetically with each teacher in need of help. Upon the principals more than upon any other agency depends the degree of efficiency of every school system. The work of their schools is the reflection of their influence; and the character of that work, except in a few individual instances, will never rise above the standards which the head of the school is capable of setting. The little matters upon which depend good discipline and good instruction must, at the start, be carefully looked after. In repeated visits to the class rooms; in carefully considered suggestions, and, at times, admonitions; in just criticism and judicious praise; in helpful illustration; and in actual demonstration of suggestions, all by the principal, are found the most effective means for the training of young teachers in their practical work. Some principals will mechanically issue written directions and consider their duty performed. Others will require an enormous amount of written preparation of plans and notes, to the inevitable discouragement and disgust of their teachers, who, finding themselves oppressed by a ponderous mechanism, grow to dislike their work and to distrust their leader. Such things only restrict and harass spontaneous effort. They tend to fashion the worker into a machine instead of a thinking, sympathetic human being which a true teacher must be. The spirit of a school must be free, natural, enthusiastic, and cheerfully serious. Such a spirit provides an irresistible impulse to earnest effort and the most favorable conditions for good work. It inspires a receptive mental attitude 4hat will seriously incline most teachers, not only to accept, but to seek criticism. In short, by tact and ability, the principals must establish and maintain a state of mutual 'confidence between themselves and their assistants. While sensitive to faults, they must always be patient, encouraging and ready to help— to show how; they must set a high standard and inspire their teachers to strive for it. We have many at the head of oor schools capable of doing this, but we have too many that are not. If the work of training teachers subsequent to appointment is to become more efficient we must demand high qualifications of our principals, each of whom must be, in the fullest ianing of the title, the principal teacher of the school. 278 NATIONAL EDUCAl^ION ASSOCIATION [Washington DISCUSSION [Reported by C. E, Chadsey, superintendent of schools, Denver, Colo.] C. N. Kendall, superintendent of schools, Indianapolis, Ind. — The superintendent finds one of his most important duties to be the making possible the improvement of the work of the new teacher. In the Indianapolis Training School a special emphasis is placed upon practice in the school arts. All cadet teachers before receiving regular ap- pointments have had experience in actual charge of schools. Over every two cadet teachers there is placed a director who criticizes the work and endeavors in every way to develop the cadets into efifective teachers. One year of practice must be had before the diploma of the training school is given. This scheme proves very efficient in meeting the local conditions of Indianapolis. Time is often wasted in school visitation. In many cases the visit is aimless and the results decidedly unsatisfactory. A far better scheme is to send out groups of teachers for school visitation, under the immediate direction of the assistant superintendent. These visits should also be followed by conferences concerning the work which has been observed. Walter H. Small, superintendent of schools. Providence, R. I. — Conditions in Pro- vidence are somewhat unique. A large percentage of the teachers are trained at the Brown University and the normal schools. Candidates for normal-school work must be high-school graduates. They are then given a two years' course followed by special training under the state critic. Two teachers are assigned to each state critic, who work for one-half year under her special guidance and instruction. The new teachers are distributed thruout the schools for one-half year's preliminary training, after which diplo- mas are given. After receiving a diploma the teachers are on the substitute list and ordinarily are in service about a year and a half before appointment is received. College graduates have similar training for one year, under close inspection. After two or three years' experience permanent appointments are given, and annual elections are dispensed with. The critic teachers, in addition to their special supervisory work with training-school teachers and new teachers, visit any teachers in order to see whether weak spots may not be strengthened. In addition, encouragement is given for continued courses at the Brown University and other institutions. About 40 per cent, of the Providence teachers are taking these courses. John W. Cook, president, State Normal School, De Kalb, 111. — In our normal school we especially attempt to develop teachableness on the part of teachers. Our teachers come to us after having completed the high-school course and have with us two years' work. The first year this is largely academic work in which the various school subjects are studied, with what might be termed the pedagogical attitude. Two years of practice work are given these normal students. I. C. McNeill, superintendent of schools, Memphis, Tenn. — A unique institution in Memphis assists the teachers. This is known as the Goodwin Institute. It is endowed for the purposes of establishing literature courses and a free public library. During each week two or three lectures are given under the auspices of this institute. The teachers are specially provided for, university courses being given in connection with this institute. I believe that it is far easier to secure the growth of teachers thru encouragement rather than fear. Addison Poland, superintendent of schools, Newark, N. J. — My problem is modified on account of the proximity of Newark to New York. It makes it necessary to establish a different basis of securing new teachers. We dispense with formal examinations such as are required in New York City, and have a salary schedule in which the maximum salary is reached far sooner than in the larger city. Superintendence] MENTAL GROWTH OF TEACHERS IN SERVICE 270 J. A. Shawan, superintendent of schools, Columbus, Ohio.— We strive hard to avoid inbreeding, believing that if our teachers can be secured from many places, a far better general average can be secured than otherwise. We therefore endeavor to tempt teachers from many of our colleges for our work. In spite of this a large percentage of our elementary teachers come from our city training school. Twenty per cent, of our teachers are college graduates. The increase in our salary schedule has very greatly increased our supply of candidates for positions. We place much emphasis upon such matters. The Columbus teachers have a voluntary read- ing circle with a large attendance. Many of our teachers are taking courses in the uni- versity. W. C. Martindale, superintendent of schools, Detroit, Michigan.— Fifty per cent, of the Detroit teachers are graduates of the Detroit Training School. For some time the practice prevailed of having our high-school faculties recommend those who in their judg- ment would be the best teachers. This did not prove a satisfactory scheme. We now have definite academic requirements, a certain standard of scholarship being insisted upon. This is followed by giving each candidate an oral examination by the faculty of the training school. At the best, however, trivialities determine the judgment as to the fitness of can- didates. All candidates are required to take a physical examination. W. H, Elson, superintendent of schools, Cleveland, Ohio.— In Cleveland we have employed a substitute supervisor. This supervisor looks after the work of the new teachers. Each grade is given, during the year, special instruction. The teachers of Cleveland are divided into four classes; promotion from class to class is made at the recommendation of the superintendent. C. F. Carroll, superintendent of schools, Rochester, N. Y. — Growth is the key-note of the hour. It is uniformly true that some teachers cannot grow. The great question for superintendents to answer is: "How can we be inspirers?" Above all I believe that inspiration is necessary. However, in addition to inspiration, administration is necessary, but, above all, put a substantial premium upon the growth of the teacher. J. A. Whiteford, superintendent of schools, St. Joseph, Mo. — How can superin- tendents help principals ? One way is to send some of them to the Department of Superin- tendence. The securing of satisfactory new teachers is to me one of my most difl5cult problems. I have found that testimonials are of no value, even testimonials from superin- tendents of high standing. I personally value most highly a personal letter to me from a fellow superintendent which is sent in response to a letter to him which I have written. I have found, in practice, that the recommendations of our university speciaUsts are valueless. Stratton D. Brooks, superintendent of schools, Boston, Mass. — The progressive superintendent is compelled to realize sooner or later that if he is to be effective he cannot avoid irritating the incompetent. Eligible lists, while not entirely satisfactory, are helpful. I believe it is unquestionably true that the upper half of the eligible list is better than the lower half. We in Boston have appointed a supervisor of substitutes. Her chief responsibility is to give human interest to the work of our substitutes. Principals, even, seem to be unable to do all that they should in the way of supervision. Too often it is true that the principals themselves are incompetent. I beheve that in Boston one of our most helpful schemes is the Sabbatical one on half salary. This is really not an expense to the district inasmuch as those eligible for the Sabbatical year are universally on the maximum salary and their place is taken by substitutes who receive half the salary. Henry P. Emerson, superintendent of schools, Buffalo, N. Y.— The state law of New York determines the requirements for candidates. In Buffalo we have never ex- perienced any lack of candidates for positions. We find, however, that the work of the supervisors is ineffective, so far as it concerns the improvement of principals. Too often 28o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington the principal merely feels relieved and abandons all responsibility as to special supervising, becoming from year to year less effective himself. Henry S. West, assistant superintendent of schools, Baltimore, Md.- — The feature of our promotional examinations in Baltimore is the study of some special problem. By doing this the teachers are lead to do some original systematic work along lines in which they are specially interested. Carroll G. Pearse, superintendent of schools, Milwaukee, Wis. — There is danger of developing too much reverence for the regularly constituted source of supplies. Free opportunity for admission to our ranks should be given to all who have succeeded no matter by what method they have secured success. The shortage of teachers will be solved by making the profession more attractive. The teacher is the one who can make her standing in the community high. As to the improvement of teachers, proper supervision is the final and vital thing in securing it. Wm. H. Maxwell superintendent of schools. New York City. — I care very little for the college graduate in the elementary schools. I will continue to care little for them until our university departments of education have learned how to turn out good teachers for the elementary schools. The great problem before school superintendents is the galvaniz- ing into life those teachers whose brains are ossified. The final solution must, in all large city school systems, come thru the principal of the school. The school principal while most helpful to the teacher when he is helpful, may, if he is a martinet, blight the enthusi- asm and efficiency of the young teacher. I came to this meeting to get light upon the problem " How we can make good prin- cipals out of poor ones." This hope has not been fulfilled. C. ROUND TABLE OF SUPERINTENDENTS OF SMALLER CITIES TO WHAT EXTENT SHOULD STATE UNIFORMITY LAWS APPLY TO CITIES IN RESPECT TO COURSES OF STUDY, TEXTBOOKS, AND METHODS IN (A) ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS, (b) HIGH SCHOOLS? I. JOHN W. CARR, superintendent of public schools, DAYTON, OHIO In order that there may be a system of public schools, elementary and high, it is necessary that there be state laws governing the same. These laws should be such as to secure uniformity in most particulars; and, at the same time, there should be a certain amount of elasticity, so that the system may be modified to suit local environments. In the discussion of this subject we shall endeavor to point out some particulars in which there should be uniformity in all cities of a state and also some particulars in which each city should be allowed to choose for itself. The state law should define an elementary school and specify certain subjects that should be taught in these schools — such as reading, writing, spelling, geography, history, grammar, and the like. So far as I know, the law in all of the different states designates certain legal branches that must be taught in all elementary schools. Of course these legal branches should be taught in the elementary schools of every city in the state. Furthermore, these branches should be given prominence on the daily program and should not be taught in a perfunctory way. But in addition to these legal branches, city boards of education should be authorized by law to add other subjects to the curriculum in the elementary schools, and to pay teachers from the pubhc funds for teaching these subjects. Any other course, in my opinion, would prevent the proper development of the elementary schools in our cities. But what subjects should city boards of education be permitted to add to the required Superintendence] STATE UNIFORMITY LAWS 281 branches ? Should there be no limit ? If a limit, what should it be ? This brings us face to face with a problem that is very difficult of solution. The overcrowded curriculum in the elementary schools results from adding this thing and that thing and still other things to the course of study without any eliminations. A halt must be called by some- body at some place. I for one believe that the state should not only prescribe legal branches of study for the elementary schools, but there should be some sort of an understanding relative to the minimum amount of time to be devoted each week in each grade to the legal branches. I am not ready to say that this should be enacted into statute law, but school superintendents, school boards or teachers in some way should come to a definite understanding relative to the amount of time to be devoted to the legal branches, and then there would be a necessary limit both in reference to the number of other subjects and the time to be devoted to these subjects in the elementary schools. Among the subjects that city school boards should be authorized to add to the ele- mentary course, I would mention music, drawing, physical cultvire, and manual training in some form for both boys and girls. By naming these subjects, I do not mean necessarily to exclude all others, but these should receive first consideration. If such subjects as German or any other foreign language are taught in the public schools, boards of education should be authorized to provide instruction in the same, only on petition of a considerable number of the patrons of a district, and then not all pupils should be required to take these subjects. City boards of education should also be authorized to provide special schools for truants and defectives. Only in a general way should state uniformity laws apply to the high-school course of study in cities. The law should require each city to maintain a high school and the course of study should be at least four years in length. The state law should enumerate certain high-school subjects all or any of which may be included in a high-school course of study in any city in the state. But the board of education of each city should have the right to adopt a high-school course of study for its own schools. This would afford an opportunity for each city to have a high-school course of study that would most nearly meet the needs of the particular locality. I favor state uniformity of textbooks in the required legal branches of the elementary schools. I believe that this uniformity should apply to city schools as well as town, village, and country schools. I offer two arguments in favor of uniformity of textbooks in the elementary schools : First, the cost is less and the quality of the books not necessarily inferior. For several years I lived in Indiana where there was state uniformity of textbooks in the elementary schools. Afterward I moved to Ohio where each board of education adopts its own textbooks for the elementary schools. I could not help noticing the difference in cost of textbooks in Indiana compared with those in the city where I now reside. The advantage in each instance is in favor of state uniformity. Expressed in per cents., the advantage in cost in favor of state uniformity follows: Spelling book, 70 per cent., series in readers 137 per cent., series in arithmetic 14 per cent., series in language-grammar 18 per cent., series in geography 46 per cent.. United States history 28 per cent. In the case of the readers the series in use in the Ohio city contains eight books and the Indiana series but five, but on the whole, the Indiana books are as well suited for school use as the others. The number of books in each series in other subjects is the same— in some instances the books are identical. It is an easy matter to see that there is quite a difference in cost to the people. But the first cost is not the only real difference. Every time a family moves from one community to another in a state where there is not uniformity of textbooks, a different set of books must be purchased. This is expensive business with no corresponding advantages. The argument is sometimes advanced that a state having uniform textbooks does not 282 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington have an opportunity to secure the best textbooks. So far as my experience goes, I believe this argument to be fallacious. In Indiana, standard textbooks were offered for adoption, the only difficulty being to secure standard first and second readers at ten and fifteen cents, respectively, as provided by the law. The second argument I present in favor of state uniformity of textbooks in elementary schools is that it prevents agents of publishing houses interfering with local school affairs. The schoolbook agents whom I have known compare favorably with gentlemen engaged in any other legitimate line of business. But human nature is human nature, and repre- sentatives of publishing houses are not always able to withstand the temptation to get this particular person elected on a local board of education or defeat that one, for the special advantage it will be to them at the next adoption of textbooks. This interference I be- lieve to be detrimental to the best interests of the schools, and furnishes one of the strongest arguments in favor of state uniformity of textbooks in the elementary schools. In reference to high schools I do not think there is the same urgent need for state uniformity of textbook as in the grades. There is a far greater difference between the high schools in a state — rural, village, and city — than elementary schools. Yet I see no reason why it would not be advantageous both from an educational and a financial stand- point, if there was uniformity in some of the high-school textbooks, such for instance as algebra, geometry, and Latin. We are still in the experimental stage in reference to high- school texts in English, science, manual training, commercial subjects, and, to some extent, history also. For that reason I favor local adoption of such texts. As I am not aware of any state uniformity laws relative to methods of instruction, I leave this branch of the subject for others to discuss. II. CARLETON B. GIBSON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, COLUMBUS, GEORGIA The venerable subject of state uniformity has the virtue of freshness and originality as a topic for discussion before any department of this Association. In undertaking to prepare some observations on the subject for this meeting, I examined one volume after another of the Proceedings, and failing to find any paper or discussion, took up the admirable index of all volumes from 1857 to 1906 and was surprised to find that the subject had never been presented in any department. From the beginning of state systems of schools, there has been of necessity state uniformity in the subjects prescribed for the common-school curriculum. From time to time the several states have made a few additions to the list of subjects originally pre- scribed, guardedly adding, however, only such subjects as were acknowledged to be in the list of rudimentary branches or those that by common consent were admitted to be closely akin to the traditional school subjects. State uniformity of textbooks seems to have had its origin in the demand, not for uni- fication of school work thruout a state, but for less expensive school books. And this demand seems to have come not from the actual first cost of an outfit of books, but from the additional, and often unnecessary and unreasonable, expense resulting from the fre- quent change in books, especially in rural schools, where the teachers were changed every session, or from the migration of pupils from one school district to another. The latter hardship fell most heavily upon the large tenant class in rural districts, who were least able to bear the expense of a new outfit of books every year. The initial demand for state uniformity has almost invariably come from that class of citizens. The agitation of any questions relating to schools by the pubHc at large has always one saving factor, which is that it quickens general interest in public education. And therefore, as the discussion of this one topic of state uniformity and its concomitant effort to reduce the cost of books have everywhere reached the masses of the people, it may not be far from correct to say that to state uniformity more perhaps than to any other issue is due the awakening of interest in public education and the initial efforts at systematizing Superintendence] STATE UNIFORMITY LAWS 283 and organizing the work of the country schools. As the resuUant of state uniformity of texts, following the prescribed uniformity in branches authorized, has come in many states an admirable course of study for all the common schools of the state. This has given definiteness to the work, created higher ideals and stimulated teachers to better preparation for efficient service. Uniformity in textbooks as an expediency has therefore contributed in no slight de- gree to the welfare of the common schools in the creation of a more lively popular interest in education, in safeguarding the important matter of economy in the management of schools for the masses of the people, in systematizing and organizing the work of the country schools, in bringing about a definite and logical course of study, and in stimulating teachers to reach higher degrees of efficiency. Where such conditions existed, there was no demand for uniformity of texts, spring- ing from natural and local causes. If such demand arose, it came from sympathy for the less fortunate in educational matters, or was stimulated by zealous persons who concerned themselves actively with bringing about a change in the important industry of making and selling schoolbooks. Where the masses of the people are fairly well aroused to the im- portance of education, where the schools are being conducted upon sound business prin- ciples, where the work is well organized and a definite course of study carefully planned is laid out, where by intelligent supervision and direction proper stimulus is given to increas- ing efficiency, there is no occasion, I submit, for state uniformity of texts and course of study. Wherever a community, town, city, county, or in the larger cities, even a ward or borough, has brought about general educational conditions far in advance of the average conditions prevailing, state uniformity could contribute nothing to the welfare of its schools. For a city or community supporting its schools entirely or in large part to be required to conform to a state uniformity law is seriously to embarrass and hamper the legislative and executive authorities of the schools in their efforts to make the system adequately meet the needs of the community. The tendency of state uniformity would be to dwarf the development of a system of schools in a rapidly growing and progressive community with all the problems incident to its more complex life. The intelligent direction of the educational affairs of such a community demands that there be recognition of the dominant life of the people, of their chief interests and concerns, and that the dominant life of the people shall largely influence the schemes for education. If state uniformity is adapted to the interests of the rural schools, and it does serve its largest purpose and accompUsh its greatest good in connection with those schools, it could not only contribute nothing to the interests of the schools of a progressive city, but would seriously detract from their highest welfare. The school authorities of such a community, recognizing the dominant interests of its people, not only might wish to adjust its course of study and introduce certain sub- jects bearing directly upon such interests, but should feel resting upon them an obligation to shake off the traditions of school work and by certain changes in the course of study, subjects taught, and general methods of conducting the school, bring the people's schools to conserve their interests in the highest possible degree of efficiency. Any extensive uniformity in texts or in courses of study, whether town, city, county, state, sectional or national, has a tendency to operate against the development of initiative and progress in educational work. The more rigidly fixed are the limitations as to books, course of study, and methods, the more discouraging it is to a thoughtful student of educa- tion to work out his problems, and the more impossible it becomes to take any initiative in correcting evils. State uniformity is good when confined to schools of uniform needs. It will often be found in the schools of a very large city that their needs are quite divergent. This is recognized in New York, and the plan of uniformity m texts is therefore not applied to all the schools of the city of New York. Where a state contributes less than half the funds necessary to maintain an institution or a school system, it should be willing to have a minor voice in directing the educational affairs of that system. To contribute little toward support and undertake to control i^i 284 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington undemocratic and offensively paternal. The most important factor in the stability and perpetuity of a democratic government is the self-control of self-supporting and adequately managed lawful institutions operating for the moral uplift of the people. The principle of local self-government is inherent and everlastingly fixed in the American people. When- ever a bit of territory demonstrates beyond ■ question its ability to control its own affairs and adequately maintain its institutions, it is the fixed policy of this people to grant it all the rights and privileges of statehood. When a town grows into an important munici- pality and reaches the point where it must have new charter regulations, there is in all sections of the country a readiness on the part of the state government to grant the municipality the privilege of controlling its own affairs within the general constitutional provisions of the state. The same principle should apply to educational institutions and systems of schools. There is an abiding sense of justice in the American people which impels them to recognize the right of institutions and social units self-supported and adequately managed within general constitutional limitations, to control their own affairs. Agitation in favor of a uniformity of texts in city schools and other local systems has a tendency to magnify unreasonably the importance of textbooks as tools with which the teacher workman must work. And in proportion as this tendency grows will the higher spiritual work of the teacher be overshadowed. To prescribe certain texts for a well- organized city high school and hold over the students, as well as over properly trained specialists in the several departments of such a high school, the imperative demand of the state that such books shall be used, and no others, is to attach undue importance to the implements of the school. To force such teachers and students to use books which may be adequate to the needs of many rural high-school classes, but entirely adequate to the demands of a well-organized, well-oiS&cered urban high school, is often obnoxious to such teachers and students and detrimental to the interests of the school. In some states that have enacted uniform textbook laws, provision has been made for the careful selection of the best texts for rural schools by able, upright, and unfettered experts; and in the state's contracts with successfully competing publishing houses, provision has been made whereby all city and other local systems within its borders, pro- viding in major or even in minor part fi;nds for the maintenance of their schools, may have the benefit of the state prices on prescribed texts, if the local systems desire to use any of them. This of course would apply to elementary schools, as a state which does not recog- nize and support a system of high schools would have no right to adopt textbooks, pre- scribe a course of study, and contract for the supply of such books to high schools within its borders locally maintained. Wherever the matter of expense and immunity from overcharging of local retailers are of serious concern, a progressive municipality or local system might as a matter of economy impose a very low ad valorem tax, barely sufficient to cover the actual cost of supplying the schools with necessary texts, and under careful business management of the school authorities provide such schools with an adequate supply of good textbooks at much less cost to the patrons of the schools than where they must be bought from local retailers with or without a state contract. This is done in many cities under a free textbook law, and is found to be not only a matter of business economy, but an important factor in ade- quately equipping the schools for efficient work. In the absence of such a free textbook law and the imposition of a special tax for schoolbooks, a local system may devise a simple plan by which a small fee or per capita tax may be collected from all pupils entering the schools, and the aggregate of these fees, constituting a book fund wisely managed by the proper school officials, could be used to supply the schools not only with texts, but with all stationery," apparatus, and equipment of tools and materials for all the special lines of work such a school system may wish to carry on. Where such a plan has been worked out and tactfully and judiciously intro- duced, it has readily met with popular favor, because as a matter of economy its value has been readily recognized. Superiatendfiice] METHODS OF PUPIL GOVERNMENT 285 PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF PUPIL GOVERNMENT I. CHILD-CITIZENSHIP AND THE SCHOOL CITY WILSON L, GILL, ORIGINATOR OF THE SCHOOL CITY, GERMANTOWN, PA. Some time ago I came to a realization of a fact so simple and plain, and yet so impor- tant that it seems strange that we have not always recognized it and acted upon it. It is this: citizenship is a practical art, and ought to be taught in a practical, systematic, scien- tific, direct way. Having made that discovery, as hundreds of thousands may have done before, I felt compelled to use it for the happiness and welfare of our children and our children's children. The result of my endeavor is a very simple plan which gives immediate pleasure to the pupils, aids greatly in correcting every wrong, develops a good spirit, aids in the construction of a strong and good character, and helps the young people to form good habits of life and citizenship. Out of every hundred boys, roughly speaking, there are not more than from one to six who are viciously mischievous and they have much more good than bad in them and prefer to get large, visible, good results, with honor and glory, than to do wrong with a chance of punishment and ignominy. This plan provides the escape for these boys from their bad life and impels them, and they are glad to be so impelled, to accept the immediate pleasures of active, productive, visible right doing. The ninety-nine other children are at the same time reaping their reward of happiness and better conditions. Our people are willing to spend large sums of money to help reform boys who have gone astray. The money that it takes to support and reform, or rather, attempt to reform one boy, vidll, by means of the school-city method and plan, save ten, probably a hundred, maybe an entire thousand boys from that kind of life which makes them candidates for the reformatories. In view of these facts I appeal to you to use at least as much power to prevent the developing of candidates for the reformatories as is used to reform them after they have gone astray. This process is immeasurably cheaper and at the same time is immensely richer in good results. Character the real object of public instruction. — The greatest aim and object of public education is to cultivate in the individuals to be educated a good conscience, and to secure for them a wise and resolute self-government and the desire and ability to co-operate for the common good; or, in other words, a good character. Sharpening the wits and storing the memory with facts, the apparent object of schools, colleges and universities, is, in reality, but a minor matter, and will easily and necessarily follow the attainment of the chief end of education. , Teaching precepts, old — Training systematically in citizenship, new. — Teaching the precepts of morality and the doctrine of one's relation to his fellows and to his country is as old as literature. Enterprising and true teachers have always sought for ways to put such teachings into practice, and they have been successful as teachers in proportion to their success in this matter. A well-developed method of practical character-building and training in morality and in performing the duties and exercising the rights of citizen- ship, as is done in the school city, is thoroly systematic and successful and is new. Public policy should demand it.— Every country should require it as a matter of public policy, and the highest legislative power in the state ought to give authority to it. There are many school-teachers and officers who are bright enough to see the importance of train- ing the children in citizenship and to form good characters, and there are many who are sufficiently unselfish and self-sacrificing to perform the labor of thinking about and installing what is to them a new method in their schools. Such teachers should be encouraged to l)egin the work without waiting to be compelled by law. An adequate method has been found.— h practical method which may be used in a 286 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington wholesale way in all schools, for students of all ages, which makes it possible and easy for teachers to lead their pupils to cultivate good consciences, to govern themselves wisely and to co-operate for the general good, will do for the cause of morality, education, and human welfare what the steam-engine and electric apparatus have done for the cause of manu- facturers and human comfort. The school-city method of popular government has proved itself to be fully adequate to this great purpose. This large claim is not rashly or unad- visedly made. Industrial training — healthful division oj child's time. — It is not claimed, however, that this method can take the place of other needed progress in public instruction, made neces- sary by the social, political and industrial evolution which has accompanied the gener£(l introduction of machinery and the immense immigration from the farms to the cities, all of which have a direct bearing on the moral and civic conditions, and, consequently, call for notice in this place. The changed conditions demand for the public thrift and the public safety that children be trained in productive industry, and that intelligent attention shall be given to making a healthful division of the children's time among book- work, productive industry, recreation, and rest, and to the proper housing and feeding of the people. Let it be noted that by productive industry is not meant that kind of manual training in which a child is engaged only two or three hours a week, and in which he uses up material furnished out of the public funds and does not give a visible and commercially valuable and adequate return. Supervision needed. — Even such enterprising ones need the encouragement and help of constant supervision by a competent and legally authorized specialist in moral and civic training. Such special supervision is at least as important as state supervision of any branch now taught in the schools. This is necessary for many reasons, a notable one being that many teachers who have had no experience in the use of the method and do not fully understand the principles involved, think it would rebound to their credit if they should change the plan and thus make it appear to be wholly or at least in part their own. Such ones generally fail in accomplishing the object of the school city, and the whole plan is abandoned, unjustly discrediting the movement. Some of these same teachers would have succeeded had they been under competent supervision. Most teachers are women, who have had no practice or knowledge of citizenship, therefore they need the assistance of supervision. Those who take up a new method, even with very best intentions, naturally tend to relapse into their old habits. To prevent this thev need constant encouragement, till the new habit is fully and permanently established. Whenever a teacher says "The pupils have lost interest," it is only another way of saying "The teacher has lost interest and has fallen back into his old ways." There are school teachers and officers who will not take the trouble to introduce this method. Whether or not the latter are in the vast majority may not be of much importance . That there are any such is sufficient reason for looking to the higher powers for favorable decision in this matter. A question for statesmen. — Whether the children of a nation shall be trained as sub- jects of a monarchy, as is being done ordinarily thruout the world, or as self-respecting, co-operating citizens of a republic is a question that demands the attention of broad- minded statesmen, whose insight is sufficiently penetrating and whose outlook is far- reaching enough to enable them to discover a vast peril to the democratic institutions of our great republic at the present time, whose judgment is good enough to enable them to recognize the remedy when it is placed before them, and who have enough backbone to act promptly and effectively in this matter. They should put it beyond the choice of all who might hinder. They should lay down the law that the schools of a republic shall train its people while children as citizens, not as subjects, and that they shall make the develop- ing of good character in the children the first aim and a specific practical part of the dailA' work of the schools. Superinteudence] METHODS OF PUPIL GOVERNMENT 287 Facts and philosophy.— In the United States, the greatest and most successful of aU republics, the one great failure in the government is the municipality, and this is a sore spot that threatens death to the democratic spirit of our republic. It is worth while to analyze the situation, with a view to seeing the principal causes for the weakness in Ameri- can municipal government. The most glaring defect is that a great mass of the educated people do not go to the primaries, and they neglect their municipal duties. That leaves the effective political voting power in the hands of those who are comparatively uneducated. They in turn are organized and manipulated by men who make a business of municipal politics, not always, but generally, for the money they can get from the public treasury, and, by means of blackmail, from private persons and establishments, and especially from those engaged in forbidden or restricted practices and business. Anarchy fostered.— Under this pressure, secret opposition and disloyalty to constituted authority is constantly fostered. Many pupils regard their pleasure and interest as opposed to those of their teachers, who are apt to be thought of as spies and in some cases as enemies, instead of friends and guides. Old-fashioned school government is monarchy, in which the teacher endeavors to rule by means of his conscience and arbitrary authority, and the political results are as we see them in the municipalities of the United States. The remedy. — The recognition of the cause of the evil is almost a declaration of the only remedy, which is systematically to train the individual wisely to cultivate his own conscience and be governed by it, rather than by that of the teacher; to co-operate with his fellows for the common good, rather than for mischief; to form the habits of law and order, rather than those of anarchy. In other words, the remedy for the apathy of educated men, in reference to their municipal duties, which is in effect anarchy, not of the lowest, but possibly of the most dangerous type, is to train them while young to think and act and to form the habits of citizens, instead of, as in the past, training them in the schools and col- leges as subjects of monarchy. It is encouraging to notice that there has been improve- ment in this in many schools in the past ten years, and that the best and most successful teachers have always to some extent led their pupils, instead of driving them. Lost liberty and death. — "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty," and the educated people have not paid the price. Among the consequences are insuflScient results from the expenditure of public funds, more disease and a higher death-rate than there should be. The people have lost a part of their liberty, if, because of the inability or dishonesty of the public servants, they must labor additional hours to pay their taxes, and quite as much so if they have lost life because of bad drainage, dirty streets, impure water and milk, bad food, or other evils which should be prevented by the government. Schools and colleges are to blame. — As this state of affairs is charged to the account of educated people, let us take a closer look. We see practically the following: The un- educated men, who can be easily handled by the machinery of the bosses, all vote; most of those who have had but little schooling vote; a college and university education is almost a certain guarantee that a man will not attend the primaries or perform his other municipal duties. This seems to throw the blame on the schools, colleges, and universities. They teach right principles. The fault does not seem to be in the books. The fault is in the school management. From the primary school till the man graduates from the university he is made to feel and to know that he has simply to obey, and nothing further to do with the government of himself and his fellows, and that he is a tattle-tale and sneak if he brings a wrong-doer to justice, and is mean and dishonorable if, when called upon by the authorities to testify, he does not so shape his testimony as to clear the offender. Plan of school city.— The plan of the school city is to organize all the children of each schoolroom, under a charter given by the higher authorities, as citizens of a municipality. These citizens elect a mayor, judge, other administrative and judicial ofl&cers and a presi- dent of the city council. All citizens in the room who have not been elected or appointed 288 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washiu^tun to some office are members of the city council. The mayor appoints his cabinet and subordinates, and has power to remove them at will. Nomination by petition, propor tional representation and the initiative and referendum enable the whole body of citzens to express and enforce its will at any time, either with or independent of its officers. Elec- tions, for several reasons, occur frequently, once in ten weeks — and experience has shown that it is desirable to make the term of the police officers short. In most primary schools every citizen not elected or appointed to some other office is a candidate for a place on the police force, for which a high ideal of gentility and kindness is set. School state. — To create a good esprit du corps for the whole school and for 'obvious civic and educational purposes, the school cities in one building constitute a school state and elect a governor, chief justice, secretary of state, and such other officers as may be desired, and each city sends one or two representatives to the state legislature. Affairs of the whole school or of citizens of two school cities will be taken care of by the state officers. School national government and international relations. — School state governments may be united in school national governments and these may set up international rela- tions. Good results. — Many instances of fine moral results are reported from the different schools. Of course, the results are not uniform, as the school city is not an automatic machine out of which all must come in exactly the same shape. It is a method, and its degree of success depends upon the interest and skill of the principal and teachers who use it. Almost without exception, when a troublesome boy accepts the responsibiUty of an office in the school city, he instantly puts off his ugly character and assumes one of glad obedience and respect for authority and others' rights, and at once begins to help in all that is right, instead of hindering, as was his habit. If, then, the teacher understands the method and is true to it, he will be friendly to the boy, consult and encourage him, sym- pathize with him and help him to maintain his enthusiasm, and the boy is saved perma- nently. Women teachers, with correct intuitions and hearts full of sympathy, if they understand the simple method, will seldom fail to make the work of regeneration perma- nent. The condition of the school city is almost an exact index of the character and condition of the head of the school and of the teacher. Industrial, moral and civic evolution. — When our Republic was young, the mass of her people lived on farms. Boys and girls went to school only two or three months in the year. For the rest of the time they labored with their parents in the fields and at the spinning- wheel and loom, always under moral, religious, industrial and civic influence, and training. The hoe and spade of the colonies have given way to the steam-driven machines on the vast prairies; the spinning-wheel and hand-loom to immense cotton and woolen mills; the country forge to stupendous rolling-mills, furnaces, foundries, and forges. By such means the children of today are separated during work hours from their parents. No systematic character training. — The pubHc schools, which consume these released hours and years in training the intellect and cramming the memory, make no systematic, intelligent endeavor to furnish that kind of character-training which our ancestors received from their parents. The War of the Revolution failed to wipe out that vestige of monarchy which lurked in the government of the little country school. That was too insignificant to be thought of, for in those days the American citizens' characters were built in the open country, under the influence of their parents, the heroes of the Revolution. Now, American character is developed in great swarming buildings, under the weight of a heavy, crowded, intellectual curriculum, and that vestige of monarchy which was left in the school has grown, with the increasing months of the school year, to large proportions and is wielded by masters, who themselves have been trained as subjects, not as free men. Thus, the pubhc schools and colleges, boasted bulwarks of our liberties, have un- wittingly, but ceaselessly, nursed the spirit of monarchy, and thru childhood and youth Superintendeuce] MET HODS OF FUPIL GOVERNMENT 289 subjected our whole people to it, to that extent, that when they reach the age of manhood they do not go to the primaries and municipal polls, and thus they fail to enter into their heritage of citizenship. This is what has made government by the bosses not only pos- sible, but inevitable. F'ortunately, some of the municipal bosses, may be many of them, are so patriotic that they would gladly see political power restored to an intelligent, active, faithful citizenship, and will not use their power to prevent their own children from being trained in the privileges and responsibilities of faithful citizenship. School-city children's contribution to the cause oj universal peace. — School cities have been established in other parts of the world. Last week J completed arrangements for the exchange of letters between the school citizens of Japan and the United States, to be developed on a large scale. The arrangements provide for translations. The letters may take up any topics, tho the basis of the correspondence will be civic interests and interna- tional friendship. The good results for which I hope, not only for the cause of interna- tional peace but of geography, language, and civic and social relations, are so obvious that it is unnecessary for me to take time at present to point them out. There has alreadv been enough corresponding between school children of different nations to demonstrate the feasibility of this project, carried on systematically and on a large scale, for the specific purpose of developing international friendship and peace. Objections. — There is no possible objection which can be raised against the school city, which cannot with the same reason be raised against the teaching of arithmetic and of any moral precepts or practices. For instance. Dr. Harris says if he wanted his grand- children to learn the disreputable practices of ward heelers, he would send them to a school city as constituted by Mr. Gill. We do not teach these practices in the school city any more than in a church they teach lying and stealing. Appeal to all school superintendents. — I hereby appeal to you, superintendents of all public schools and to all patriots and friends of a government of the people, for the people, [and by the people, to join in this movement to provide that every child who enters a school- [house shall be treated while there as a free man, and be confirmed in the character and [habits of a free-born, faithful, and patriotic citizen, not only ready to die, if necessary, 'for his native land, but what may be more difficult and quite as important, actually living [for his race, patiently and fearlessly defending his rights and faithfully performing all his ^public duties. ed ir II. SCHOOL CITIES OLIVER P. CORNMAN, DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, PHILADELPHIA, PA. I have so high a regard for the sincerity and singleness of purpose of Mr. Gill in his hampionship of the particular method of pupil government that he advocates, and so horo a respect for his unselfish devotion to the cause, that I regret that in discussing this question I am constrained to view the method and its results from a quite different point of view. Perhaps we may find consolation for the strange disparities in the reports of men supposed to be viewing the same thing by recalling Saxe's old poem of the five bhnd men and their diverse accounts of the elephant they went to see, and by frankly acknowl- edging the certain blindness inherent in us all upon which William James has discoursed entertainingly. Many of our plans of pupil government, it seems to me, do not sufficiently concen- trate upon the problem of realizing the best possibilities of the individual pupil, but are suggested and controlled by the ulterior consideration of finding a remedy, or panacea if ay be, for the admitted and deplored ills of the body politic. "The Shame of the Cities" is, unfortunately, so familiar a story with us that it is read with a shrug and the hopeless interrogation, "What are you going to do about it ?" A favorite reply to this question, and one which in this age and country of enthusiastic belief 290 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington in the possibilities of education is certain to receive the emphatic indorsement of almost all well-meaning people, is "Begin with the children, and so inculcate right principles and develop in them civic consciences that the rising generation of upright men and women fully conscious of their civic responsibilities will so regenerate the cities that their govern- ment will become the pride, rather than the shame of the Republic." The "school city" is this reply narrowed down to a very definite and specific form of application. The failure of our municipal governments is so lamentable, the motives of the "school- city" reformers so unquestioned, the suggested remedy apparently so efficacious, that boards of education, the newspapers, public-spirited citizens, in fact the laity in general, give the "school city" their cordial support. The only class of people who question its value as a panacea for municipal ills are the experienced educators of our public-school systems. Here and there "school cities" have been organized. In some schools they have been declared successful, in others they have been given up, but the great majority of educators seem to regard the paternal form of government that obtains in the schools generally to be the legitimate form for school purposes, and the method by which the best character training can be most successfully accomplished. This is not entirely due to a mere conservative adherence to the old established order of things (the tendency in educa- tion has too often been the other way, adopting the new for newness' sake being frequently charged up against the modern schoolman), but is based upon careful and intelligent con- sideration of the case in the light of expert knowledge of child nature and its possibilities, and of experience of the behavior of children in the community life of the school. It is held by many educators that while a main purpose and actual accomplishment of the schools is to train their pupils in self-government, yet it is not possible to organize such a thoro-going system of self-government as that contemplated in the "school city" without its being under such surveillance and control by the school authorities as essentially to negative its self-governing elements, and that a frank paternalism is better than a thinly disguised one. Indeed, it is asserted that a merely nominal self-government, strictly supervised and directed by the teacher, such as the "school city" must inevitably become, approximates only too closely (however unintentionally) the form of government — boss- rule under free men's charters — by which many of our municipalities are actually controlled. The analogy of the school organization to the city de facto government becomes so true under such conditions that the children run the danger of having their habits of thought and conduct trained along the very lines which a true training in good citizenship would lead them to combat. These and other dangers of the "school city" have been well pointed out by Dr. Harris who sees in such a civic dramatization the dilemma for the pupils of a school of demagogery and unscrupulous politics or of servile discipleship under the almost hypnotic leadership of a strong teacher. These are some of the considerations which bring many educators to pause before they adopt this otherwise most attractive scheme for the civic regeneration of the race. But the value and success of the "school city" cannot be settled satisfactorily on a priori grounds. The matter must be put to the test of actual trial, and the results carefully and impartially studied. General testimony of principals who have organized "school cities," unchecked by other investigation, seems to me of little value in establishing scientific conclusions. Many who have started the "school city" are so enthusiastic for the great end in view that their judgment of the means is liable to be colored; others are likely to feel that the partial or complete failure of the "school city" may be charged up to their personal mismanagement, and so do not care to report lack of success. In order that the study should be of real value it should be conducted at first hand by actual visitation of the "school cities" to observe their operations, and by conference with the principals and teachers having them in charge. The actual sentiments and opinions of the children themselves should also be obtained as a very important part of the whole inquiry. In investigating results of the "school-city" experiment, I have not been able to make any such thoro-going inquiry, but merely submit as a partial contribution toward the solu- IL Superintendence] METHODS OF PUPIL GOVERNMENT 201 tion of the problem the returns from a questionnaire answered by the teachers (forty-five in all) of three schools in which "school cities" had been organized for about one year, and the answers made by the pupils of one of the schools to another set of questions sub- mitted to them. In order to secure as far as possible unbiased replies, the pupils were directed to omit their names and write only grade and sex upon their papers. Returns were not obtained from pupils below third grade, as most of the questions, tho very simple, are beyond the comprehension of first- and second-grade pupils. Many of the third-grade, and even some of the fourth-grade pupils wrote "I do not know" in answer to the questions calling for reasons. The replies were collated separately for boys and girls and by grades and departments (grammar and primary). Some interesting differences for age and sex were thus disclosed. The summary of results showed that the distribution of "ofl&ces" had been very general, nearly half (47 per cent.) of the 601 pupils reporting having served as officers. The higher the grade the greater the dislike for office, as 13 per cent, of the primary pupils, and 50 per cent, of the grammar pupils replied that they objected to serving. The gram- mar-grade pupils seem to be more willing to obey the officers, since 25 per cent, reply that they object, while 37 per cent, of the primary scholars object; but the older pupils are more skeptical as to the value of the plan, for only 68 per cent, wish it continued, while 82 per cent, of the primary pupils vote in its favor. The girls are slightly more favorable in their judgment of the officers, 69 per cent, replying that they regard most of the officers as good, while only 63 per cent, of the boys record this opinion. The girls are also more willing to obey in the ratio of 78 per cent, to 62 per cent. They manifest about the same degree of interest in the continuance of the "school city," 73 per cent, of each sex voting for it. It is frequently asserted by the advocates of the "school city" that the pupils are not only practically unanimous for it, but are filled with enthusiasm about it. This is prob- ably due to the fact that the children are questioned when assembled together, and by one who, they feel, is enthusiastic for the system. Any experienced teacher knows that under such circumstances children will vote unanimously for anything. The individual returns, however, show little enthusiasm and considerable doubt as to the value of the plan. A large majority of the teachers (91 per cent.) it is true, voted in favor of continuing the experiment, many, however, because of the great end in view, some merely because of the monitorial features of the system which they favor; but they do not give strong testi- mony of its value and in all these schools the plan was finally abandoned. The teachers considered that about one-fifth of all the officers elected discharged their duties poorly, 8 per cent, of the teachers reported noticing "many" cases of disrespect to the officers, 26 per cent, reported little interest even in elections (altho children take a great interest in any break in school routine) while 68 per cent, reported that their pupils showed little interest in the "school city" in general. In one school a special test was made of the pupils' spontaneous interest in the "school city." The general election was to be held according to charter, three times a year, i. e., at the beginning of each term — the school year being divided into three periods. Two general elections were held, but the time for the third was purposely allowed to pass by. Not a child out of over 850 took sufficient interest to ask why election was not held. The election of classroom officers was arranged to take place at beginning of each month. This also was allowed to lapse in May, seven elections having been held previously during the school year. Only two instances were reported of pupils asking the reason for this omission. Such unconscious testimony strongly substantiates the opinions expressed by the teachers of the lack of interest in the system. Moreover, 27 per cent, of all the pupils, 32 per cent, of the grammar grade, voted to discontinue the system. This in spite of the fact that they believed the school authorities to be strongly in favor of the plan. Of course, the anonymous nature of their report gave them freedom to vote as they thought; 292 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington but no doubt many were influenced by the favorable opinion of their teachers. If one- fourth or one-third of the citizens of the United States wished its form of government changed, the country would, it seems to me, be in a deplorable way. A mere three-fourths majority in favor of the Republic would certainly not be a very satisfactory one. Of the thirty or more "school cities" organized in the public schools of Philadelphia all but one or two have been discontinued. Those that still claim existence have been so modified as to retain little more than the monitorial features of the original plan . Again it is claimed that children as a rule show excellent judgment in the election of their officers, tho why they should show good judgment in this difficult matter when they have very poor judgment in almost everything else (immaturity not being the period of "judgment"), is difficult to understand. Teachers report that they regard only 68 per cent, of those elected as "good" officers and that 17 per cent, were "bad" in conduct by ordinary school standards, while only 66 per cent, of the pupils report that they con- sidered most of the officers "good." These reports seem to show that the judgment displayed in choosing officers is what might be expected of children, crude and faulty. It is sometimes claimed that the election of the "bad" boy to office makes a surprising change in his conduct and general attitude toward the school. This is, perhaps, true in some instances, but not in all, nor even in a majority of cases. In the opinion of the teachers about one-half (47 per cent.) of such cases showed some improvement under the responsibilities of office. In the grammar grades, as noted above, fully half the children do not wish to hold office. In a couple of instances not a pupil was willing to serve for his class. The un- wilUngness to hold office in the higher grades seems to be due largely to the development of desire for popularity and of ideals of honor and friendship, that do not appear in the lower grades. The desire may be wrong, and the ideals imperfect, nevertheless they oper- ate as .strong motives either to refuse office or to discharge its duties perfunctorily. like Touchstone's Audrey these ideals may be poor things but they are their own and the best they have and we should be exceedingly careful how we tamper with them. "Because it makes enemies," "because you lose friends," "because I don't like to report others," are sample reasons given. Others simply object for selfish reasons, "Because you don't have so much fun," "because it is too much trouble," etc. The primary-grade pupil who hardly knows what popularity means, who is a natural tale-bearer, and who scarcely develops friendships to a degree worthy of the name, makes the more wilHng and efficient officer. Indeed, it has seemed to me that in the lower grades (leaving out of consideration the first and second grades to whom the whole system is nearly if not quite incomprehen- sible) the "school-city" plan works most smoothly. They take the matter seriously, not questioning for a moment the wisdom of the school authorities who have organized the system, and accepting with childish faith the things about it that they do not understand. The intelligence of the higher grade pupil, which a priori should fit him better for citizen- ship and assumption of officership in the "school city," enables him to see the weak points of the system, while his selfish interests and emotional development prompt him to shirk his responsibilities. It is claimed for the "school city" as an incidental merit that it greatly improves the discipline of the school in which it is organized. This is hardly borne out by the testi- mony of the questionnaire. A large majority of the teachers hold the opinion that it exerts no effect one way or the other, a small minority (11 per cent, for classroom discipline and 35 per cent, for general discipline) hold that it exerts a good influence, while 2 per cent, expressed the belief that its influence is for the worse. I am inclined to conclude from this testimony and from my own personal observation that the influence of the "school city" upon the school discipUne is not very considerable. A well-disciplined school will continue so after organization as a "school city" and a poorly disciplined one is not likely to be very greatly improved. Indeed, a "school city" is liable to become riotous in the extreme, unless carefully supervised and controlled. I onC' L full iL Superintendence] METHODS OF PUPIL GOVERNMENT 203 The answer to the questions of the pupils' questionnaire ^ which called for reasons for their opinions, plainly disclosed the great difference in the point of view of primary and of higher grade pupils; the former seemed to miss the significance of the "school-city" idea almost completely; the latter, while showing somewhat greater appreciation of its meaning, were inclined to place school-boy and girl ideals and traditions of conduct above it. No- where was there manifested enthusiasm for the "school city," nor a sense of the relation between present and future responsibilities. The answers seemed to show that pupils of the elementary school are neither ready for, nor desirous of, a system of self-government in the school. The discussion thus far has been restricted to the executive functions of the "school city." The legislative and judicial branches of the "school-city" government should be considered in detail, but time limitations forbid. It must suffice to say that the exercise of these functions is considerably more difficult than those of the other branch of govern- ment calling to a still greater extent upon capacities which the child does not possess. It is true that a "school city" may be organized in all these departments, and be kept running under the careful and constant direction and supervision of the school principal and teachers. Just as the modern animal trainer can teach his four-footed pupils the most marvelous tricks, the children can be made to play the game more or less well, but the self- government is only nominal, and the real significance of the plan, either completely mis- understood or at best but very vaguely apprehended. This is in complete accord with what is now known of child nature from careful observation and experiment of the trained psychologist and pedagogue. Children are not miniature replicas of adults, but are essen- tially different in many of their instinctive traits, emotional dispositions, and intellectual characteristics. The "school-city" system appeals to instincts and emotions which either do not exist or are undeveloped, and makes demands upon the child's intelligence which he is unprepared to meet. In short, it shoots over the pupils' heads, and so fails to effect that development of the civic conscience, and that preparation for good citizenship for which it is designed. The lack of interest that the children manifest in the "school city" after the first flush of novelty has subsided, the comparatively neutral effect that it has upon the discipline of the school, the great amount of supervision and control that must be exercised by the teacher in order to produce even the semblance of success, all seem to indicate that the system is not adapted to the nature and development of the pupil of the elementary school, and tell strongly against its value for the great object which it has in view. Tho the "school city" may not accomplish what is- claimed for it, nor be a legitimate method of training in citizenship, yet there may perhaps be derived from its study sugges- tions for the utilization of class and school spirit, and the development of a helpful co- operation on the part of the children that will be of considerable value in that general development of character upon which all good citizenship is necessarily based. It is this general development of character that is the fundamental consideration. The special forms of training as provided in the "school city" and by other similar devices are unimportant if not positively meretricious. I think this has been borne out by such scientific investigations as we have at hand. Instance the following conclusions reached by Earl Barnes as the result of a concrete study of the development of children's political ideas: "The sense of the abstract state and of their obligations to it will come to children only later in life. Special emphasis on citizenship as usually understood in elementary education is largely wasted time; and yet the patriotic teacher will breed patriots in all his attempts to make good men and women. Citizenship is but one attribute of good and intelligent men and women and this study calls us back once more to the wholeness of elementary education. All attempts to make good artisans, good leaders of commerce, good soldiers and officers, or good citizens and rulers by any short-cut will produce only one-sided, uncertain, and dangerous grown-up children." With these conclusions I am fullv in accord. 294 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington DISCUSSION Superintendent E. C. Willard, Stamford, Conn. — We are obliged to teach text- books in civics abstractly. By this method, the subject can be taught concretely. We differentiate this from all other subjects. If has been an unqualified success in Stamford. It may do a great deal of good and certainly no harm. It has been in successful operation ten years in one of the schools of Syracuse, N. Y. ; also in one school in Philadelphia eight years. Thirty schools in Philadelphia have used it successfully from one to three years. The results always depend upon the tact of the teachers using it. Superintendent J. H. Phillips, Birmingham, Ala. — We are still experimenting. We are not ready with positive conclusions. Great caution is necessary in introducing a plan of this kind. The results so far in Birmingham are good. The boys have been made responsible. This has helped the teacher. Most school troubles are caused by a few active spirits. The great majority are silent. This scheme gives voice to the great majority. It is especially successful in four schools in Birmingham. It gives voice and power to the better sentiment of the school and public sentiment in the school, as every- where else, is the controlling spirit. Superintendent Winfred Howard Babbitt, Hawaii. — There is a peculiar situa- tion in Hawaii. There are children of many different nationalities, to be made into American citizens. The value of school city is here greater than elsewhere. Great results have been accomplished by this method, greater, I believe, than are claimed for it D. ROUND TABLE ON AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION TOPIC: PREPARATION OF TEACHERS FOR AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION In the absence of Secretary Wilson, of the Department of Agriculture, Dr. A. C. True, director of the Office of Experiment Stations, was asked to represent the Department of Agriculture. Dr. True spoke informally and the substance of his remarks was as follows : The Honorable Secretary of Agriculture has been prevented from coming to this meeting because of press of other business. He has not commissioned me to represent him on this occasion, but I feel that it is proper for me to say a few words relating to the educa- tional work of the great department over which he presides. The secretary is greatly in- terested in all that pertains to the education of our rural people and under his administra- tion the national Department of Agriculture has been encouraged to promote very actively the movement for education along agricultural lines. Later in this meeting Mr. Crosby will describe somewhat specifically what the department is doing in this matter, and I will not anticipate what he has to say. I may, however, call attention to the fact that a large part of the work of the depart- ment is broadly educational. Thru its investigations and explorations it is collecting a large amount of new information on agricultural subjects which it is disseminating broadcast thruout the country thru numerous popular and scientific publications. Under the law by which it was established the department is authorized to use the term "agriculture" in its broadest sense. Not only farming, but also horticulture, forestry, and whatever relates to the growth and preservation of plants or domestic animals, in villages and cities as well as in the open country, come within its province. The depart- ment is, therefore, doing much which is of interest and value to teachers, students, and other people in the towns as well as on the farms. Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 295 In recent years the department has found that it is very desirable to supplement its publications with local demonstrations of new crops and methods and with oral instruc- tion at farmers' institutes and other assembUes of people interested in agriculture. It has also reaUzed that if the work done by the department and the state agricultural experiment stations is to be thoroly utilized for the improvement of our agriculture and the intellectual and social uplift of the masses of our rural people, the minds of the country children must be prepared to receive the new information which may aid them in their future life work. The department has therefore engaged in the propaganda for the introduction of agricultural subjects into our school curricula, and in co-operation with the agricultural colleges and educational leaders in the various states has sought to ascertain and define what is feasible in the development of a system of agricultural education suited to the needs of the vast number of our people who live in the country and carry on our agriculture. Entering into the movement for agricultural education at a time when it had few friends, the department has greatly rejoiced in its rapid progress in recent years. Today the leaders of pubhc opinion in this country, with the President of the United States at their head, are generally convinced that our schools should be brought into closer touch with our industries and that subjects relating to such a fundamental industry as agricul- ture should be included in the school curricula. Responding to the demands of this movement, this great National Education Associa- tion is every year showing a deeper interest in measures looking to the improvement of education for our rural people. And today this Association is to take an important advance step in the organization of a Department of Rural and Agricultural Education. It seems that we have reached a new stage in the development of this movement. Thus far it has been mainly a propaganda for reform. Now the time has come for the definite formulation of programs for these new phases of education and the undertaking of many experimental efforts to adapt the new courses to our general educational schemes. You, who are actually engaged in the work of our schools, are therefore banding yourselves together to study the problems of agricultural education and to make and put into effect plans for this new type of education. There is reason for general congratulation that the cause of agricultural education has reached such a point. The Department of Agriculture is glad that you are met here for such a purpose. It desires to aid you in this great work in any way that it can. It now seems assured that the forces in favor of the improvement of the education of our rural people are to be greatly strengthened by a closer organization and sympathy. We may therefore hope for widespread and permanent results in the cause of agricultural education in the near future. B IIL NOTES ON THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS OF AGRICULTURE ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION {An Abstract] Commissioner Brown urged that in the training of teachers of agriculture both the scientific and the pedagogical purpose should be kept steadily in view. He expressed confidence that effective co-operation could be maintained in such education between scientific speciahsts on the one hand, and pedagogical teachers on the other hand. He referred to Senate bill 3392, "to provide for the advancement of instruction in agriculture, manual training and home economics in the state normal schools of the United States." This bill, said Commissioner Brown, is one of several which have been introduced at this session of Congress, providing for national aid to education in the several states, and particulariy for national aid as regards education in agriculture, home economics and other industrial subjects. The fact that several bills touching in different ways upon this 296 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington subject have been brought before Congress is a clear indication of public interest in this matter. Principle involved. — The principle involved in the granting of such aid to the states by the general government has already found definite lodgment in the policy of the national government, as shown by the appropriations made under the second Morrill act, of 1890, and the Nelson amendment of 1907, providing for a more complete endowment and sup- port of agricultural and mechanical colleges. It is generally agreed that the working of this principle, in its bearing on the support of the land-grant colleges, has been extremely beneficial. One indication of the value of such appropriations is seen in the fact that they have encouraged rather than retarded the support of these state institutions by the several state governments. The information at hand in the Bureau of Education shows that in the year 1896 these land-grant colleges received in the aggregate 29 per cent, of their support from the national government. Ten years later, in 1906, owing to the increase of state appropriations, this proportion of their support from federal funds was reduced to 15.4 per cent. In this ten- year period the congressional grant was increased by 19 per cent. Increase in state aid. — Continuing, Commissioner Brown said: In the same time the amount which these institutions received from their several states was increased by about 240 per cent. Whereas in 1896 twenty-five of these institutions received more than one-half of their support from the national government, in 1906 only fifteen received more than one-half of their support from the national government. These figures show a whole- some tendency. They would seem to indicate that the granting of national aid for the promotion of education might safely be extended to other classes of institutions, provided it can be shown that there is a national need that these institutions be advanced more rapidly in their educational efficiency than they can be advanced without such national aid. The land-grant colleges were intended to meet what was clearly a national need, that of institutions in all of the states which should promote agricultural improvement by providing the higher grades of agricultural instruction. This had been found to be an extremely difficult undertaking- Even with the en- couragement by the first Morrill act, 1862, the development of these institutions was pain- fully slow. Since the granting of an annual appropriation for their better support, under the second Morrill act, their usefulness has been very rapidly extended and increased. During the period since 1890, however, industrial changes have gone forward with great rapidity, the tendency of our rural population to gravitate toward the cities has continued, and the need of a better industrial education for our city populations has been emphasized by the increasing severity of world competition. For all of these reasons the problem of a better education of an industrial type, in both country and city, has steadily become more acute. Federal assistance needed. — It is extremely doubtful whether these growing needs can be met in the near future in a majority of the states unless the encouragement of federal appropriations be added to the efforts of the states and of local communities. There is, however, good reason to hope that any appropriations which may be made to this end by the national government will encourage and promote such provision by states and com- munities as will in good measure meet the need. Commissioner Brown, in concluding, said: I would recommend that, as a preliminary to any new federal appropriation for educational purposes in the several states, a special inquiry be instituted by Congress to cover the points indicated, and any other items which may properly enter into a plan of federal appropriation for educational purposes. " In my judgment a large saving would be effected even if such an inquiry should occupy from one to two years of time and involve an expenditure of from fifty to one hundred thousand dollars." The speaker also called attention to the fact that certain modifications should be made in Senate bill 3392 before it is put upon its passage. Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 297 CO-OPERATION OF STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES AND STATE NORMAL SCHOOLS I. KENYON L. BUTTERFIELD, PRESIDENT MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE AMHERST, MASS. In 1905 Governor W. L. Douglas, of Massachusetts, appointed a state Commission 'on Industrial Education, of which Hon. Carroll D. Wright was chairman, for the purpose of investigating the needs of the commonwealth with respect to industrial education, and of reporting a plan of operations which would meet the need. That Commission 'presented to the legislature of 1906 a strikingly complete and extremely valuable printed report, a document destined to become a classic in the literature of the subject. Agriculture as a phase of industrial education was fully recognized in this report, and among other recommendations of the Commission was one for the establishment of a nor- mal department at the Massachusetts Agricultural College for the purpose of giving in- struction to teachers who desire to teach elementary agriculture in the public schools. This was the result of careful consideration of the methods and facilities for the training of teachers to teach agriculture. The Commission had discussed the feasibihty of such instruc- tion in the state normal schools, in a proposed special normal school for agriculture, and in the agricultural college. They decided that the greatest economy and efl&ciency would be subserved by the establishment of a normal department in agriculture at the agricul- tural college. In accordance with this report, the legislature established such a department and in 1907 made an appropriation of $5,000 per year to carry out the law. In the same year the college organized a Department of Agricultural Education and appointed as full pro- fessor William R. Hart, of Nebraska. Instruction to the regular students of the college is given in this department. For teachers already in service a Simimer School of Agri- culture was held at the college in 1907. This decision of the Commission and the establishment of the Department of Agri- cultural Education and of the Summer School of Agriculture at the college, of course, raised the question, What shall the normal schools do with reference to work of this type ? Shall they refrain entirely from such instruction, shall they develop courses parallel to those offered at the college, or shall they give courses supplemental to those at the college ? This question was brought up for further consideration thru a proposition ad- vanced by Principal F. F. Murdock, of the Massachusetts State Normal School at North Adams, that the agricultural college and the normal school should co-operate in the train- ing of grade teachers for work in elementary agriculture, and if possible in supervision of agriculture and nature-study. The proposition in brief was: (i) That the college should engage an instructor and supervisor of elementary agriculture who should give a portion of his time to the instruction of students at the normal school, another portion to the super- vision of those schools in Berkshire County which the normal school is endeavoring to assist in the introduction of agriculture, and the remaining time to such instruction in the agricultural college and general supervision and assistance to the teachers of the state as circumstances will permit. (2) That the normal school should contribute its facilities of a science department, a garden of two and a half acres, and the children in the training school. The principle involved in this proposed scheme of co-operation is substantially this : Agriculture is recognized as a distinct subject, and one possessing, even in its elementary work, strong technical aspects. Hence it will be differentiated in scope, purpose, and method of approach, from the nature-work of the lower grades, and even irom some phases of school gardening. It seems to follow, therefore, that the agricultural college, by reason of its equipment, its atmosphere, and its teaching force, is the proper place for the instruc- tion of teachers in the subject-matter of agriculture. On the other hand, the normal school, because of its purpose, its facilities, and its teaching body, is the proper place for the study of the child and for practice in teaching, 298 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington or, to put it more exactly, is the proper place for the development of the material and methods of instruction with special reference to the mental needs and capacities of the child. The agricultural college emphasizes the technical aspect, the subject side; the normal school emphasizes the pedagogical aspect, the child side. This does not mean that the agricultural college usually ignores the pedagogical, nor the normal school usually ignores the technical, aspect of the question. Obviously there is no sharp line of demar- kation, but obviously also the spirit and atmosphere of both schools, dififering in emphasis, are both needed for the thoro development of the plan. It is to be observed, moreover, that this plan has to do with elementary agriculture. The question of instruction in high- school agriculture has not thus far been considered in the scheme of co-operation, tho the agricultural college is providing for such instruction. I have hesitated to outline this plan because it is at present only a plan. But if the legislature, acting according to the wish of the state Board of Education and of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, appropriates additional funds, this plan will go into efifect approximately April i. Nevertheless, I have used this proposed and tentative plan for the purpose of this discussion because I think it involves two funda- mental principles, namely: (i) That the emphasis in the agricultural college and the emphasis in the typical normal school, with respect to the training of teachers to teach elementary agriculture, will differ one from the other, tho the division is not sharply marked. Both are complementary and both are vital. (2) That the natural and desir- able method of training teachers of elementary agriculture involves a measure of co-opera- tion between the two institutions. The development of methods remains largely for the future. There will doubtless be some exchange of pupils. There probably will be exchange of teachers. And even if nothing more is done than that the college instructor whose special field is agriculture shall assist at the normal school and in overseeing the efforts to introduce elementary agriculture into the schools, the principle will be recognized and generous co-operation will be secured. II. ALFRED BAYLISS, PRINCIPAL WESTERN ILLINOIS STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, MACOMB, ILL. I know nothing which I can contribute to this discussion likely to be of more value than a brief account of an instance of rather close co-operation already established between the College of Agriculture of the State University of Illinois and the normal school with which I am connected. At present such work as we are attempting in agriculture is in charge of our instructor in biology (Mr. J. T. Johnson), who, as a side line, while an instructor at the university, nearly completed a full course in the agricultural college. Because of the friendly relations existing between our instructor and the agricultural college faculty there was not the slightest difficulty in arranging for a co-operative soil-experiment field on the normal-school campus. The ground set apart for a beginning is the S.E. 2J acres of the S.E. 10 of the N.E. 40 of the N.W. \ of Sec. 36, Twp. 6 N., R. 3 W. of the fourth principal meridian. The soil is a gray silt loam, natural timber land, representing quite a large area of land in the upper Illinois glaciation. The plans to be used in conducting the field experiment were prepared in detail at the college, under the immediate direction of Dr. C. G. Hop- kins, the professor of agronomy, who personally saw to it that the field was properly laid out, tiled, and that all other initial steps were rightly taken. The plans are duplicates of those used in the experiments in soil fertility at the experiment station at the college. The normal school is responsible for the field operations and the bookkeeping, for both of which the most precise directions have been supplied. Samples of the soil have been taken to the agricultural college and stored for comparison with others to be taken from the same plots eight to twenty years hence. Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION o,^,. .^ ^99 This experiment field is divided into forty plots, each one rod square, and each sur- rounded by a protecting border one-fourth of a rod wide. These plots are arranged in two divisions, so mapped and numbered that any plot may readily be located and referred to. There are four series of five plots each in each division, and the plan involves a four-year rotation of corn, oats, wheat, and clover hay. The two divisions make it possible to have each crop represented in duplicate every year. The treatment proposed in each division is as follows: For the first division — Plot No. I. — No treatment. Plot No. 2.— Legume treatment (turning back to the soil everything grown upon the land excepting grains and clover seed). Plot No. 3. — Legume, lime. . Plot No. 4. — Legume, lime, phosphorus. Plot No. 5.- — Legume, lime, phosphorus, potassium. For the second division — Plot No. I. — No treatment. Plot No. 2. — Manure. Plot No. 3. — Manure, lime. Plot No. 4. — Manure, Ume, phosphorus. Plot No. 5. — Manure, lime, phosphorus, potassium. This, it will be seen, provides for (i) a system of grain farming in which the humus and the nitrogen are to be maintained by plowing legume crops and the residue of other crops, such as the stalks of the corn crop and possibly the straw of the oats and wheat crops, and all of the clover crop except the seed; and (2) a system of live-stock farming in which the crops are all removed from the land, including the corn stalks, straw, and clover hay, while farm manure is to be returned in proportion to the crops produced. Further detail is unnecessary at this time and place. It should be added, however, that there is not the least doubt that when we get this line of work well in hand, the agri- cultural college will be equally ready and willing to start and direct us in any other advis- able line. Our present thought is that dairy husbandry will be next, and that may be followed by some lines of plant breeding. Moreover, to the credit of its co-operative instincts be it said, the agricultural college has located at least one of its branch stations in juxtaposition to a particularly enterprising and progressive country school, allowing the school certain special privileges in connection therewith, making it hardly less a co-operative station than the one just described. Co-operation in this spirit is merely the natural articulation of parts of the public- school system, and would be one means of making such a measure as Senate Bill 3392 fully efficient. DISCUSSION William M. Stewart, president State Normal School, Salt Lake City, Utah. — The primary need for the successful teaching of agriculture is competent teachers. Neither the agricultural college nor the normal school can alone adequately prepare teachers for giving scientific instruction in agriculture in the common schools. This statement is made in view of two main considerations: (i) The difficulty and newness of agriculture as a subject of school study; (2) The fact that the teaching of agriculture requires the services of a better-trained teacher academically, and better- trained in psychology, pedagogy, and methods, than does the teaching of any of the subjects now included in the school curriculum. The teaching of agriculture embraces the whole of the teacher's art. It is a pervasive and exacting subject. It embodies the most important aspects of character building; for in teaching the pupils scientifically to plant, cultivate, and harvest farm crops, and as a community to be responsible for the proper care of a school garden, we are training them in some of the most valuable lessons in Life. Honesty is here not merely inculcated, but 300 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington is put into actual operation. Industry is not liere explained and commendedj but is realized. There is no doubt, in such case, of the worth and the necessity of industry, regu- larity, etc., for their effects are apparent in the product. The great lessons of civic right- eousness and personal honor stand out in bold relief just as soon as a school engages in co-operative work connected with the real activities of life. The special difficulty in teaching agriculture arises from the fact that it is a part of, or may be correlated with, almost every other subject taught in the schools. It implies botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, physiology, geology, meteorology; it is reading, language, geography, arithmetic; it is manual training and domestic science; or at least it is so closely related to all these subjects that a pedagogical knowledge of the entire curriculum is necessary in order to enable the teacher successfully to teach agriculture in the public schools. It is also commerce, business, and transportation. A teacher cannot merely learn agriculture and then teach it. He should leain the pedagogy of all the branches upon which it depends and with which it is so vitally connected; and yet he must be specially trained in the science and art of agriculture, or he will fail to realize its practical or vocational value. The great masses of the people are and ever will be producers of commodities. The school garden, a nature laboratory necessary to every school, is the most con- venient, certain, and attractive form known for the creation of products for sale by school pupils. Each child coming from the public schools should have acquired something in the way of an occupation that he can do well. Simple branches of horticulture are easily within his reach, since they require only methodical application and not a high degree of either hand skill or mental training and balance. The vocational value of agriculture, domestic science, etc., therefore, gives to the child some preparation of real merit which will do much to prepare him for life. But this work has more than vocational value; even the city teacher should be thus trained. Life in the city is so artificial that to have the city schools do some of the nature work and garden practice will do much toward preventing the city boy or girl from becom- ing formally bookish and unpractical. Besides, the city needs the school garden and the elements of agriculture, for it may happen that the talent of the city child is for agriculture. If so, this kind of training will find out his talents and instincts as well as train them. Why should not the city boy be permitted to go to the country if he so desires, as well as the country boy to the city ? The open-air exercises, the muscular and mental activity, and the change from school routine to the varied motor activities of the garden, all con- duce to make this form of training one of the best, not only from the educational but from the hygienic standpoint, ever undertaken in the schools. Of course the great question remains. Is it practicable ? Can it be done ? Can teachers be so trained and every little school have at least a garden for its laboratory ? We believe so. The school garden part is so simple, so easy of realization in some degree when once understood, that no school, however small or poorly equipped, need fail in the work of doing some agriculture when the teacher is competent. So the vital need is competent teachers. Let us now consider how this work of training teachers can best be done, so as to insure the efficiency of the teacher as well as to maintain economy of expenditure in his prepara- tion for agricultural education. We have no doubt, judging from our own experience, and from the very nature of the subject, that the most economical and efficient plan is to have the agricultural college and the normal school departments of the university, and to have them associated in one place and combined on one campus under one administration. Such a combination would furnish expert knowledge and skill needed for the training not only of agricultural teachers but for all others as well; the equipment of all the schools would be available for each, and expensive duplication avoided. Each can help the other so much that there would be an enormous gain in efficiency, and saving in expenditure. But the great reason is the advantage which this union affords for the superior training of Superintendence] ^ AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION ^OI teachers. Expert knowledge in many lines of science, natural history, and business are required for successful agricultural practices, while the necessary psychological and peda- gogical training of teachers cannot, except at great expense, be supplied by any one of these institutions standing by itself. It is not enough that the public-school teacher shaU know agriculture, he must be primarily a teacher; he must know the best normal methods; his view-point must be that of the child. While this is true of all the subjects taught in the public schools, it is particularly and in a paramount way true of the science and art of agriculture. Above any other subject in the school curriculum, agriculture presents special diffi- culties in teaching; and more than any other subject, it requires the successful application of the principles of sound pedagogy in order to be successful. All the ingenuity, tact, and even devices of good teachers must be here employed, or we shall fail. The great problem will be how to sustain the interest of the child in the work, for notwithstanding the beauty of the science and the naturalness of the art of agriculture, children will lose interest in it simply thru waiting for its results, unless the subject-matter is made, by pedagogical methods, to conform to the natural interests of the child. The growth of plants is very slow. The results in farming are not attained until the end of the season; often not then. Soils in and of themselves may be very uninteresting things; fertilizers still more so; and the same may be said of some of the farm processes. The interest of the adult is easily sustained, because he can foresee the result. To him the end means money and profit; but the child in the early years of his school life cannot foresee the end. He has little in- terest in profit or loss; he will not, he cannot, wait for his result until the plant matures and the crop is sold. In order to sustain his interest, the results must be immediate, as they appear to him to be in grammar, arithmetic, and any other school subject. It is here that the art of teaching will always be indispensable. The more mere knowledge any agricultural expert has, the more dangerous he might become in the schoolroom from this very fact; for if he lack the teacher's art, his superior knowledge of agriculture can but serve to carry him and his instruction still farther away from child-interest and thus discourage and disgust the child with the subject. It is for these reasons that the normal school must train teachers to teach agriculture; for scientific farming is the most complex of the nature arts and sciences. The adult learns it in some direct and condensed way. If the normal work for training teachers of agriculture should be added to the agri- cultural college, the latter would need to incorporate into its organization a complete normal school. If agriculture is to be added to the normal school, the latter must have the services of agricultural teachers as part of its faculty. The first alternative would require the agricultural college to duplicate everything the normal school does. The second alter- native would require that the normal school should secure the services of several agricultural experts for at least a part of their time, as is now the case at the Utah State Normal School. This year we have found it sufficient to receive from the agricultural college the services of an expert on soils and farm crops, of another on economic entomology, of another on horticulture, and of another on birds. We get the services of one professor one day each week thru the school year. This is, of course, in addition to the regular nature-study instruction, which requires two days more per week, and is given by the regular professor and director of nature-study in the St^te Normal School of Utah. In those states in which the three institutions, the university, the agricultural college and the normal school, are entirely separate and apart from one another, the agricultural college should maintain a branch experiment station on the campus of the normal school, so that the specialists in charge of that station would also be available for use by the normal school. This co-operative work between the two schools could be managed as extension work on the part of the agricultural college, just as the farmers' institutes are part of its extension work. This normal institute, as a species of extension work, would be a center 302 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington for this kind of activity, and would no doubt accomplish more than many or perhaps all the other institutes devoted directly to the interests of farmers. That is, in its final results it would train the teachers and they would disseminate what they had learned; and thus the benefits to agriculture would be enormously multiplied. The government in its appropriation to agricultural colleges should set apart a specific portion of the appropriation to be used in state normal-school work, as the officers of the state normal school should direct; but the expert work should all be done by the agri- cultural-college faculty. It would be indispensable that the financial aid devoted to the purposes of normal instruction should not be uncertain and must not be left to the discre- tion of the agricultural college. The management of the normal curriculum must be with the normal school. It knows best just when, and also how much agricultural instruc- tion should be given to the prospective teachers of the community. This is precisely its business and function. It vdll prescribe, broadly, the subject; but the details and char- acter of the work to be given must be determined by the agricultural college experts, who alone can keep abreast of recent progress in agricultural science. The third alternative is the attempt to train teachers in agriculture without any co- operation between the two schools. This is possible, but expensive and unsatisfactory. No doubt certain recreative garden work could be done; and also some nature work; but this is not sufficient and would result in failure, so far as efficient training of teachers in agriculture is concerned, or it would result in a gradual duplication of work and equipment of the agricultural college. The Utah State Normal School is on most friendly terms with the State Agricultural College which has promised all the aid possible. We hope in the immediate future to have an agricultural experiment station located on the normal-school campus. Our school garden now comprises six acres under close cultivation. An expert gardener gives his entire time to it, with some assistance during the growing season. This land is cultivated as a commercial garden. It is expected to pay its own way. Our director of nature-study maintains that the best lesson in farming will be the concrete demonstration of how a farm, garden, or orchard may be made to pay; and therefore that the garden as a whole and each separate class garden should be cultivated for the sake of profit, as well as for the sake of beauty, recreation, and education. We have found already that we could, if we had the facilities, base most of the school work upon the activities that center round the school garden. Our nature-work in the fall begins with the study of weeds, and each grade is expected to identify its assigned groups. Certain cultivated products and also certain wild plants, insects, and birds are assigned to each grade. Along with these laboratory studies, the actual harvesting of small farm crops is given. The children sell the crops harvested from their special garden, put the money in the bank, figure the cost of the product, make out the bills, and carry on all the business and banking essential to such work. In this subject, they study a specimen rather than a book. The specimen is their book. What they tell about it is their oral recitation; what they write about it is their writing- work and English composition; their drawing or model- ing of it constitutes their art; their estimates of its value and calculations made about it form their arithmetic. The raising of it and the preparation of the utensils necessarv in its handling make up part of their manual training. The same vegetables cooked in the domestic-science classes furnish part of the material for their work in cooking. The arguments presented aim to sustaih: 1. The great importance of agricultural education, and the extreme difficulty in suc- cessfully teaching it in the common schools, both elementary and secondary; also that the teacher of agriculture, more than the teacher of any other subject in the curriculum, should be professionally trained for his work. 2. That this training can best be done in a university which combines with it on one site the agricultural and the normal school. 3. That if the normal school undertakes the work of training agricultural teachers Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 303 by itself on a separate site, it should have, to be most successful, the co-operation of the agricultural college. 4. That for the agricultural college to train competent teachers it would be neces sary to duplicate the equipment and faculty of the normal school. In conclusion I will say that the movement for industrial education will make its most rapid and successful advance along the line of agriculture. To give all teachers at least some agricultural training will not only mean a revolution in our educational system but it will give such an impetus to agriculture as our country has never seen. I have great faith in this movement as a wonderful stimulus in socializing school activities, that is, in making the school organic with life— the ultimate aim of our democratic system of education. CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND STATE SCHOOL AUTHORITIES IN PROMOTING AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION DICK J. CROSBY, EXPERT IN AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION, UNITED STATES OFFICE OF EXPERIMENT STATIONS, WASHINGTON, D. C. In the promotion of agricultural education there are many problems which will require the combined efforts of all the educational forces in this country to solve. The movement for agricultural education is so large and withal so new, it has come upon us so suddenly, that we find ourselves unprepared to meet all of the demands it makes upon us. It comes nearer to being a national movement than any other recent movement in educa- tion. The combined legislation of the federal Congress and the legislatures of the several states and territories has built up a national system of agricultural education, which includes the following units: (i) The National Bureau of Education, which acts in an advisory capacity with all of the units concerning the expenditure of federal funds for educa- tion and serves as a general clearing-house of education; (2) the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture which acts in an advisory capacity on matters relating to the expendi- ture of federal funds for research in agriculture and on matters relating to agricultural education in particular, and is itself engaged in research to increase the fund of knowledge in agriculture; (3) state agricultural experiment stations, engaged in adding to the sum of knowledge concerning agriculture, and (4) state agricultural colleges engaged in educat- ing some 60,000 of our young men and young women along lines of agriculture, mechanic arts, and home economics. For the support of these state research and educational institutions the federal government is now expending about two and one-half million dol- lars annually and the several states and territories are taxing themselves to the amount of over eight millions. The government is also expending over nine milUons annually for the work of its Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Education, so that altogether something over twenty million dollars are expended annually to increase our fund of information on industrial subjects, largely agricultural. Of late the agricultural-education movement has grown at a rate that is truly astound- ing. The agricultural colleges, which for some twenty-five years waged a fierce struggle for the right to be — a right questioned not only by the older types of colleges but also to a surprising extent by the farmers themselves — ^have in recent years found themselves and gained the loyal support of their constituents. Agricultural education has become so popular that it is no longer sufficient for the agricultural colleges to turn out leaders to take positions of influence and trust in the colleges, stations, and other educational and research institutions. They must also train young men in a more practical way for the work of the farm, the dairy, the orchard, and the forest, or else there must be special agricultural schools for this work. Several secondary agricultural schools have come into the field and struck good, clean furrows; others are following. But this is not all-satisfying. There must also be some instruction regarding this great fundamental industry of our 304 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington country in the public high schools, and even in the grammar schools where conditions are favorable. You can see at once how, with every added demand along this line, the problems of teaching and administration multiply. There are teachers to train — who shall do it, the colleges or the normal schools or both ? What sort of courses are suitable for the training of teachers in this new line of instruction ? For it is new, something far different than instruction in language, mathematics, physics, or chemistry. There are courses of study to prepare for these grammar schools, public high schools, technical agricultural high schools, and agricultural colleges. Who shall do this — each local institution for itself or some central agency or some combination of forces representing both the local and the central agencies ? CO-OPERATION AS IT NOW EXISTS Fortunately for us who have drifted into the current at nearly flood tide, some of these problems began to appear about twenty years ago and steps were then taken to give them careful consideration. Soon after Congress appropriated funds for agricultural experiment stations a national organization known as the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations was formed. Membership in this association was granted to each agricultural college and each agricultural experiment station, to the National Bureau of Education, to the United States Department of Agriculture, and to the Office of Experiment Stations which was organized about this time to represent the department in its relations with these institutions. This association brought together the leaders in agricultural education from all parts of the country and brought about conferences and discussions which were very helpful in showing these men what they were not doing. The need of some fundamental study of the pedagogics of agriculture became more and more apparent, and finally, about 1895, the association appointed a standing committee on methods of teaching agriculture, of which the director of the Ofl5ce of Experiment Stations has been a member from the first. This committee made its first report in 1896 and has made ten reports since that time, all of which have been published by the Department of Agriculture and are now available. There have been seven reports on college courses in agriculture, two on secondary courses in agriculture, and two on elementary courses in agriculture. The courses outlined in these reports were not intended to be followed implicitly by all of the colleges and schools in the different states and territories but were aimed to form the basis of a systematic and progressive treatment of the subject of agri- culture, and as such they have been eminently successful. It is doubtful if any institution has followed these courses in their entirety, but their influence is plainly discernible in nearly every college and school course where agriculture is taught. This co-operation with the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Ex- periment Stations has brought the Department of Agriculture more and more into the field of agricultural education as a co-ordinating agency, a sort of clearing-house for information on the subject. Thru its Office of Experiment Stations the department has helped the association to conduct a graduate school of agriculture where methods of teach- ing and some of the more fundamental problems in agricultural education are discussed by a corps of the most noted experts to be found in this country and Europe. It has also aided the agricultural experiment stations, colleges, and schools to secure suitable investi- gators and teachers. The Office of Experiment Stations maintains a card catalogue of about 1,500 names containing a record of the training and experience of teachers and investigators in agriculture and allied subjects, to which it can refer readily when requests for candidates are received from any of the institutions. One of the important functions of the Office of Experiment Stations is that of collect- ing and disseminating information on agricultural education and research in this country and abroad. It has a staff of twelve experts who are constantly engaged in examining the agricultural literature of the world and preparing it for publication in such form as to make Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 305 it widely available in this country. The office pubUshes a technical journal known as the Experiment Station Record which contains a record of the results of every experiment con- ducted by an experiment station in this country as well as the more important investigations of some eight hundred experiment stations in foreign countries. In this publication there is a department of agricultural education in which textbooks, bulletins, circulars, and important newspaper articles on this subject are reviewed and some of the more important notes concerning the progress of agricultural education are given. The office also publishes a series of popular bulletins known as "Experiment Station Work," in which the results of investigations appear in a form suitable for the use of the non-technical reader— the farmer, and his children in school. Then there are various technical bulletins on the investigations of the office, circulars embodying the reports of the Committee on Instruction in Agriculture and other publications containing information of popular interest. The other bureaus of the Department of Agriculture are also doing many things which are of service to the cause of agricultural education. The Bureau of Plant Industry, for example, has efficiently aided the school-garden movement by distributing seeds, by pre- paring publications, and by supervising the school-garden work of the schools of the Dis- trict of Columbia, part of which is done on the department grounds. The Bureau of Soils has aided in the location of farms connected with agricultural schools. All the bureaus are issuing many publications which are of use to teachers and students, and it is the policy of the department to furnish them to the schools as freely as existing legislation will permit. The Office of Experiment Stations has the advice and assistance of all the bureaus of the department in the preparation of its publications on agricultural education, and it should also be said that the present Secretary and Assistant Secretary of Agriculture have done all in their power to advance the interests of agricultural education and make the department broadly useful in this cause. As a natural result of the accumulation of data in the Office of Experiment Stations concerning the teaching of agriculture in this country and abroad, educators in all parts of the country have come to look upon the office as a source of information and advice whenever new problems in agricultural education arise. The office is frequently called upon to aid the state school authorities in planning new schools of agriculture and courses in nature-study and elementary agriculture for the primary and secondary public schools, for normal schools, and even for private and denominational schools and colleges. As an example of this kind of work the office was asked to send a representative to California to meet the teachers and farmers of the state in a large convention at the State Agricultural College and confer with them regarding the introduction of agriculture into the school system of that state. The director of the office, Dr. A. C. True, attended this meeting and outlined briefly his views, which were that instruction in nature-study and school gardening should be introduced into the first six years of the primary school, with more formal instruction in agriculture during the remaining two years of the grammar school and thruout a portion at least of the high-school course. He recommended also the establishment of additional agricultural high schools to meet the demand for com- prehensive training in agriculture on the part of students who could not take the college course in agriculture. He was then asked to prepare a plan for introducing agriculture into the public schools, which he did, and as a result of this work a number of county superintendents have taken steps to introduce agriculture into all of their schools and have succeeded in getting many of their teachers to undertake this work. Provision has also been made for two state agricultural high schools since Dr. True's visit to California. As another example I might speak of our work in Georgia. The legislature of the state passed an act providing for eleven agricultural schools in Georgia. Those who were charged with the duty of organizing these schools had a pretty good notion of what they wanted to accomplish but were without experience in arranging the details of courses of study and outlining laboratory work and field exercises. The Office of Experiment Stations was asked to assist in this work and sent its expert in agricultural education to Georgia to 3o6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington study the situation and confer with the governor, the state superintendent of public instruction, the chancellor of the state university, and the president of the State Normal School at Milledgeville, concerning courses of study. After the conference our expert was asked to outline at considerable length courses in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry, with laboratory work and field exercises, which he did. These courses were submitted to the dean of the College of Agriculture, the governor of the state, and the board of trustees of the school of agriculture and formally adopted by them. Just now we are co-operating with the county school authorities in Cecil County, Maryland, in developing a small country high school in which agricultural teaching is a prominent feature. The man who is engaged in that work is sent out during June, July, and August to aid in training teachers of agriculture in summer schools and teachers' institutes. Apparently our friends in the different states would like it if we could supply them with four or five such men. And so we might multiply examples, but these are sufl&cient to show the nature of the work which the Office of Experiment Stations is called upon to do in co-operation with state school authorities. There are a hundred and one other things concerning which the advice of the office is solicited. Our correspondence on agricultural education is very large arid is growing every day. Scarcely a day passes that we do not send out from loo to i,ooo or 1,500 publications to be used in schools. LINES OF FUTURE DEVELOPMENT With the present interest in agricultural education and the rapid growth of the move- ment for the introduction of agriculture into secondary and elementary schools and its attendant problem of training teachers for this work, it is evident that for many years to come there will be a large demand for just such clearing-house work as the Office of Ex- periment Stations has been engaged in during the past ten or fifteen years. The work of outlining courses of study for different types of schools has only just begun. Thus far in our work for secondary and elementary schools we have dealt only with the subject of agronomy. There still remain for consideration such subjects as horticulture, forestry, animal industry, dairying, farm machinery, farm mechanics, and agricultural engineering, all of which are important and will be taken up as soon as the resources of the office will permit. The work of training teachers to take up the agricultural instruction in normal schools, agricultural high schools, and public schools, with its many attendant problems, has only -just begun, but the correspondence and the requests for literature on this subject are already large. Plans for agricultural high schools and for the organization of courses in agriculture in the public high schools and in consolidated rural schools are being made in all parts of the country, and everywhere new problems are presented concerning which the advice of this office is sought. This work will continue and will grow until agricultural courses in all of these different schools attended by the sons and daughters of the farmers have been organized on an efficient basis. The department will also be called upon for many years to come to aid the agricultural colleges in bringing the results of the investigations made by this department and the experiment stations into pedagogical form for use in the agricultural colleges and these different schools. This work is now proceeding too slowly to keep pace with the accumu- lation of material and too slowly, as indicated above, to keep pace with the development of institutions giving instruction in agriculture. It is now generally recognized that no other agency than the Department of Agriculture, which maintains an intimate organic relation- ship with the state institutions for agricultural education and research, is so well equipped to perform this important function. As the Commissioner of Education said at the cele- bration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Michigan Agricultural College, "The national Department of Agriculture is undoubtedly to continue its remarkably wide and influential work, its expert investigations, the issuance of manifold and vastly useful publications, and its furtherance of all manner of agricultural education and research in the several states." Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION ^07 Finally, it seems to me that the Department of Agriculture is tailed upon to continue indefinitely its work of bringing together and publishing for wide distribution the results of successful experiments, successful methods of teaching agriculture, in this country and abroad. It can do this more economically than any other agency can do it. It is already examining the agricultural literature of the world, and it is in a position to bring to the attention of those school authorities who are just starting out in experiments along this line the results of successful efforts elsewhere. It has ready access to much literature that is unavailable to the general public or even to the state agricultural institutions and thus is enabled to give wide publicity to many experiments in agricultural education which might otherwise remain buried indefinitely in library alcoves. The department needs the assistance of all these other educational agencies. It needs to know their problems, to learn of successful experiments, in order that the results may be published abroad; also of failures, so that warning of impending difiiculties may be given. One of the most help- ful educational conferences I ever attended was one held recently in Atlanta, where much time was given to reports of failures and their causes. One of the most difficult things which your committee on industrial education has had to do has been to get definite information regarding real success and real failure in teaching agriculture. Too many of the records that have been written up have been records of anticipation. What we need, what the department needs, what the National Education Association needs, is examples of things made possible thru successful achievement and of things to be avoided because of almost inevitable failure. The department is ready and anxious at all times and in every way possible to assist state and county school officers, teachers' associations, and individual teachers along lines of agricultural education. It does not seek to do the things which the dififerent states can just as well do for themselves. It recognizes the fact that the education of its youth is primarily a function of the state. It will never knowingly invade the field of the Bureau of Education, with which it is co-operating and with which it hopes to co-operate more fully and freely in the future. It seeks only to fulfill to the utmost of its ability its function as a central agency to co-operate with all local agencies, whatever their type or size or official standing, which are engaged in the great movement of educating the people of the country to live happy, contended, and useful lives in the country. DISCUSSION E. C. Bishop, deputy state superintendent of public instruction, Lincoln, Nebraska. — I shall make no attempt to discuss as a matter of fact the co-operation now existing between national and state authorities in promoting agricultural education. I undertake to discuss only the need and the possibilities of such co-operation. In line with a custom somewhat general with the individual who discourses on a subject which is larger than himself — tho not necessarily larger than his interest and his ambition — I shall begin and may continue speaking mostly of something else. I may not be orthodox in conclusions; I may be laboring under the disadvantages of a lack of a workable knowledge; what appears to me a morning mist may be a New- foundland fog, and my discrimination of objective points may be dimmed by a wrong focus; but what knowledge and experience has come to me, whatever insight is mine, whatever conclusions I may reach — all is given, cautiously, yet as freely as the occasion permits. Agriculture is the newest in its application, the most important, and, excepting geog- raphy, the most widespread of the sciences which directly concern our people. Not only the student of botany, of physics, of chemistry, of zoology, of geology, of astronomy, geography, and the other allied sciences; but likewise, the student of social, political, and economic science is called to contribute his best thought and effort to the development of the science of agriculture. Agriculture has existed as an undeveloped science since the establishment of the first 3o8 NAl'IONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington garden. Abel was doubtless the first man to feel seriously the need of the development of agriculture as an art. We have too many farmers yet who are farmers after the manner of Adam — forced to farm for a livelihood, but too willing to let the seeding, the tilling, the harvesting, the storing, and the utilization of products take care of themselves or be left in charge of an ambitious son. We yet have too many farmers — rather agriculturalists — who are satisfied with a scientific knowledge of agricultural facts, so far as they may be known. We need more farmers who study the science of agriculture and then practice the art of farming — which art is the applying with skillful hand of the known scientific principles of agriculture as an art, as an industry, as a business, as a profession, and as a social factor in the making of the home, the develcrpment of the state, and the control of national activities. The increased attention given in recent years to education in agri- culture is only the natural development of an educational principle which found recogni- tion in the reaction which came from the one-sided effort toward an all-classical education with the early renaissance. The almost exclusive literary idea in education, supplemented by application of the principle that to give the boy only what he will need and can appreciate when he becomes a man, constitutes misconception and neglect of the nature of the growing boy, which neglect leads to undesirable results. Under stress of the discussion of certain moral and ethical questions we frequently applaud the general statement that the boy is only a little man and is to be treated as such. Were we to apply fully such attitude in the education of the boy, the resultant product would be neither the desired man nor a satisfactory grown-up boy. Since recognition of the principle that the child, not the man, must be the object of study and that man comes to his best development from cultivation of the values on hand at whatever stage his instruction begins, we continue to search for addi- tional avenues of approach. Not the child in the school, not the child in the workshop, not the child as he will be when he becomes a man, not the child of the future; but it is the child of now, in his own home, which concerns us. And we cannot wait until the child enters college or until he enters high school; these are the times when ideals have already been formed and when home, ties have been too much broken. Our work must begin with the fireside age, when a child is a living interrogation point in a body of ceaseless activity. What are the influences that concern a child ? If rightly directed the concerns that influence a child are : the duties in the home, the tasks that must be performed, the products of toil, the resultant enjoyment of effort; the relation of toil, effort, of the complete home life, to life outside and beyond the home. In an agricultural community the study of agriculture is necessary, not only for economic reasons, but necessary for safe character formation and for proper civic develop- ment. In such a community the science of agriculture includes not only the study of plant and animal life and their adaptations, but it also includes the study of cookery, needle- work, and all the home economic and manual arts which are directly concerned in the maintenance of a home in the community. May I repeat, then, that the study of agriculture in its application to home and com munity life must reach the child before life-ideals are formed and before home ties are broken. This means that to be most effective, agricultural schools or courses in agricul- ture must be so conveniently located and so accessible that the many rather than the few may attend. It means that agricultural literature must go into the home; it means that agricultural literature which enters the home must go into the hands of the child and into the library rather than into the wastebasket, unread. If one-half of the investigations made by national and state agricultural departments were known to the members of all families which should be concerned; if one-half of the good literature issued by our agri- cultural departments of nation and state were read and read intelligently in families of agricultural communities, such an uplift would come that we should not deem it necessary to spend so great time in discussions such as these. Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION 309 We heave much good material. We have many forces working for the promotion of agricuUural education. The present problem is largely one of utihzing that which we now have. I shall mention seven points which, in my estimation, largely govern present possible results. 1. Agricuhure as a science is not so fully developed, so definitely outUned and so well applied as other sciences which are made a part of public-school education. 2. Agriculture is not properly recognized as a science and as an art by the great body of the people whom it should most concern. 3. The place of agriculture in the curricula of public schools, colleges, and universities has not been so definitely fixed as that of other sciences. Agriculture is now in the pioneer stage, fighting its way to recognition as a part of the public-school system. 4. In many communities where it is most needed, the study of agriculture is opposed by the beneficiaries. 5. Teachers are attempting to teach agriculture without having made sufficient prep- aration therefor. • 6. Textbooks adapted to the needs of the schools and to the needs of those preparing to teach are not yet sufficiently in general circulation. Such textbooks will be provided when we are better settled in our method of procedure. 7. Agricultural education is yet in the experimental stage. We are asking each of the other: "How can it best be done?" The afore-mentioned facts are sufficient evidence of the need of co-operation of all agencies concerned in the promotion of agricultural education. In those subjects which have won their way to recognition and have become in a measure adjusted to their places, we can fail in co-operation with less disaster to the cause. But where the movement is new, where the position is not settled, where the conditions were not fully defined, where we know not our own minds and hesitate to believe in the minds of others, we need the closest co-operation that may be secured in order successfully to establish and promote the work. The great work done by our national and state departments of agriculture, to be properly appreciated and to become effective among the great mass of the people who should be interested and helped thereby, must be not only wisely distributed but well read. The question of distribution is much more easily settled than the question of read- ing. Printed matter, both valuable and worthless, is now so plentiful and so widely and freely distributed that the average home receives more printed Uterature than the members thereof have time or inclination to read, let alone study. To be effective our good Uterature must have a proper hearing. Such hearing can be secured thru the agency of two points of approach. First, agricultural Uterature must be popularized, not only in simplicity of language, but in treatment of subjects re- lated to home and community life. Second, the recipient of such literature must be in a receptive mood. The first proposition includes the preparation of literature deaUng with scientific agriculture from the standpoint of the scientist, the practical farmer, the child, the school teacher, and the home-keeper. Here is where co-operation is necessary in order that the valuable information gained thru departments of agriculture, experiment stations, and pedagogic sources may be conveyed in proper forms of expression to the readers con- cerned. The second proposition^ that of preparing the reader for the reception of available literature and for inducing the beneficiary to take advantage of the opportunities open — this is the greater proposition and the one in which we most need unlimited co-operation and extensive supervision and direction. You will pardon me for referring to conditions in our own state, but I must speak of that I know best. In the state of Nebraska the forces that contribute most largely to agricul- tural education are: The State Board of Agriculture, the University of Nebraska, the state and county organization of farmers' institutes, the state and county departments of public instruction and various ladies' auxiUaries and women's clubs. In the high school or any other school which is properly equipped for teaching agriculture, manual traim'ng, and 3IO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington home economics we have no serious problem of co-operation. Proper equipment means full apparatus and other means of carrying on the work, and well-trained teachers. Our great problem is the teaching of agriculture, home economics, and manual training to the great mass of the people who do not have access to well-equipped schools. To wait for the consolidated school and for the establishment in town and city schools of properly con- ducted courses in these three arts means delay beyond the forbearance of those who are demanding that this form of industrial education be given proper emphasis. It is entirely proper for us to look to ideal conditions and to direct our activities in accordance with the best ideals, but we shall never reach the ideal by dreaming of the future and by planning our present action on a basis of the ideal future. Present action should look to the future but must be based on the means of attaining the ideal, rather than upon the ideal itself. If this generation is to see agriculture, manual training, and home economics bearing good results in the homes of our people, we must take our schools to the homes of the people. We must reach the present generation thru the medium of the rising generation. The son and the daughter, thru the efforts of the teacher, can lead the father and the mother where the father and the mother thru all the agencies within their power cannot lead the son and daughter. We need the co-operation of all those agencies which have to do with the increasing of our fund of knowledge and with its distribution thru the experiment station, the department of agriculture, state and county departments of public instruction, the college, university, normal school, high school, the town and rural school, the farmers' institute, the women's club, and other women's auxiliaries. The extension of this work thru the agency of the public schools in our state has been effected largely thru the co-operation of the state university, which includes the state organization of farmers' institutes, the state Board of Agriculture, the state Depart- ment of Public Instruction and the state normal schools — the Department of Public Instruc- tion exercising largely the function of management, the university providing literature and speakers, the State Board of Agriculture providing financial assistance, the state normal schools training teachers. This co-operation has been most effective in popularizing the science and art of agriculture and home economics among all classes of people. The secret of successful co-operation lies largely in a definite understanding of the part to be contributed by each co-operative agency. The greatest need is a central medium for learn- ing the needs of each locality and for collecting, harmonizing, popularizing, and dis- tributing the knowledge at hand. This central medium or authority should be provided with the means to gather, popularize, and distribute. This includes financial support, which financial support should secure supervising authority and sufl&cient force to take to every community the benefits of the combined results of the research, investigations, and experiences of all the agencies instrumental in advancing this form of education. Each school district should have, close at hand, the means of knowing what has been done, what may be done, and what may not be done so far as experience may direct; whether such direction comes from the neighboring district, a distant district in the county, in the state, or in the nation. State supervision should be sufficient in quaUty and in quantity that every inquiring locality may bring to the local field the experiences, successes, and failures which have been made under like conditions. The relation of the school district to the county, and of the county to the state, should continue in the relation of the state to the nation. If every state whose ambitious people in one or more localities desire to advance the cause of agricultural education could have the assistance on the home ground of national supervision, or rather national experience gained from the experiences of other locaUties in other states, we would avoid in great measure the repetition of mistakes and would bring early success where now too often success must repeatedly win its way thru common errors which are repeated in the pioneer stage of any good work. If our national experts in the various lines of agricultural educa- tion could be reinforced in number and in the increase of specialization of departments, all Superintendence] AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION -^H properly co-ordinated, so that every state could call for this assistance on the many and various occasions when such assistance is needed, the problems of agricultural education would assume a definite form that would soon become more easily solved. I close with these thoughts: First, to secure satisfactory and reasonably early resuhs we must recognize existing conditions and work from these conditions. Second, the various agencies for promoting agricultural education in state and nation must provide an adequate centralizing agency for utilizing co-operative instruments of activity in the agricultural field of education. Geo. B. Cook, superintendent of schools. Hot Springs, Ark.— The present meeting of the Department of Superintendence marks a well-defined forward step in the ever- broadening educational field that spreads out from year to year showing continuallv greater possibilities for the public schools. I look upon the organization of the Depart- ment of Rural and Agricultural Education and the prominence given this extensive phase of educational work as one of the most important and far-reaching steps ever taken by the National Education Association, not only because it is important within itself in placing the seal of highest approval upon this branch of practical training, but because this move- ment is in accord with the spirit of the times. There has been a steadily increasing movement for several years, or rather a series of movements, independent one from another arising from different parts of the United States, each with the same great purpose in view yet approaching the problem of better training in rural schools and practical agricultural education from widely divergent stand- points. This has become almost the paramount economical question, involving in the most direct manner the entire social fabric of the nation. It is a matter of the food supply; the production of the raw material; the development of the nation and the recognition of the most important, valuable, and necessary factor of national life — the producer. This question has become admittedly important from every standpoint. Congress has seriously discussed bills carrying vast appropriations for the purpose of placing agri- cultural education within reach of the farmer boy. Various states have already not only established their agricultural colleges but have encouraged practical training along this line in the district school. The national government has established its experiment stations and the Department of Agriculture has sent its experts over the nation and followed these with tons of literature. The most important commercial organizations have aided in this work, realizing that the development of the country, an increase in the products, means wealth for them as well as for the individual and the nation at large. Tables have been carefully prepared showing that improved methods and trained minds have multiplied the wealth-producing ratio for the citizens of entire commonwealths. These are some of the factors that have brought about such a wide and active interest among the citizenship of the nation, as well as its educational leaders, in the development of rural and agricultural education. The growth of our public -school system has been continual and ever forward. Uni- versities and colleges, schools of special and of general training, dot the entire land. Every state has its great educational institutions. The urban schools have developed with wonderful strides. Cities, great and small, point with pride to elegant, modem school edifices, splendid equipment and comprehensive courses. Scarcely a town of any pre- tension but has its high school. The system of urban education is not perfect but it is abreast with the times. This condition is not so generally true with the rural schools. In the more thickly settled portions of the nation, many advantages have been given the rural schools in recent years and practical training in husbandry has been taken up with unfailing success. This is just the beginning, the dawn of an era that means "a square deal" for the country boys and girls thruout the nation, in the South and West and North and East. This movement will mean for manv southern and western states just what it may be 312 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Washington made to mean for Arkansas — that many of the educational advantages enjoyed only in the cities and larger towns will be given the children of the rural district schools; that the training in these schools will become moie and more practical; that the education received in school will fit them to live in comfort and in happiness upon the farm; that the honor due peculiarly to the producer will not only be shown in empty sentiment but better methods, and better understanding of agriculture in its many branches will bring greater remunera- tion to the farmer and, at the same time, equip him better to defend his rights and maintain the higher station to which he is so justly entitled. I do not intend to convey the idea that there is to be a revolution in our educational system nor that these conditions will come about in full realization within a given period of time; but I do fully believe that the development toward these conditions will be notice- ably rapid when conducted along gradual, rational, constructive lines that will in no way disturb the harmony of our commonwealth or the benefits of our school system which are enjoyed so largely at present. The value of our public schools cannot be overestimated and the possibilities for in- creasing their direct benefits to the nation and to our state are only circumscribed by limita- tions which the very training given in the public schools will hasten to remove at a compound ratio. The beginning has already been made and the work can be carried on by careful attention to details, accurate business administration of our public -school affairs, and by conservation of the school funds, rather than by added expense. THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION CONSTITUTION PREAMBLE The National Council of Education shall have for its object the consideration and discussion of educational questions of general interest and public importance, and the presentation, thru printed reports, of the substance of the discussions and the conclusions formulated. It shall be its object to reach and disseminate correct thinking on educational questions; and, for this purpose, it shall be the aim of the Council, in conducting its discussions, to define and state with accuracy the different views and theories on the sub- ject under consideration, and, secondly, to discover and represent fairly the grounds and reasons for each theory or view, so far as to show, as completely as possible, the genesis of opinion on the subject. It shall be the duty of the Council, in pursuance of this object, to encourage from all its members the most careful statement of differences in opinion, together with the completest statement of grounds for the same. It shall further require the careful preservation and presentation of the individual differences of opinion, whenever grounds have been furnished for the same by members of the Council. It shall invite the freest discussion and embody the new suggestions developed by such discussions. Any member making such suggestion or objection may put in writing his view, and the grounds therefor, and furnish the same to the secretary for the records of the Council. It shall prepare, thru its president, an annual report to the National Educational Associa- tion, setting forth the questions considered by the Council during the previous year, and placing before the Association, in succinct form, the work accomplished. It shall embody in this report a survey of those educational topics which seem to call for any action on the part of the Association. The Council shall appoint, out of its own number, com- mittees representing the several departments of education, and thereby facilitate the exchange of opinion among its members on such special topics as demanded the attention of the profession or of the public. ARTICLE I— MEMBERSHIP 1. The National Council of Education shall consist of sixty members, selected from the membership of the National Educational Association. Any member of the Associa- tion identified with educational work is eligible to membership in the Council, and, after the first election, such membership shall continue for six years, except as hereinafter provided. 2. In the year 1885 the Board of Directors shall elect eight members— four members for six yq^rs, two for four years, and two for two years, and the Council shall elect eight members — five members for six years, two for four years, and one for two years; and annually thereafter the Board of Directors shall elect five members and the Council five members, each member, with the exception hereinafter provided for (sec. 5), to serve six years, or until his successor is elected. 3. The annual election of members of the Council shall be held in connection with the annual meetings of the Association. If the Board of Directors shall fail, for any reason, to fill its quqta of members annually, the vacancy or vacancies shall be filled by the Council. 4. The term of service of the several members of the Council chosen at the first election shall be arranged by the Executive Committee of the Council. 5. The absence of a member from two consecutive annual meetings of the Council shall be considered equivalent to resignation of membership, and the Council shall fill 313 314 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National vacancies caused by absence from the Council as herein defined, as well as vacancies caused by death or resignation, for the unexpired term. All persons who have belonged to the Council shall, on the expiration of their membership, become honorary members, with the privilege of attending its regular sessions and participating in its discussions. No state shall be represented in the Council by more than eight members. ARTICLE II— QUALIFICATION FOR MEMBERSHIP All members of the Council shall be either life or active members of the National Educational Association. ARTICLE III— MEETINGS There shall be a regular annual meeting of the Council held at the same place as the meeting of the National Educational Association, and at least two days previous to this meeting. There may be special meetings of the Council, subject to the call of the Executive Committee, but the attendance at these meetings shall be entirely voluntary, A majority of the Council shall constitute a quorum for the transaction of business at any meeting, whether regular or called; but any less number, exceeding eight members, may constitute a quorum for the transaction of business at the regular annual meeting, as defined in this article. ARTICLE IV— THE WORK OF THE COUNCIL The Council shall, from time to time, undertake to initiate, conduct, and guide the thoro investigation of important educational questions originating in the Council; also to conduct like investigations originating in the National Educational Association, or any of its departments, and requiring the expenditure of funds. ARTICLE V— THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COMMITTEES AND EXPERTS In the appointment of special committees, and in the selection of writers and speakers, it shall be the privilege of the Council to appoint such experts, whether members of the Council or not, as are deemed best qualified to conduct investigations. ARTICLE VI— OFFICERS At the annual election of ofl&cers in 1904 the president of the Council shall be elected for a term of three years, the vice-president for a term of two years, and the secretary for a term of one year; and thereafter annually the vacancy caused by the outgoing ofl&cers shall be filled by the election of one person for a term of three years. It shall be the duty of the president of the Council to prepare, with the assistance and approval of the Executive Committee, such a program for the annual meeting as shall realize as fully as practicable the purposes for which the Council was organized and exists . ARTICLE VII— STANDING COMMITTEES 1. There shall be four standing committees: an Executive Committee, a Committee on Membership, a Committee on Educational Progress, and a Committee on Investiga- tions and Appropriations. 2. The Executive Committee shall be composed of the president of the Council and of three other members, whose terms of office shall be so arranged that one new member may be chosen each year, beginning with the year 1899. 3. It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to provide an annual program by selecting, whenever feasible, subjects for investigation, and appointing committees to conduct such investigations. It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to carry out the provisions contained in this constitution referring to volunteer and invited papers. It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to provide a place on the program for the report on any investigation which may be ordered by the National Educational Asso- ciation or its departments. Council! OFFICERS AND STANDING COMMITTEES 315 4. The Committee on Membership shall be composed of the president of the Council and six other members, whose terms of office shall be so arranged that two vacancies may be filled every year, beginning with 1899. 5. There shall, be appointed annually a committee of one to submit, at the next meeting, a report on "Educational Progress during the Past Year," in which a survey of the important movements and events in education during the preceding year is given. This committee need not be selected from the members of the Council. 6. The Committee on Investigations and Appropriations shall be composed of nine members, whose terms of office shall be so arranged that three vacancies may be filled each year, beginning with 1903. No proposal to appoint a committee to undertake an educa- tional investigation of any kind, and no proposal to ask the Board of Directors of the Association for an appropriation for any purpose, shall be acted ^upon until such proposal has been referred to this Committee on Investigations and Appropriations for report. ARTICLE VIII— THE DUTIES OF THE COUNCIL 1. It shall be the duty of the Council to further the objects of the National Educational Association, and to use its best efforts to promote the cause of education in general. 2. The meetings of the Council shall be, for the most part, of a "round table" character. ARTICLE IX— AMENDMENTS This constitution may be altered or amended at a regular meeting of the Council, by a two-thirds vote of the members present, and any provisions may be waived at any regular meeting by unanimous consent. By-laws not in violation of the constitution may be adopted by a two-thirds vote of the Council. OFFICERS, STANDING COMMITTEES, MEMBERS OFFICERS FOR 1908-9 JOSEPH SWAIN Swarthmore, Pa President Terra expires in 1910 JAMES M. GREEN. . .'. Trenton, N. J Vice-President Term expires in 1909 JOHN W. CARR Dayton, Ohio Secretary Term expires in 1911 EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE The President, ex officio, chairman Elmer Ellsworth Brown Washington, D. C Term expires in 1909 W. T. Harris Washington, D. C Term expires in 1910 James M. Greenwood Kansas City, Mo Term expires in 1911 COMMITTEE ON MEMBERSHIP The President, ex officio W. T. Harris Washington, D. C Term expires in 1909 Jesse F. Millspaugh Los Angeles, Cal Terms expires in 1909 Livingston C. Lord Charleston, 111 Term expires in 1910 I. C. McNeh^l Memphis, Tenn Term expires in 1910 Charles H. Keyes Hartford, Conn Term expires in 1911 James M. Greenwood, chairman Kansas City, Mo Term expires in 191 1 COMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND APPROPRIATIONS James M. Greenwood, chairman Kansas City, Mo Term expires in 1909 Frank A. Fitzpatrick Boston, Mass Term expires in 1909 Elmer Ellsworth Brown Washington, D. C Term expires in 1909 Augustus S. Downing Albany, N. Y Term expires in 1910 Lorenzo D. Harvey Menomonie, Wis Term expires in 1910 John H. Philips Birmingham, Ala Term expires in 1910 Nicholas Murray Butler New York, N. Y Term expires in 1911 William H. Maxwell New York, N. Y Term expires in 1911 Wn^LiAM O. Thompson Columbus, Ohio Term expires in 1911 3i6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National MEMBERS Elected by the Association W. T. Harris, Washington, D, C. Benjamin Ide Wheeler, Berkeley, Cal. William H. Maxwell, New York, N. Y. Edwin G. Cooley, Chicago, 111. Howard J, Rogers, Albany, N. Y. John MacDonald, Topeka, Kans. Alma L. Binzel, Menomonie, Wis. Morris Elmer Dailey, San Jos€, Cal. Silvanus L. Heeter, St. Paul, Minn. Charles McKenny, Milwaukee, Wis. Elected by the Council terms expire in 1909 Miss N. Cropsey, Indianapolis, Ind. Lewis H. Jones, Ypsilanti, Mich. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, Washington, D. C William H. Black, Marshall, Mo. Nicholas Murray Butler, New York, N. Y. Luther L. Wright, Lansing, Mich. George M. Philips, West Chester, Pa. Edmund A. Jones, Columbus, Ohio John G. Thompson, Fitchburg, Mass. Ernest E. Balcomb, Stillwater, Okla. terms expire in ioio John W. Cook, DeKalb, lU. David R. Boyd, Norman, Okla. Lorenzo D. Harvey, Menomonie, Wis. Edwin B. Craighead, New Orleans, La. Carrol G. Pearse, Milwaukee, Wis. Henry Snyder, Jersey City, N. J. Katharine E. Dopp, Chicago, 111. Edwin E, Sparks, State College, Pa. Henry Suzzallo, New York, N. Y. Henry C. Morrison, Concord, N. H. Anna Tolman Smith, Washington, D. C. WiLLLAW S, Sutton, Austin, Tex. James H. Van Sickle, Baltimore, Md. James B. Aswell, Natchitoches, La. Brown Ayers, Knoxville, Term. Robert J. Aley, Bloomington, Ind. Charles E. Chadsey, Denver, Colo. Paul H. Hanus, Cambridge, Mass. J. Stanley Brown, Joliet, 111. P. P. Claxton, Knoxville, Tenn. terms expire in 191 1 William H. Bartholomew, Louisville, Ky. Frank A. Fitzpatrick, Boston, Mass. I. C. McNeill, Memphis, Tenn. E. Oram Lyte, Millersville, Pa. James M. Greenwood, Kansas City, Mo. EsTELLE Reel, Washington, D. C. Theo. B. Noss, California, Pa. Julius I. Foust, Greensboro, N. C. W. T. Carrington, Springfield, Mo. John J. Doyne, Little Rock, Ark. Frank B. Cooper, Seattle. Wash. Joseph Swain, Swarthmore, Pa. Nathan C. Schaeffer, Harrisburg, Pa. Ben Blewett, St. Louis, Mo. Z. X. Snyder, Greeley, Colo. John W. Abercrombie, University, Ala. B. W. Torreyson, Little Rock, Ark. Frederick E. Bolton, Iowa City, Iowa Jane Addams, Chicago, 111. William C. Bates, Cambridge, Mass. terms expire in 1912 Thomas A. Mott, Richmond, Ind. John H. Phillips, Birmingham, Ala. Livingston C. Lord, Charleston, III. James H. Baker, Boulder, Colo. Charles C. Van Liew, Chico, Cal. Sarah Louise Arnold, Boston, Mass. James A. MacLean, Moscow, Idaho Edward T. Fairchild, Topeka, Kans. Alfred Bayliss, Macomb, 111. Ernest C. Moore, Los Angeles, Cal. Ella Flagg Young, Chicago, 111. Jasper N. Wilkinson, Muskogee, Okla. William O. Thompson, Columbus, Ohio John W. Carr, Dayton, Ohio Albert Salisbury, Whitewater, Wis. Grace C. Strachan, Brooklyn, N. Y. Adelaide S. Baylor, Wabash, Ind. Ca"rleton B. Gibson, Columbus, Ga. John W. Olsen, St. Paul, Minn. Oscar T. Corson, Columbus, Ohio terms expire in 1913 James M. Green, Trenton, N. J. Augustus S. Downing, Albany, N. Y. George B. Cook, Little Rock, Ark. Stratton D. Brooks, Boston, Mass. Edgar H. Mark, Louisville, Ky. Ida C. Bender, Buffalo, N. Y. Henry B. Brown, Valparaiso, Ind. WnxiAM O. RiDDELL, Des Moines, Iowa A. C. Nelson, Salt Lake City, Utah Reed B. Tfttrick, Harrisburg, Pa. William E. Hatch, New Bedford, Mass. Bettie a. Dutton, Cleveland, Ohio Charles H. Keyes, Hartford, Conn. Andrew S. Draper, Albany, N. Y, Clifford W. Barnes, Lake Forest, 111. Mrs. Ellor Carlisle Ripley, Boston, Mass Mrs. Edwin C. Grice, Philadelphia, Pa. John W. Withers, St. Louis, Mo. Thomas C. Miller, Charleston, W. Va. Frank B. Dyer, Cincinnati, Ohio Count HONORARY MEMBERS 317 MEMBERS—Continued Elected by the Association Elected by the Council TERMS EXPIKK IN 1914 Oscar J. Craig, Missoula, Mont. David Felmley, Normal, 111. John R. Kirk, Kirksville, Mo. David B. Johnson, Rock Hill, S. C. Wales C. Martindale, Detroit, Mich. Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, Boston, Mass. Arthur H. Chamberlain, Pasadena, Cal. M. Bates Stephens, Annapolis, Md. Jacob A. Shawan, Columbus, Ohio James W. Crabtree, Peru, Nebr. William M. Davidson, Omaha, Nebr. Martin G. Brumbaugh, Philadelphia, Pa, Lloyd E. Wolfe, San Antonio, Tex. James E. Russell, New York, N. Y. Oliver S. Wescott, Chicago, 111. Julia Richman, New York, N. Y. Mrs. Josephine Heermans, Kansas City, Mo. Frank Strong, Lawrence, Kans. Edward C. Elliott, Madison, Wis. Homer H. Seerley, Cedar Falls, Iowa HONORARY MEMBERS Edwin A. Alderman, Charlottesville, Va. Earl Barnes, Montclair, N. J. Alexander Graham Bell, Washington, D. C. D. Bemis, Spokane, Wash. Thomas W. Bicknell, Providence, R. I. Richard G. Boone, Yonkers, N. Y. Albert G. Boyden, Bridgewater, Mass. .\nna C. Brackett, New York, N. Y. John E. Bradley, Randolph, Mass. Edward Brooks, Philadelphia, Pa. George P. Brown, Bloomington, 111. William L. Bryan, Bloomington, Ind. Matthew H. Buckham, Burlington, Vt. David N. Camp, New Britain, Conn. James H. Canfield, New York, N. Y. Oscar H. Cooper, Abilene, Tex. William J. Corthell, Gorham, Maine. E. W. Coy, Cincinnati, Ohio Charles DeGarmo, Ithaca, N. Y. Robert E. Denfeld, Duluth, Minn. John Dewey, New York, N. Y. V. C. Dibble, Charleston, S. C. Charles W. Eliot, Cambridge, Mass. William W. Folwell, Minneapolis, Minn. James A. Foshay, Los Angeles, Cal. William K. Fowler, Lincoln, Nebr. H. B. Frissell, Hampton, Va. R. B. Fulton, Miller School P. O., Va. Charles B. Gilbert, Englewood, N. J. Daniel C. Oilman, Baltimore, Md. Aaron Gove, Denver, Colo. Lewis C. Greenlee, Denver, Colo. James C. Greenough, Westfield, Mass. W. N. Hailmann, Chicago, 111. G. Stanley Hall, Worcester, Mass. Walter L. Hervey, New York, N. Y. Albert Ross Hill, Columbia, Mo. J. George Hodgins, Toronto, Can. James H. Hoose, Pasadena, Cal. George H. Howison, Berkeley, Cal. James L. Hughes, Toronto, Can. Thomas Hunter, New York, N. Y. Ellen Hyde, Farmington, Mass. Edmund J. James, Champaign, 111. Charles M.Jordan, Minm-ajKilis, Minn. E. S. JoYNES, Columbia, S. C. Calvin N. Kendall, Indianapolis, Ind. David L. Kiehle, Preston , Minn. William F. King, Mt. Vernon, Iowa Henry M. Leipziger, New York, N. Y. James MacAlister, Philadelphia, Pa. Francis A. March, Easton, Pa. George H. Martin, West Lynn, Mass. Charles A. McMurray, DeKalb, 111. Jesse F. Millspaugh, Los Angeles, Cal. William A. Mowry, Hyde Park, Mass. Mary E. Nicholson, Indianapolis, Ind. John M. Ordway, New Orleans, La. Warren D. Parker, River Falls, Wis. John B. Peaslee, Cincinnati, Ohio Joslah L. Pickard, Brunswick, Maine Edward T. Pierce, Los Angeles, Cal. James R. Preston, Jackson, Miss. John T. Prince, West Newton, Mass. George J. Ramsey, Danville, Ky. William D. Ruffner, Lexington, \'ii. Ellen C. Sabin, Milwaukee, Wis. Henry Sabin, Des Moines, Iowa J. G. Schurman, Ithaca, N. Y. H. E. Shepard, Baltimore, Md. Irwin Shepard, Winona, Minn. Edgar A. Singer, Philadelphia, Pa. Charles R. Skinner, New York, .\'. V EuLER B. Smith, Athens, Ga. J. Lancaster Spalding, Peoria, III. Homer D. Sprague, Newton, Mass. J. W. Stearns, San Diego, Cal. Lucia Stickney, Cleveland, Ohio Grace Bibb Sudborough, Omaha, .NJeh John Swett, Martinez, Cal. A. R. Taylor, Decatur, III. W. R. Thigpen, Savannah, Ga. L. S. Thompson, Jersey City, N. J. Charles F. Thwing, Cleveland, Ohio Julia S. Tutwh^er, Livingstone, Ala. Delia L. Willlams, Delaware, Ohio J. Ormond Wilson, Washington, D. C. Lightner Witmer, Philadelphia, Pa. Harry K. Wolfe, Lincoln, Neb. Calvin M. Woodward. St. Louis. Mo. 3i8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Robert Allen 1894 Israel W. Andrews 1888 Joseph Baldwin 1899 Henry Barnard 1900 William N. Barringer — 1907 Newton Bateman 1897 Reuben S. Bingham 1902 John T. Buchanan 1908 Norman A. Calkins 1895 Aaron L. Chapin 1892 Clara Conway 1904 J. L. M. Curry 1902 N. R. H. Dawson 1895 John W. Dickinson 1901 Larkin Dunton 1899 John Eaton 1906 W. R. Garrett 1903 Samuel S. Greene 1883 John M, Gregory 1898 George T. Fairchild 1901 Daniel B. Hagar 1896 R. H. Halsey 1907 John Hancock 1891 William R. Harper 1906 DECEASED MEMBERS William D. Henkle 1882 Edwin C. Hewitt 1905 Elnathan E. Higbee 1889 Frank A. Hill 1903 Burke A. Hinsdale 1900 Ira G. Hoitt 1905 George Howland 1892 John S. Irwin 1901 Henry N. James 1901 H. S. Jones 1900 Thomas Kirkland 1898 Albert Lane 1906 Merrick Lyon 1888 Albert P. Marble 1906 James McCosh 1894 Charles D. McIver 1906 Thomas J. Morgan 1902 Lemuel Moss 1905 M. A. Newell 1893 Birdsey G. Northrop 1898 Edward Olney 1886 Gustavus J. Orr 1888 Francis W. Parker 1902 W. H. Payne, 1907 S. S. Parr 1900 Selim H. Peabody 1902 William F. Phelps 1907 John D. Philbrick 1885 M. S. Cooper Poucher . . . 1900 William B. Powell 1904 Zalmon Richards 1899 Andrew J. Rickoff 1899 Charles C. Rounds 1901 Edward R. Shaw 1903 William E. Sheldon 1900 James A. Smart 1900 F. Louis Soldan 1908 R. W. Stevenson 1893 Thomas B. Stockwell 1906 Eli T. Tappan 1888 Horace S. Tarbell 1904 Charles O. Thompson 1885 H. S. Thompson 1904 Arnold Tompkins 1906 James P. Wickersham 1891 S. G. Williams 1900 Emerson E. White 1902 SECRETARY'S MINUTES FIRST SESSION.— Monday Forenoon, June 29, 1908 The Council met in the Old Stone Church, Cleveland, Ohio, at 9:30 a.m. and was called to order by President Joseph Swain. The minutes of the Los Angeles meeting were approved as printed in the annual report of the general association. The introductory address of the president of the Council was then presented by Joseph Swain. On motion the address of the president was referred to a special committee consisting of Charles H. Keyes, James M. Greenwood, and Elmer Ellsworth Brown. "The Preliminary Report of the Committee on the Scarcity of Teachers" was pre- sented by the chairman of the committee, I. C. McNeill. The leader of the discussion of this report was David Felmley, Normal, III., who had prepared the report submitted by the committee. The discussion of this report was continued by the following members: James M. Green, Charles H. Keyes, James E. Russell, Ella Flagg Young, William O. Thompson, Frank A. Fitzpatrick, and Z. X. Snyder. The discussion was closed by David Felmley and I. C. McNeill. "The Preliminary Report of the Committee on Provision for Exceptional Children in the Public Schools" was presented by the chairman of the committee, James H. Van Sickle. Discussion by the following members of the committee: Frank A. Fitzpatrick and L. E. Wolfe. General discussion by O. P. Cornman, district superintendent of schools, Philadelphia, Pa.; M. P. E. Groszmann, of Plainfield, N. J.; E. R. Johnstone, superintendent of training school for feeble-minded children, Vineland, N. J.; Paul Kreuzpointer, Altoona, Pa.; George M. Elmendorf; Ella Flagg Young, of Chicago; Walter S. Cornell, medical inspector of schools, Philadelphia, Pa. Couucill SECRETARY'S MINUTES 3x0 SECOND SESSION.— Monday Afternoon, June 29, 1908 The Council met in joint session with the general association at the Hippodrome at 2:30 P.M. After the welcome addresses and responses to the general association, the president of the Council, Joseph Swain, introduced Charles F. Thwing, president of Western Reserve University, who presented the address on the "Educational Progress of the Year " THIRD SESSION.— Tuesday Morning, June 30, 1908 The Third Session of the Council met in the Old Stone Church at 9:30 a.m.. President Swain presiding. The president announced that the Committee on Membership would also act as a committee on nominations. The first topic of the morning, "The Preliminary Report of the Committee on Moral Training in the Public Schools," was presented by different members of the committee as follows: a) The Problem Stated, by Martin G. Brumbaugh, Philadelphia, Pa. b) "The Treatment of the Pupil," by John W. Carr, Dayton, Ohio. c) "Influence of the Home and School Life," by James M. Greenwood, Kansas City, Mo. d) "Relation of Moral to Religious Training," by Clifford W. Barnes, Lake Forest, 111. General discussion followed by: Miss Nebraska Cropsey, Indianapolis, Ind.; Livingston C. Lord, Charleston, 111.; W. H. Bartholomew, Louisville, Ky.; Henry Neumann, New York City, and John W. Cook, DeKalb, 111. The second topic, "Distinctive Functions of University, College, and Normal Schools in the Preparation of Teachers," was presented by Elmer Ellsworth Brown, United States Commissioner of Education, Washington, D. C. General discussion by the following persons: John W. Cook, DeKalb, III.; James E. Russell, New York City, John R. Kirk, Kirksville, Mo. The third topic, "The Culture Element in Education," was presented by James H. Baker, Boulder, Colo., chairman of the committee appointed to consider this subject. The discussion was opened by Dr. William T. Harris, Washington, D. C. The discussion was continued by T. A. Mott, Richmond, Ind.; W. H. Black, Marshall, Mo.; G. Stanley Hall, Worcester, Mass.; W. T. Harris, and James H. Baker. The president appointed the following persons to act at the current session as mem- bers of the Committee on Membership: C. H. Keyes in place of E. O. Lyte and J. W. Carr instead of J. F. Millspaugh. FOURTH SESSION.— 9:30 a.m. July i, 190S The fourth session of the Council met in the Sunday-school room of the Old Stone Church at 9:30 a.m., President Swain presiding. The chairman of the Committee on Investigations and Appropriations, J. M. Green- wood, presented the report of the committee which had been presented to the Board of Directors. The committee recommended that all appropriations for investigations be held in abeyance. On motion these recommendations were approved. A resolution was adopted requesting the publication of the preliminary reports of special committees appointed by the Council. A special committee, consisting of J. H. Baker, W. O. Thompson, and A. S. Downing, was appointed to present this request to the board of directors of the National Education Association. The President of the Council was authorized to appoint four additional members of the committee on the "Culture Element in Education." The Report of the Committee on "Co-operation with Educational Organizations in Other Countries "was presented by William T. Harris, Ex-commissioner of Education of the United States, Elmer Ellsworth Brown, Commissioner of Education of the United States. 320 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National The discussion was opened by Miss Anna Tolman Smith, Washington, D. C, Other persons taking part in the discussion were: Basanta K. Roy, Calcutta, India, Clifford W. Barnes, Lake Forest, 111. The discussion was closed by W. T. Harris. ■ A memorial address on the life of F. Louis Soldan by Superintendent Ben Blewett. St. Louis, Mo., was then presented. By consent of the Council, the memorial address on Rufus H. Halsey was deferred in order that the members of the Council might attend the meeting of the active members , of the Association. FIFTH SESSION.— Thursday Forenoon, July 2, 1908 The Council met promptly at 9:30 o'clock a.m. in the Auditorium of Old Stone Church, President Swain presiding. The memorial address on Rufus H. Halsey was given by J. A. H. Keith, president of the State Normal School, Oshkosh, Wis. The report of the "Committee on Industrial Education for Rural Schools" was sub- mitted by the chairman, L. D. Harvey, Menomonie, Wis. The discussion was participated in by the following persons: D. B. Johnson, of South Carolina, J. M. Green, of New Jersey, L. E.Wolfe, of Texas, Charles A. McMurry,of Illinois, Brown Ayres, of Tennessee, George B. McLean of Iowa, Elmer Ellsworth Brown, United States Commissioner of Education. The discussion was closed by L. D. Harvey of Wisconsin. The subject, "Household Science in Elementary and Secondary Schools," was pre- sented by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, instructor in sanitary chemistry, Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology, Boston, Mass. The discussion of the above subject was participated in by the following persons: A. S. Downing, Albany, N. Y., W. H, Maxwell, New York City. The discussion was closed by Mrs. Richards. The committee on membership submitted the following report: To the National Council: Your Committee on Nominations of new members of the Council recommend the appointment of the following persons to succeed themselves: William M. Davidson, Omaha, Nebr., term to expire 1914. Martin G. Brumbaugh, Philadelphia, Pa., term to expire 1914. Lloyd E. Wolfe, San Antonio, Tex., term to expire 1914. James E. Russell, New York City, term to expire 1914. Oliver S. Westcott, Chicago, III., term to expire 1914. The following persons were recommended to fill vacancies for the unexpired terms of the following named persons who have been by the provisions of the Constitution trans- ferred to the list of honorary members by reason of their absence from two consecutive meetings of the Council: James B. Aswell, Baton Rouge, La., to fill the place of Albert Ross Hill, term expiring in 1910. Ben Blewett, St. Louis, Mo., to fill the place of L. C. Greenlee, term expiring 191 1. Albert Salisbury, Whitewater, Wis., to fill the place of G. H. Martin, term expiring in 1912. W. S. Sutton, Texas, to fill the place of Mrs. Josephine Heermans, term expiring in 1910. Respectfully submitted, J. M. Greenwood, Chairman C. H. Keyes W. T. Harris J. W. Carr I. C. McNeill Joseph Swain L. C. Lord Committee on Membership On motion the above report of the Committee on Membership was adopted and the persons named therein duly elected members of the Council. Council] SECRET A RY'^i MINU TES 321 Owing to the change in the Constitution of the General Association the Committee on Membership submitted an additional report as follows: SPECIAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON MEMBERSHIP To the National Council of Education: By order of the general association the membership of the National Council was changed from sixty active members to one hundred and twenty and the Council was authorized to elect thirty new members — five whose term should expire in one year; five, in two years; five in three years; five in four years; five in five years; and five in six years'. The committee recommends the election of the following: FOR ONE year; TERM ENDING I909 Luther L. Wright, Lansing, Mich. Edmund A. Jones, Columbus, Ohio George M. Philips, West Chester Pa. John G. Thompson, Fitchburg, Mass. Ernest E. Balcomb, Stillwater, Okla. FOR TWO years; term ENDING I910 Robert J. Aley, Bloomington, Ind. Paul H. Hanus, Cambridge, Mass. Charles E. Chadsey, Denver, Colo. J. Stanley Brown, Joliet, III. P. P. Claxton, Knoxville, Tenn. FOR THREE YEARS; TERM ENDING I91I John W. Abercrombie, University, Ala. Frederick E. Bolton, Iowa City, Iowa B. W. Torreyson, Little Rock, Ark. Jane Addams, Chicago, III. William C. Bates, Cambridge, Mass. FOR FOUR years; TERM ENDING I912 Grace C. Strachan, Brooklyn, N. Y. Carleton B. Gibson, Columbus, Ga. Adelaide S. Baylor, Wabash, Ind. John W. Olsen, St. Paiil, Minn. Oscar T. Corson, Columbus, Ohio FOR FIVE years; TERM ENDING 1913 Mrs. EUor Carlisle Ripley, Boston, Mass. John W. Withers, St. Louis, Mo. Mrs. Edwin C. Grice, Philadelphia, Pa. Thomas C. Miller, Charleston, W. Va. Frank B. Dyer, Cincinnati, Ohio FOR SIX years; TERM ENDING 1914 Julia Richman, New York, N. Y. ' Frank Strong, Lawrence, Kans. Mrs. Josephine Heermans, Kansas City, Mo. Edward C. Elliott, Madison, Wis. Homer H. Seerley, Cedar Falls, Iowa (Signed) J. M. Greenwood, Chairman C. H. Keyes W. T. Harris J. W. Carr I. C. McNeill] Joseph Swain j L. C. Lord Committee on Membership On motion the above-named persons were unanimously elected members of the Council. The Committee on Membership which was also appointed the Nominating Committee submitted the following report: To the National Council: . . Your Committee on Membership, which was also appointed the Nommatmg Com- mittee, recommend the election of the following: officers of the council John W. Carr, to succeed himself as secretary of the Council, for a term of three years, term ending 191 1. ' . „ James M. Greenwood, to succeed himself as a member of the Executive Committee of the Council for a term of three years, term ending 1911. _ Charies H. Keyes, to succeed E. O. Lyte as a member of the Nominating Committee for a term of three years, term ending 191 1. James M. Greenwood, to succeed himself as a member of the Committee on Member- ship for a term of three years, term ending 191 1. 322 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National MEMBERS or COMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS AND APPROPRIATIONS Nicholas Murray Butler to succeed himself for a term of three years, term expiring in 1911. William O. Thompson to succeed F. Louis Soldan for a term of three years, term expiring in 191 1. William H. Maxwell for a term of three years, term expiring in 191 1. Respectfully submitted J. M. Greenwood, Chairman W. T. Harris I. C. McNeill Joseph Swain Committee on Membership The following resolutions offered by Elmer Ellsworth Brown were adopted: Resolved, That this Council urges upon Congress the importance of a careful investiga- tion of the needs and conditions of education in all parts of the country as a preliminary to any new grant of national aid for education, to the end that the established educational systems of the several states may be fostered and encouraged. Resolved, That this Council recommends to the Board of Directors of the National Education Asociation that a committee, consisting of the president and secretary of the Association and the president of this Council, be empowered to appoint from time to time suitable representatives of the Association to the meetings of important educational societies in foreign countries, such appointment to involve no expenditure of the funds of the Asso- ciation. The special committee appointed to consider the address of the president submitted the following report: Your committee to which was referred the president's address have given the same careful consideration, and beg to submit the following recommendations: 1. We advise that the general plan of the program for this year be followed for next year. 2. We approve the recommendation for the establishment of one or more traveling fellowships but realize that the present is an inopportune year to take steps toward the immediate inauguration of this work. 3. We advise that immediate steps be taken to amend the constitution on the two points suggested by the President — namely: (a) EUminate the requirements that the president of the Council shall make an annual report to the National Education Association, and (&) Strike out the phrase in Art. 3, sec. 3, requiring this Council to meet at least two days before the meeting of the National Educational Association. 4. We recommend the adoption of a rule providing that no paper or report from this Council shall hereafter be printed in the Volume of Proceedings unless at least three copies of a synopsis of the same be in the hands of the president of the Council at least thirty days before its annual meeting. Charles H. Keyes, Chairman J. M. Greenwood Elmer Ellsworth Brown On motion the above report was unanimously adopted. After full discussion the members of the Council agreed on the following, relative to meetings in the future: 1. That seats for one hundred persons be reserved for members of the Council and that no persons other than members of Council be permitted to occupy them at any time. 2. That a room with a seating capacity not to exceed five hundred be provided for the meetings of the Council. After thanking the members of the Council for their kindness and courtesy, the presi- dent declared the Council adjourned. J. W. Carr, Secretary Council) PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 323 PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS PRELIMINARY STATEMENT THE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL, JOSEPH SWAIN, PRESIDENT OF SWARTHMORE COLLEGE, SWARTHMORE, PA. As long as the president of the National Council of Education served but one year, he could not be expected to formulate a policy for the consideration of the Council concerning its work. He of necessity followed precedent. In 1904 at St. Louis the term of the president of the Council was changed to three years and our present honored commissioner of education, Dr. Elmer Ellsworth Brown, was chosen the first president to serve the longer term. In his opening statement at the last meeting of this body in Los Angeles, Commissioner Brown, after three years' experience as president, formulated a policy which was approved by the Council. The program for this year has been made as nearly as possible in accordance with that policy. It is important in order that the program may be in harmony with the best thought of the Council, that there should be an opportunity for suggestions by the members each year which may be followed so far as possible the following year. It is also important that the Council shall have clearly before it what its working policy is, and for this reason I shall briefly restate this policy with any sugges- tions and inquiries which may occur to me and I will ask that the whole matter, in accordance with the precedent of last year, be referred for consideration to a committee who shall report at an early meeting of the Council. In this way the Executive Committee may have the benefits of the best judgment of the whole Council in making the program for the next meeting. The By-Laws of the National Education Association provide that — The National Council of Education shall have for its object the consideration and discussion of educational questions of public and professional interest; the proposal to the Board of Directors, from time to time, of suitable subjects for investigation and research, and the recommendation of the amount of appropriations that should be made for such purposes; the appointment and general supervision of such special committees of investi- gation and research as may be provided for and authorized by the Board of Directors of the Association; the consideration, discussion, and recommendation to the Board of Directors for disposition of all reports by such special committees of research as may have been appointed on its recommendation or by its authority; the annual preparation and presentation to the Association at its annual convention of the report on "Educational Progress during the Past Year; " and in other ways shall use its best efforts to further the objects of the Association and to promote the cause of education in general. This statement is certainly broad enough to leave the Council free to under- take any educational work which it has the time, the means, and the energy to carry out. As was said last year: The National Council of Education .... is in a peculiarly favorable situation as regards the gathering up and digesting of current educational opinion. By collating the judgments of the most successful teachers and school administrators it can render that most important service— the determination of widely approved standards of educational 324 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National practice. It can, moreover, exercise a great influence on the development of educational doctrine, out of which the standards of educational practice are to proceed, by bringing together into direct and suggestive comparison the best formulations of educational doc- trine which can be had. The National Council of Education is at present concentrating its work on investigations which have been conducted or may be undertaken. It is believed equally important to follow up, year after year, any good report which has been made in order that salient points may be thoroughly assimilated, and to keep on the alert for promising subjects for further investigation in order that those of greatest promise shall be selected for well and widely con- sidered inquiry. It cannot be too often nor too forcibly said that this association must not let its investigations be less accurate, less painstaking, or less comprehensive than those of our universities, the scientific departments of the government, or the Bureau of Education. We must leave to others things that can be better done by others. In the investigation of facts as in contrast with the investigation of administrative policy or of educational opinion the Council or the committee appointed by the Council would do well to select one expert to investigate and report on a given topic. We cannot hope to have the con- tributions of this council given the same standing among scholars as the better contributions from other sources unless we have at least one man on every committee of investigation who is a recognized scholar and expert in the line of the subject of investigation. It has been suggested that the work of investigation by this council might be well supplemented by the appointment of one or more traveling fellows or scholars. It would seem unwise for this council in any way to undertake to duplicate work done by the universities. But it would be entirely in harmony with the purpose of this body if funds can be provided to give a scholarship or fellowship to an expert in some line in which the Council desires some sub- ject investigated, provided such expert could make investigation at home or abroad as the representative of the National Education Association or this Council to study definite problems and make a definite report to the Council. Such a representative might secure good results and broaden the work of this body. There are two minor and obvious suggestions that occur to one in reading the constitution of the Council. The preamble to this document says that the Council shall prepare through its president an annual report to the National Education Association setting forth the questions considered by the Council during the previous year, placing before the association in succinct form the work accomplished. This appears to be a dead letter. Should it not there- fore be eliminated from the preamble of the constitution by due process of amendment or ordered that it shall hereafter be fulfilled? In the second place. Art. 3 says in part: ''There shall be a regular annual meeting of the Council held at the same place as the meeting of the National Education Council] PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 325 Association at least two days previous to the meeting." It has been impracti- cable in recent years for the Council to meet two days before the general session of the National Education Association on account of the unwillingness of the railroads to grant rates long enough before the general session of the National Education Association for members of the Council to receive the benefits of the rates and arrive at the place of meeting two days previous t6 the meeting of the general association. Should not the constitution be changed by elimi- nating the phrase, "and at least two days previous to the meeting," found in lines 2 and 3, sec. 3 ? At the meeting in Asbury Park, in 1905, there were six sessions and at Los Angeles in 1907 there were four sessions of this body. This year five sessions have been planned. The program for these sessions may be arranged under three heads: First, The Report on the Educational Progress during the past year, which is made a part of our program by the constitution of the Council and is this year presented at the opening session of the National Education Association this afternoon. Second, Reports of committees appointed for special investigation and a general dis- cussion of the same. The Council asked its president to appoint six committees to make special investigation, A committee was appointed to continue the investigation of indus- trial education in rural schools. This committee has ready a printed report to submit to this Council for consideration and discussion. Four other committees are ready to present preliminary reports. They are as follows: (i) Committee on a System of Teaching Morals in the Public Schools of the United States; (2) Committee on the Scarcity of Teachers; (3) Committee on Provision for Exceptional Children in Public Schools; (4) Committee on the Culture Element in Education. The committees on Shortage of Teachers and Provision for Exceptional Children have printed preliminary reports. The sixth committee, on Co-operation with Educational Organizations in Other Countries, is presenting, instead of a report, three suggestive questions within the field of the work of the committee, which are open for discussion. The field of work open to this committee is very broad and may take years of thought and labor before the entire scope of its work shall appear. The work of several of the committees will necessarily continue beyond the present year. How many and what ones will continue their work will be for the Council to determine. Third, the remaining topics are selected from a list of about fifty questions kindly furnished by members of the Council. The questions were real ones and worthy of a place on the program, did time permit. Some of these topics have been used by the general session and others by departments. My obligation to the members of the Council for their assistance is gratefully acknowledged. All the members of the Council not on the pro- gram for a longer paper or discussion have been asked to speak three minutes on a topic of their own choosing. Of the fifty-eight members, forty-five are on the program of this meeting. Five have written that unavoidable circumstances will prevent their presence at this time. Others are present who preferred not to have their names on the program. I wish to ask the Council to help devise some plan by which at least abstracts of the papers and reports presented to the Council will be iij the hands of those asked to lead in the discussion at least thirty days before the meeting of the Council. It is impossible to have thoro and adequate discussion without an opportunity on the part of the speakers to digest the subject-matter presented. I must confess to have failed to secure the copies desired thirty 326 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National days in advance. Though the request was'made six months ago in most, cases, they were furnished not more than a week in advance. The feeling is wide- spread that the discussions are less valuable in recent years than formerly because those asked to discuss papers have no adequate opportunity to prepare themselves. I would suggest that no papers or reports be printed in the Proceedings after the present year unless at least three copies of the synopsis of the same are in the hands of the president of the Council at least thirty days before its annual meeting. If this should not be found effective then some more dra^ic action should be taken. The Council should take any action necessary to make the discussion a most vital and stimulating part of its work. We are again saddened by the death of two of our friends and colleagues in this Council, Dr. F. Louis Soldan, superintendent of instruction, public schools, St. Louis, Mo., and Rufus H. Halsey, president of the State Normal School at Oshkosh, Wis. A suitable memorial for each of these will be pre- sented. Each of these men has been an honor to the Council, to the profes- sion of teaching, and to American education. Their faithful and fruitful service in the cause of public education should be a new inspiration and a new incentive to each of us to do what we can while it is yet day, for the night Cometh when no man can work. In closing I propose for consideration at the business meeting of the Council the following: QUERIES 1. Shall the general plan of the program of this year be followed for next year? If not, with what modification ? 2. Shall the Council recommend the establishment of one or more traveling fellow- ships ? If so, under what conditions ? 3. Does the Council favor an increase in membership ? If so, to what number? 4. Should the Council take any action that will make more efficient its discussions ? 5. Should the constitution of the Council be changed in either or both of the partic- ulars suggested ? THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION FOR THE YEAR CHARLES r. THWING, PRESIDENT OF WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY AND ADELBERT COLLEGE, CLEVELAND, O. I wish to interpret the progress of education for the year now closing under six relations: First, in relation to the subject to be educated, the people; second, the educating force; third, the educating content or material; fourth, the educat- ing tools or instruments; fifth, the educational conditions; and sixth, in respect to personality. First, in relation to the subject to be educated, the people. The year offers intimation of a continuance of the increasing appreciation on the part of the people of education. Several bases for the betterment of humanity are worthily used; the financial, which Lord Cromer's career in Egypt embodies ; the social, which French civilization illustrates ; the economic and Councfl] THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION 327 the educational, which England embodies. The American people have con- sciously or unconsciously adopted the educational basis as a special means and method of betterment. The people are coming to see with increasing clearness that the religious basis is in peril of narrowness of interpretation and of application, that the social is in peril of superficiality, that the economic is in danger of becoming sensualistic without imagination, and the financial materialistic without spiritual vision. The educational basis, it is seen, is broad— as broad as humanity without superficiality; deep— as deep as thought without narrowness, moving and inspiring without visionariness. All this the people are coming to see, to feel, to appreciate. The formal clauses of the constitutions of the different states commending education are becoming an integral part of the unconscious thinking, feeling, and conduct of the whole body of the people. This increasing appreciation is made evident by laws passed by the legis- latures of the several states in these last months. Among such laws and among movements growing out of such laws may be noted the progress of the study of agriculture in rural high schools. States as remote as Pennsylvania and Kansas, Arkansas and New Jersey are leading in such a movement. Michigan has established a chair of agricultural education in its school at Lansing. The endeavor, too, to put libraries into every public-school building progresses. The movement is a general one, taking on diverse forms in different states and in different schools of the same state. Several common- wealths, also, have established commissions either to study educational condi- tions or to codify school laws. Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Washington, and Pennsylvania are acting in this important relation. As a part of such improve- ment also, several states are proposing to make the supervision of educational interest more expert. In this endeavor Vermont has a large place. The enforce- ment of compulsory laws regarding attendance is receiving attention. With this enforcement is joined a more rigid inspection of factories which employ children, to insure that those under legal age are not employed. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Vermont especially represent this movement. Minimum salary acts still continue to be passed, as in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The movement or the transfer of the basis of taxation from the local district to the larger area, as the township, the county, the state, continues to gain force. As a financial movement and also a human one, the endeavor for the establishment of pension funds progresses. Intimations are that every state, as a state, and every large city in it, will presently have pension funds in working order. Among the cities Harrisburg has in this last year made rapid progress and among the states the movements in Massachusetts should be noted. In this time the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has entered into the third year of its service. This organization has already established for itself under wise leadership a great place in the American higher education. It has based itself upon the assurance that grants made by it 328 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National are not a largess, not a favor, but an attempt to give proper compensation to the college teacher. It has helped to make colleges less denominational without making them less Christian, as also it has helped to standardize conditions of admission and of graduation of the American college* That this Founda- tion has a great place is proved; that it will have a much greater one is also evident. The movement for industrial and technical education continues with increasing emphasis and incentive. The world is becoming interpreted more and more as a material potency which it is the duty of men to develop. With the exception of the present small demand, caused by depressed industrial conditions, engineers of all types are in urgent demand. In America the call is akin to. the call which is found in India and Egypt for irrigation engineers and in China for civil and for mining engineers. The demand for engineers of the highest intellectual type increases with greater force than for those of the clerical or imitative type. Engineers of the power of large thinking, of initiative, of general executive force are specially required. This increase in the demand and in the supply to meet the demand emerges in impressive contrast to the diminishing number of men entering schools of theology. This decline, however, seems to be characteristic of all nations. Despite these principles, laws, and movements which represent the increas- ing force and volume of education, it cannot be denied that the number of pupils who persevere in following an educational course to its conclusion still remains small. A career of a class from the primary through the high school or the coUege is like the march of an army in retreat. It is distinguished by its losses. The enhancement of the worth attributed to the higher education for women still continues. The desire of girls to go to college is quite as general as the desire of boys to become engineers. But the sentiment is rising — rather a feeling than a conviction — that the higher education of women should be differentiated from the education of men. Women have proved that they can do the work of men. They are now, having made their calling and election sure, asking this question: "Is it worth while to try to do the work of men?" The question is raised in some minds: ** Should not the higher edu- cation of women still have for its primary intellectual interest and for its content studies which may specially relate to the calling to which at least one-half of the college graduates will devote themselves?" Such questioning, rather than questions, comes to move in the heart and mind of those who have especially to do with the higher education of girls. Second, The educational force may be interpreted as administrative, personal, pedagogic, material. In administration the year emphasizes the continuance of the policy of centralization. In the higher education the enlarging place of the College Entrance Examination Board illustrates the general movement. In the middle education the progress made in abolish- ing the district system and establishing the town system, and also the progress Councfl] THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION 329 made in uniting two or more townships for purpose of supervision, bears evi- dences of the same tendency. This tendency is also emphasized in the selec- tion of the educational council, or board of education, of the individual city, from all citizens, and not on the basis of wards or mere districts. The personal and pedagogic elements of the educational forces represent the teacher. The central place occupied by the teacher apart from tools and instruments was never so thoroly recognized and appreciated as this very day. The work of the teacher is coming to be received as a profession and as the profession of the utmost value to humanity. Its qualifications, as well as its beneficence, receive a higher valuation with each passing year. But tho the professional value of the teacher has been enhanced, it is also seen with increasing clearness that the worth of the personal character of the teacher is the primary worth of the schools. But also with this recognition is emerging an intimation that the work of the faithful woman in the schoolroom is made too hard. To lessen its exhaust- iveness without diminishing its efficiency is seen to be the eminent problem. It is not usually true that the work of the men who teach in school and college is too severe. The impression is growing that a larger number of men should be employed. The percentage of women teaching in American schools is the highest of any country. In America four-fifths of all teachers are women and one-fifth men; in Japan the proportions are reversed: one-fifth are women and four-fifths men. Third, In respect to what I have called educational content certain tend- encies in opinion are becoming more and more emphasized. The judgment is maintained that all truth has educational value; and that, therefore, the curriculum should be broad. The curriculum should be made to include whatever can minister to the increase of the power of thinking, or to the appre- ciation of life's beauty, or to the efficiency of life's service. The curriculum should embrace all those studies which are of the highest worth. It may also include those which are of other worth than the highest. The efficiency which is sought for is the efficiency to earn a living. That is primary. But also the efficiency which is sought for is the efficiency which can make a life. Mechanical high schools are increasing and industrial training is receiving greater emphasis. Whether mechanical high schools should be a part of the ordinary high school or created on distinct foundations and under separate faculties is a subject under general discussion and under special discussion in Massachusetts. But that the efficiency of the so-called manual training is dependent more upon the brain than upon the hand is becoming recognized. With this emphasis runs a disposition to cut out what is called "fads and frills," though, be it said, these eccentricities are far less numerous than those who inveigh against them seem to believe. Among the teachers of the two classical languages of antiquity taught in the high schools and the colleges, is growing the feeling that both, if either, should be taught, and neither if not both. Latin without Greek came to have 330 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National a place of its own thirty years ago in American schools and colleges. The enlargement of the physical and natural sciences caused a decline of interest taken in Greek. Greek seemed more remote than Latin and it especially suffered in the competition for a place in the curriculum. But recently scholars have come to recognize the intimate relationship of the two. Latin literature finds its springs and origins in the Greek. A student seldom studies Greek without knowing Latin. He does study Latin without knowing Greek. It is declared that such a study gives a false knowledge of the proportional values of the life and literature of the Greek and Roman people. Therefore while the classical teachers do not lessen their claims of the worth of the type of education they represent, they are inclined to eliminate it if it cannot be offered in justice and proportion. They, of course, are perceiving that the continued teaching of modern languages is rendering these languages more adequate tools of modern training than they were when introduced into the course of study. Fourth, The educational content has close relationship to what may be called educational tools or instruments. Such implements are of primary service in education. The improvement of education is well measured by the improvement in educational tools. Among these implements the textbook has the first place. The improvement in textbooks still continues. The modern textbook differs from the early one in respect to the method of presenta- tion of the subject. The earlier one sought to explain and to interpret the subject in a logical order. The author's point of view was scholastic. The textbook was the expression and exposition of truth and of truths. The recent textbook seeks to explain and to interpret the subject primarily for the benefit of the]mind of the student. The point of view of the author is the point of view of the pupil. This point of view has for its chief characteristic sim- plicity. It represents the discarding of the irrelevant. It also stands for the sense of porportion in making principal principal and subordinate subordinate. Its fundamental element of the student's point of view continues to be empha- sized in textbooks of the current year's publication. Akin to the textbook should be noted the educational journals and reviews. These publications show a constant improvement. This improvement is made despite the condition under which they labor, conditions arising from the fact that the daily journals, weekly papers, monthly and quarterly reviews regard education as one of the great human interests which they should and which they do consider. The opportunity seems ripe, it may be added, for still further enrichment of periodical literature. The conditions are hard, but the ideal is one which we can worthily set before ourselves. In relation to educational tools, it is to be added that the community with each passing year appreciates at a higher value the service wrought by good architecture, both as a means of improving material conditions, as a way of promoting the health and securing lives of pupils, and also as a method of »>iinistering to the sense of the beautiful. The need of security for the personal Council] THE PROGRESS OF EDUCATION 331 I safety of teachers and students has been emphasized by the burning of a school- house in the neighborhood of this city in the month of March. The harrowing death of one hundred and sixty-four pupils and teachers gave a shock to the whole civilized world. It also prompted the educational authorities in both America and Europe to look well to the risks to which every student and teacher is subjected. Fifth, Educational conditions represent elements as important as educa- tional forces or tools. Among these conditions athletics are still occupying a chief place. This occupancy relates to every grade of education except pos- sibly the kindergarten. It is still a reflex of the interest of the whole commu- nity in athletic concerns. The community is coming to realize that to seek to support athletics in school or college is to seek to support certain of the great human and lasting interests of man. The college and school are seeking to regulate these sports. Teachers are playing more with their boys, or if not playing with them, at least are coming to sympathize more with them in their play. Many students, too, in some colleges and schools are seeking with wiser wisdom and with more genuine sympathy to give to sports a proper place in their educational career. The keen excitement regarding fraternities in the high schools has in many instances subsided. Those organizations are in some schools allowed to exist; in a few they are forbidden. But taking all of the ten thousand high schools of the United States together these organi- zations are relatively few. What I have said of educational policies and conditions in North America is also true of policies and conditions on American territory over the seas. Governor-general Smith, of the Philippines, concluding a long conversation upon the worthiness and efficiency of the Americans who have come to the islands, said, "But after all the best of them all is the American teacher." The American teachers, both men and women, are doing more for the per- manent elevation and improvement of the Filipinos than all other forces and personalities. These teachers are of good origin. They are the children of the great body of American homes. Many of them are graduates of the colleges of the Middle West and of the Pacific Coast. They are possessed of high ideals. They have an instinct for efficiency. They are willing to endure hardships as good soldiers. They unite intellectual insight and comprehen- sion with the moral virtues. They are forceful without officiousness, and, while conscious of their power, and watchful for opportunity, are yet not arro- gant. Eight hundred men and women of this noble type have for seven and more years been working as teachers in the Philippines, are still working, and are to continue. Sixth, Behind the whole educational system stand great personalities. The American system has been rich in this supreme wealth. The year has taken away not a few such men. Foremost among them is Thomas Day Seymour, for almost a generation professor in Greek in Yale. Of him it may be said, as he said of one of his colleagues in the college of which he was a 332 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National graduate and where he taught before gomg to Yale, ''a Christian gentleman and scholar, honored for his character as much as for his scholarly attainments." A younger colleague, Edward Gaylord Bourne, has also, after a lingering illness, ended his career. In his death the cause of American history loses an investigator of great frankness and candor, a writer of wide and increasing recognition, and a teacher of inspiration, especially for minds like his own, eager and inquisitive. Harvard and the cause of classical scholarship suffered a great loss, also, in the sudden death of Minton Warren, and Columbia and the cause of science mourns the untimely end of Underwood. St. Louis and the nation mourn Soldan — an inspiring soul, a chevalier, and standing for a noble type of the executive. The whole northwest, and especially the state of Washington, mourns the death of Bryan, the first state superintendent of schools. It may also be added that American education lost a wise supporter and American teachers a genial friend in the death of D. CoUamore Heath, publisher of good books, a man noble in purpose, wise, prudent, and strong in every undertaking. Changes other than mortal have also occurred. Hopkins has retired from the headship of the New England College after giving six years of service not unworthy of the fame of his great father. Following upon his resignation, Harry A. Garfield was chosen president. The oflfice was offered and accepted a year in advance of undertaking the same. This method is to be commended. For the work of the teacher is a vital process, and changes in vital processes suffer less by reason of being made deliberately. In this year, too. Dean Laura Drake Gill has retired from the deanship of Barnard College after a service of seven years. The ofl&ce of dean of a woman's college is one of the most difficult, as it is one of the most important, in the whole educational hierachy. Miss Gill brought to the deanship of Barnard a high appreciation of the wealth of helpfulness which it offers to the student and to the community. In another college of Columbia, Dean Russell has completed ten years of serv- ice. Teachers College could have existed without Dean Russell, but if he had not served it in this decade, it would have been a very different college. He has excelled in two of the most delicate and difficult problems belonging to the college executive: In the selection of teachers and also in the endeavor to persuade and to quicken a body of trustees to the realization of the great duties resting upon them and of the rich opportunities open to them. As one compares the history of the year with the history of education in other great nations, American education represents the annals of a nation at peace. England has been in a state of serious excitement, in church, both established and unestablished, in Parliament and without, regarding public and ecclesiastical education. The excitement still continues. No satis- factory solution has been reached. Curzon has tried and, even with his great power, so far failed, to raise two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for Oxford. In the British Empire of India, advancement has been made in dealing with ignorance, in a community, complex and ancient, where only 5 per cent. CouncU] REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 3ZZ can read. Egypt has established technical and trade schools. Turkey still lingers in educational darkness. China's revival has been hurt because of the lack of a proper number of teachers and also by a great doubt of the sin- cerity of the Chinese government in promoting education. Japan still continues to educate and to educate with that efficiency which she puts into her military and naval service. America has, with her companion nations, sought to labor on in this supreme cause, keeping the river of her education full of the water of life, determined that to each child shall be given fitting educational opportunity for making his work efficient, and his character large, rich, and fine. REPORT OF COMMITTEE OF INVESTIGATIONS ON THE SCARCITY OF TEACHERS Letter of Transmittal To the President and Members of the Council of Education, National Education Association: Fellow-Members: Herewith is submitted the report of the Committee on Scarcity of Teachers, by President David Felmley, the secretary of the committee, who sent out a series of questions agreed upon by the committee at a meeting held at the Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, January 2 and 3, 1908. At a subsequent meeting of the committee, held in Washington in February, it was decided to ask President Felmley, who had previously made an intensive study of some phases of this subject, to compile the statistics and draft the report. The report is based upon a systematic questionnaire which brought replies from four hundred eighty-three correspondents who represent every state and territory except Dela- ware. The material used came from state superintendents, county superintendents, city superintendents, presidents of normal schools, professors of education in colleges and universities, editors of school journals, and managers of teachers* agencies. These people, because of their large experience and careful reflection upon the subjects regarding which they gave facts or expressed views, represent, in our opinion, a safe intelligence on the matters herein considered. This investigation brings together the facts of wide experience and a consensus of opinion of people whose business puts them into active contact with the vital elements considered. It, therefore, appears that the conclusions reached rest upon rational knowl- edge which must always seek the causal relation of things. Supported by evidence that seems to sustain the construction placed upon it, your Committee submits this Report, not as the final word but as the basis for further study should the National Education Association desire to secure greater detail of information and attempt to develop a new phase of sociology in accordance with the methods of exclusive and technical science. Respectfully submitted, I. C. McNeill, Chairman David Felmley James M. Green Charles H. Keyes James E. Russell Committee 334 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE SCARCITY OF TEACHERS Your committee appointed to investigate the scarcity of teachers mailed nearly one thousand copies of a series of questions touching the extent of the shortage among different classes of teachers, the probable contributing causes, and the availability of certain suggested remedies. Full replies were received from 483 correspondents, representing every state and territory except Delaware. The replies came from state superintendents of public instruction, from county and city superintendents, from presidents of normal schools and professors of education in colleges and universities, from editors of school journals and managers of teachers' agencies — nearly all testifying to the prevailing scarcity of qualified teachers. Indeed, Southern California, Colorado, and New Mexico are the only regions where any sort of a surplus exists. Only fifty replies reported no shortage in the immediate locality of the writer. In one state three hundred schools had not opened a month after the date of opening because no teachers were available. In another the plan had been largely adopted of having a teacher serve two schools six months in each. On January i four hundred additional teachers were needed in the city of New York, and fully half that number in Chicago. In fact in many states thruout the Union, schoolhouses still stood empty late in the fall because of the dearth of teachers. Everywhere there is complaint of the poorer quality of the teachers available especially for rural schools. In all the states these are largely taught by mere boys and girls lacking in scholar- ship, in professional training, and especially in self-control. As a conse- quence they embroil themselves with pupils and parents and wreck their schools for want of discipline. County superintendents and examining boards have been obliged to lower their standard of requirements for admission to the profession, to reject fewer applicants for certificates. The upper classes in the state normal schools are depleted by the constant calls for teachers. They have not been able to meet one-fourth of the demands made upon them during the school year. Fewer students enter the state normal schools, except in those states where normal training secures a life certificate. Why need they? The schools must be provided with teachers. All who can pass muster with the certificating official are reasonably sure of employment, while he in turn must level his requirements to the ability of the available candidates. An examination of the roll in any particular county will show that many of the best teachers are leaving the work: the men to farm, to study law or medicine, to become insurance agents and traveling salesmen, or to enter the government service; the women to become trained nurses, secretaries, stenographers, responsible bookkeepers, and saleswomen. There has always been this outflow from the profession, but just now it is greater than before; Council] REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 335 and now to an alarming degree it is the best teachers that are leaving. Out of forty-six Illinois county superintendents who have written on this point thirty-seven state that it is distinctly the most forceful and promising that we are losing. All must agree that in view of the needs and responsibilities of modem education, too few are looking seriously to a career in this profession and making adequate preparation for it. Nor is the scarcity confined to any particular class or kind of teachers. While plenty of persons can be found ready to accept the better-paid positions, the number of teachers able to meet the standard of qualifications set by em- ployers is in few states equal to the demand. This fact was best illustrated in the replies to the question, Is there a shortage of competent teachers for normal schools? City and county superintendents generally answered no. But normal school presidents, the men charged with the selection of such teachers, with two exceptions answered yes. The dearth of teachers is naturally most pronounced in the ungraded rural schools. These schools thruout the country are usually taught by women. In many cases good boarding-places cannot be had. The teacher frequently must discharge the duties of a janitor. The isolation of country life is so dis- tasteful, that most rural teachers sfeem willing to accept a larger school at lower salary in town or village. Consequently the least desirable rural schools are the last to be taken. Of the school ofiicers replying to our questions on this point, 92 per cent, report a shortage of rural teachers; 60 per cent, of the replies state that the scarcity is not limited to fairly competent candidates, that it is hard to find any sort of person to undertake some of their rural schools. In graded schools it is a question of the competency of candidates. Many wealthy suburban communities, proud of their schools, put their superin- tendents on the road with instructions to get good teachers at any cost. So long as public education is regarded largely as a local or neighborhood affair rather than a duty that the state owes alike to all its children, this practice will prevail and the favored communities experience no shortage of qualified teachers. City superintendents who maintain a city training-school, or whose cities are the location of state normal schools or other institutions for the preparation of teachers, usually report a good supply of qualified teachers. Along with the two classes of communities just described, and the localities favored by an attractive climate or other special advantages of residence, we must place the booming cities of the newer states where good schools are an asset of the pro- moter or the real estate dealer. Yet in spite of these special conditions that affect certain cities we find that 72 per cent, of the city superintendents reporting from the North Atlantic states, 84 per cent, from the South, 82 per cent, from the Middle West and 48 per cent, from the Mountain and Pacific states declare that they find it difficult to secure well-qualified teachers for their graded schools. The difficulty is not confined to candidates properly prepared in drawing, singing, nature-study, handwork, or physical training, branches 336 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National recently introduced into the curriculum of progressive schools. It is not easy to find persons of personal power and disciplinary ability with sufficient knowledge and professional training to teach well the traditional branches of the elementary-school curriculum according to the standards of present-day school boards. This condition prevails in all sections tho with less intensity in the East and in the Newer West. Of the replies received 36 per cent, report that the scarcity of competent teachers obtains in all grades alike; 21 per cent., that it is most pronounced in the upper grammar grades; 11 per cent., in the primary grades ; while 3 per cent, of the superintendents report that it is most difficult to find teachers equal to the problems of the formative period in the fourth and fifth school years. Secondary schools experience less difficulty in finding satisfactory teachers. The higher salaries paid, the greater social distinction enjoyed, the shorter hours, the narrower field of study, the lessened responsibilities of the high- school teacher all tend to attract young women to this field. Only 13 per cent, of the replies from the East, 27 per cent, from the South, 20 per cent, from the Middle West, and 17 per cent, from the Pacific states indicate any notable shortage of women teachers qualified for high-school positions. More than half of them in all sections report a scarcity of men. Men to teach science and manual training are hardest to get, probably because lucrative openings in engineering, manufacturing, and medicine constantly invite such men. Next to these stand good teachers of English. Plenty of people professing to teach English can be found, but the subject is still so poorly organized in our high- school programs that success is only for the exceptional teacher. Satisfactory teachers of the commercial branches are not plentiful because the quality of the students electing these branches demands the highest personal power in the instructor to incite them to vigorous effort. Teachers of mathematics, modern language, history, and Latin are usually abundant. Only in the South is there reported a scarcity of Latin teachers. A marked scarcity of well-equipped principals is reported from the South; in other sections only of competent men principals. The low salaries paid have resulted in a survival of the unfit in this sex. About one-third of the reports from the East and Newer West and fully two-thirds of the replies from the South and Middle West indicate a dearth of competent instructors in drawing, singing, manual training, domestic science, and physical training. The teachers' agencies are usually well stocked with candidates in all these lines; but many of them are people who have turned to teaching as an afterthought. They are frequently poorly educated outside of their special lines, and quite unskilled in teaching classes of children. CAUSES Why are teachers scarce? The economic law is that labor drifts from one occupation to another according to the relative inducements offered in each. At all times teachers have been drawn to their vocation by a variety Council! REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 337 of considerations. The social position and public respect accorded to worthy teachers is no mean inducement. People who love knowledge for its own sake, not merely for the uses to which it can be put, usually find delight in sharing their treasures with others. Many, too, are attracted to the school- room by a genuine love of children. To most of them, I take it, teaching is more than an occupation; it is a veritable caUing; there has been something of a spiritual summons, an ideal of bettering the world thru the adminis- tration of the school, an ideal whose urgency has brought them to the teacher's desk. Along with these inducements has been the salary, which has been valued nearly as much for the evidence of public respect accorded as for the material comforts that it commands. Now as compared with other occupations it seems that the moral or spirit- ual inducements to become a teacher are as potent as ever. But the question of salary is becoming in every sphere of activity a larger consideration than it has been in the past. The cause is fundamentally in the industrial changes that have removed the domestic industries from home and farm to factory and shop. Our pioneer forefathers produced with their own hands nearly everything in or about their homes. They saw little of the wares of the. merchant. Their luxuries and personal adornments were largely the product of their own taste and skill. Now the world buys and sells relatively five times as much as a century ago. We serve others and are served by them. The measure of comforts that we shall enjoy depends very largely upon our command of the market. The standard of living is determined by these changed conditions. In spite of all the moralists may say in praise of the simple life, teachers know that to retain a due measure of respect in the eyes of the public if not in their own, they must in dress, and in style of living, pay some regard to the prevailing stand- ards. The teacher, therefore, is not to be upbraided because he sometimes turns from his work to consider the question of pay. It is true that whether his salary be great or small he owes all that he can give to the children under his care; but when the day for signing a contract has arrived it is his privilege to make the best possible bargain. Salaries of teachers have risen in all sections of the country during the past ten years but not uniformly. In states side by side under the same economic conditions the increase has differed widely because of legislation that has directly affected salaries, the supply of teachers, or revenues available for the schools. Measured by percentages of former salaries the gain has been least in New England, rural Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, and California. Yet the last-named state is today paying the highest salaries in the country. The increase in the decade the country over has averaged nearly 25 per cent., being lowest, as a rule, in the rural districts least affected by the recent indus- trial prosperity. In our wealthy urban communities women teachers are comparatively well paid. In fact, only exceptional women can earn a better living in other 338 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Natfonal pursuits. The high standard of qualifications demanded, the security of tenure, the social position accorded teachers, alike because of the value of their work and the high character of the personnel of the teaching profession, no less than the salary, make the work attractive to superior women. But there are hundreds of smaller cities in which these conditions do not exist, and in which low standards of qualifications and political influence in the appointments combine to keep salaries low, and the calling in little esteem. Of rural teachers there are thousands -in the South, in New England, even among the prosperous farmers of the Middle West, whose pay is less than thirty dollars per month, often for a school year of six months or less. It is not strange that men everywhere are abandoning the rural schools and even the positions in the towns and villages paying less than $800 per year. If they wish to build a home and rear a family the outlook is far better in the skilled trades, not to mention the professions and responsible positions in the com- mercial world. From an official of the National Federation of Labor I have the following table of wages of skilled labor for the past five years thruout the Middle West, except in the largest cities, all enforced by the union scale. Actual earnings With full time about could earn Bricklayers $750.00 $1,200.00 Plasterers 600 . 00 900 . 00 Carpenters 600 . 00 900 . 00 Plumbers 7SO-oo 1,000.00 Painters 500.00 750.00 Journeymen tailors 600 . 00 900 . 00 Coal miners 700.00 1,000.00 Locomotive engineers .... 1,200.00 1,800.00 Firemen' 800 . 00 1,000 . 00 Brakemen 700.00 900.00 Machinists 800.00 900.00 In all these lines of skilled labor there has been a notable advance in wages during the past ten years. Coal miners' wages have practically doubled. It is not necessary to multiply evidence on this point. It is a matter of common knowledge that the country schoolmaster is fortunate whose net earnings are better than those of a good farmhand. Many good women teachers earn less than stenographers, factory-girls, seamstresses, and cooks. In the Northwest the land booms, the reservations thrown open to settlement., in all sections the inviting business opportunities, the sudden fortunes made by lucky investors, have sowed the seeds of unrest among teachers. In few cases has the advance of wages in the past twenty years kept pace with the increase in the cost of living. Moreover, the demands upon teachers have multiplied. Institutes, books, periodicals, and summer schools have brought home to them the need of professional preparation. When this need is realized the conscientious teacher feels that he must obtain the preparation or quit the ranks. The demand for such preparation is often stronger among Council] REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 339 teachers than among employers. Promising teachers frequently leave the ranks because they keenly feel the need but cannot see in present salaries justification for making the necessary expenditure. The inadequate compensation is not because our people do not believe in education. They intend to spend most generously for its support. During the past thirty years the per capita cost of public education has almost doubled, but the enlarged expenditures have been for fine buildings, for equipment, apparatus, libraries, and especially for developing our somewhat expensive high-school system which has increased its enrolment twenty-fold. A fine school building especially appeals to the American spirit. It is the pride of the town to be exhibited to the prospective investor. It is regarded as a wise investment for advertising purposes. But teachers' wages are largely deter- mined by custom. No organization or trades-union methods have been opera- tive to force them up. Competition has been unrestricted. With unrestricted competition wages are bound to sink to the lowest level at which workers will consent to live. This level is reached in that large class of young women, fresh graduates of the public school, who while living with their parents are willing to accept any small salary sufficient for their personal expenses. Wherever school boards are willing to employ teachers with this standard of preparation, self-supporting men and women must seek a field where intelligence, skill, energy, and fidelity bring a decent reward. While the inadequate salary, as compared with other employments requir- ing equal preparation, ability, and responsibility, is undoubtedly the chief cause of the scarcity of teachers, there are various other factors. In nearly all the states the examinations for teachers' licenses have increased in extent and rigor as compared with twenty years ago. To the seven common branches which were the universal requirement of a former generation have been added, in various states, physiology and the laws of health, the history of the state, pedagogy, civil government, physics, zoology, botany, the elements of agriculture, vocal music, and drawing. In a few states loosely administered county examinations have been replaced by state examinations, which, without adding ^to the nominal requirements, have been so impartially enforced as to eliminate many of the weaker teachers and to discourage others from under- taking the work. The higher standard of qualifications demanded by employers in progres- sive communities has been a still more influential cause. In fact the raising of this standard without a corresponding rise in salaries is the root of the present situation. School boards and superintendents have steadily increased their demands for professional preparation. Reading circles, teachers' meetings, institutes, summer schools — all devour the teacher's leisure, and her purse. It is not claimed that these demands should be abated. These means of professional growth add zest and even joy to her work that otherwise might sink into drudgery. But this demand for growing teachers proceeds from school boards rather than from taxpayers. 340 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National The insecure tenure of position has been a large factor in driving men out of the profession. With women teachers in our larger cities the tenure is probably too secure, for the good of the children. But men usually desire to marry and own a home. A physician or lawyer may settle in a town and con- tinue even if he now and then offend a client. So long as a portion of the community believe in him, he can make a living, but if a teacher, especially if the responsible head of the schools, offends a few of his patrons, he must sell out and move. The expense of securing a new position, the uncertainty and suspense wear out the most buoyant and hopeful of men. Men of narrow horizon sometimes get on school boards. They do not look far into the con- sequences of their deeds. They do not see the effect upon the quality of teach- ing that must result from a policy that drives self-respecting men out of the profession. Until public sentiment demands more consideration for the teacher as a man and a citizen the best talent will desert the school- room. In the country schools the conditions are even worse. According to the reports received, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Indiana are the only states in which most rural teachers remain a second year in the same school. The peculiar organization of the Indiana schools in part accounts for this. In all the other states about 80 per cent, of the rural schools open each fall with a new teacher. The practice dates from the day of the itinerant teacher who sojourned for a term among his patrons, and is today more prevalent in the localities that are nearest pioneer conditions. The untrained and untried teacher now begins in some weak district where wages are low and moves along the scale of better-paying districts until she lands in the ''home school" or in the neighboring city. Without continuous interest in the children and the community which she serves no teacher can do her best work or develop her best qualities. She may be a teacher of subjects but not a teacher of children. In the country all sorts of experimental work in agriculture must bridge across the summer vacation. School libraries are bought and cared for, school museums filled, schoolrooms decorated with pictures and casts where teachers remain year after year. Furthermore the prevailing practice originated in the days when teaching was regarded as a makeshift or a stepping-stone, rarely as a serious or permanent occupation. The continuance of the practice keeps alive the old opinion of the worth of the teachers' work. Another factor in the growing scarcity of men teachers is the feminization of the schools. Boys reared in a city rarely look to teaching. They think it women's work. The few young men who plan to teach are country bred, taught by men teachers from whom they caught their inspiration. The truth is that the American people have starved their schools, have sneered at and belittled the pedagog and professor until even university presidents find it exceedingly difficult to secure young men of personality and scholarship to fill college positions. If the masculine influence is wanted in the schools, and few question the need of it in the upper grades and high school, a more Council] REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 341 iB kn liberal scale of salaries must be provided for men than is necessary to secure competent women. On the other hand in many schools the work has grown until it has become too great a burden for women; they are denied reasonable opportunity for social life. Women ought not to be worn out in the work nor find their matrimonial prospects impaired. Stenography and clerkships throw one with adults. The teacher's day is spent with children, her evening too often in correcting and grading written work. REMEDIES The remedies for the present situation have been in part suggested in the statement of the causes of the scarcity of teachers. They are all answers to this question, How can teaching be made more attractive to young men and women of character and ability? To begin with, salaries must be made adequate. What wages should teachers receive ? What wages should be paid for any service? The answer is, society should provide for all its servants charged with any vital function the conditions and means essential to effective service. Teachers should be free to teach. The citizen teacher of the early days could teach in winter and farm in summer. Few teachers are content with the standard of excellence then possible. Excellence in the caUing now involves professional training, books and magazines, summer schools and institutes, travel, lectures, and concerts. . A vacation outing is no extrava- gance if it buys vigor and inspiration for the schoolroom. The teacher's salary should be sufficient to reimburse him for his outlay for professional training, to maintain his professional growth, to enable him to live in the part of the town and dress in the style that the community demands, to bring up and educate his family and lay by something for old age. In brief, his salary should provide as good living as other men of equal character, ability, training, and skill receive. In the Indiana report on Taxation and Teacher's Salaries these recom- mendations are made: For the rural schools, $420 to $600 per year. For grade teachers in towns and villages, $480 to $650. For grade teachers in smaller cities, $600 to $800. For grade teachers in larger cities, $750 to $1,000. For ward principals and high-school teachers in smaller cities, $900 to $1,000. The salaries of high-school principals should be about 50 per cent, greater. County superintendents should be put on a par with the other county officers. The city superintendents should be paid as well as the postmaster. In New York and Chicago and a few wealthy suburbs, the superintendent is better paid than that official. But in 90 per cent, of the cities paying their superintendents $1,000 or more the postmaster's salary averages one-third larger. His respon- sibilities are surely no greater. The required standard of character, ability, knowledge, and culture no higher. 342 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Such improvement of salaries cannot come without vigorous effort. There must be developed a public sentiment that will recognize the difficulties and worth of the teacher's work. We need an educational revival, a campaign of education in behalf of education. Most of our educational discussion is short circuited; it does not reach the people who decide things. We must get hold of the leaders of public opinion and thru them our legislators, for in social reform legislation must often direct and determine public opinion. The most feasible solution of the salary question is a minimum salary law. Seven states have recently enacted such laws. Pennsylvania and Ohio make the minimum salary $40 for at least seven months; North Carolina, $35; Maryland makes it $300 for the year. West Virginia provides minimum monthly salaries of $40, $35, $28, respectively for the three grades of teachers' licenses. South Dakota provides a minimum of $45. The Indiana law enacted in 1903 provided that in case of beginning teachers the daily wages shall not be less than 2 J cents multiplied by the scholarship grade on his license. After the first term of teaching the multiplicand is increased to 2^ cents; after three years 2f cents. The multiplier is increased for attendance upon the annual institute and for professional ability or schoolroom success. The examinations for teachers' licenses are uniform thruout the state; 85 per cent, is the minimum grade upon which a license can be issued. Under the provision of this law, the poorest teacher in Indiana cannot be paid so little as $40 per month. In five years the law has effected an average rise in teachers' wages of 36 per cent. The increase has been all along the line, but greatest in the salaries of women teachers in rural schools, who now receive in Indiana an average monthly salary of $49 .77, while in 47 counties in Illinois the average monthly salary of all women teachers is less than $40 per month of twenty-one days teaching. By a recent enactment to go into effect next year, salaries in Indiana are still further increased by raising the multiplicands to 24 cents, 3 cents, and 3^ cents. A high-school education is made the minimum of academic quali- fications, while teachers of all grades must complete a course of professional preparation in some professional school. A special appropriation is made from the state's treasury for townships or districts which, while levying the maximum, are unable to pay the minimum salary for the required number of months. There can be, we think, no valid objection to such legislation. Teachers are public employees. The salaries and fees of many public officers in minor political divisions are prescribed by statute. In most of the states the legis- lature has made only general provision for schools, leaving to the discretion of the various districts the amount of money to be raised, the salaries paid, the length of the term, the branches to be taught, and the selection of the teacher. In experience it has been found that the intelligence and spirit of some com- munities are not sufficient adequately to execute the educational purpose of the state. The legislature has been obliged to play the schoolmaster by requiring Councai REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON SCARCITY OF TEACHERS 343 a certain length of school year and prescribing the qualifications of teachers. A minimum salary law is only another step in the same direction. It recog- nizes that the education of the children of the state is the concern of the entire state, and not merely of families and neighborhoods. It brings the intelli- gence and the authority of the commonwealth to the support and assistance of localities where educational sentiment is weak. The fear is sometimes expressed that the passage of such a law tends to create the sentiment that the prescribed minimum salary is sufficient. I have yet to learn of any such law's working that way. I have received letters from state superintendents of the states mentioned that declare that no such tendency has appeared. The wealthy districts have increased their salaries proportionately. Of the replies received 85 per cent, favor a minimum salary law, 9 per cent, are opposed, 6 per cent, in doubt. On the question of pensions for veteran teachers there is a pronounced divergence of opinion — only 58 per cent, favoring pensions. On the one hand, it is urged that most teachers are poor investors ; that they are the prey of the promoters ; that the small amount annually withheld from their salaries will be more productive if left in the hands of the business world ; that the practice is growing among large private employers, and, above all, that a pension system enables us in a kind and graceful way to relieve teachers who have outlived their usefulness. On the other hand, it is argued that the teacher ought to receive his full salary at the time he earns it; that many teachers leave the work before they are entitled to a pension ; that teachers ought not to be relieved of necessary forethought in providing for old age ; that a pension system in effect is an inducement only to the weak, improvident, and indolent, that both civil and military pensions weaken and demoralize. The results of an inquiry among young teachers and normal-school students support the contention that a pension system would not attract many young people to the profession. After an initial probationary period teachers should be appointed for a term lasting thru good behavior. Removal from position during such term should be thru public hearing after formal presentation of charges. In this branch of the public service there should be as secure tenure as is afforded to United States judges or to letter carriers. Teachers should have just as much freedom of political action as is accorded to other men in public service without endangering their employment. The scarcity of good teachers will not disappear until there are extensive changes in the organization and administration of our schools. There must be fewer school boards. Only men of the highest character and intelligence should be eligible. Those who license teachers should be readily recognized as men of superior educational ability and scholarship. There should be fewer examinations of teachers. After one fair and thoro test of scholarship, the teacher in continuous service should be subjected to no other. Gradu- ates of professional schools of recognized standing should receive license 344 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National without further examination. Teachers should be given larger freedom in their choice of methods for accomplishing the results required. Their pay- should run for the entire year with such arrangements for vacation activities as may be agreed upon. The rural schools should be organized in large units, either township or county. The revenue system should furnish a large state school fund, thus equalizing the burdens of the public education and at the same time give large opportunity for local pride and local initiative to provide superior schools thru local taxation. Districts should be made large enough to secure a school of respectable size. The rural teachers should be provided with a suitable board- ing-place, with a private heated room, convenient to her school. Prosperous farmers want good schools but are not willing to be bothered with the boarding of the teacher. With the coming consolidated school will come the teacher's dwelling-house hard by the school house; his kitchen garden, flower garden, and little farm, the experimental garden of the school. But while the fundamental remedy is to be found in improved salaries, boarding-places, and other material conditions of the teacher's life, it must be remembered that men and women do not work primarily for the satisfaction of material wants, but of social needs. Esteem, homage, admiration — these are the great satisfactions. If teaching becomes everywhere an honored calling it will attract and hold choice young people. The advent of this day of universal honor depends in part upon new legislation that may remove some barriers, in changes of organization that will give freer play to. social forces, but it depends chiefly upon the quality of the teachers themselves, their scholarship, their professional skill, their spirit, their devotion, and their common sense. DISCUSSION Ella Flagg Young, Chicago, 111. — The report is disappointing. The data have not been carefully analyzed and interpreted. The report conveys the impression that the committee had an explanation for which data had been found, ready at hand. The statement that Chicago had a shortage of 200 teachers, January i^ 1908, is mislead- ing. Stated in that bald manner, the condition seems to be one in which 200 vacancies could not be filled. There were not vacancies — about 100 teachers were on the list wait- ing for appointment as vacancies might occur. There were, probably, many teachers absent from one to ten days because of an epidemic of colds. The greatest scarcity of teachers is in the rural school, and this, the report explains, is caused by the movement of women teachers toward the social life of the city or town. Later, a tear is dropped over those unhappy women teachers in the upper grammar grades and high schools in the cities, because the duties of the advanced grades deprive the women of their leisure in the evening, a time when they should be free to look after their matri- monial affairs! Does courtship take any more of the woman's time than of the man's — one cannot court alone. Think of this Council spending its time on such a report as an investigation of the cause of the scarcity of teachers. This is an attempt to show how to make conditions that will reduce the number of teachers. Concerning the method of gathering data, I should like to call attention to the fact that the day has passed when social questions are studied in one group only. The committee CouncUJ PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 345 would do well next year to adopt the method of the social settlement and the university — to investigate both groups concerned; to make inquiries of not only presidents and superin- tendents but also of the young men and women who would be valuable additions to the teaching force, and to learn from them the reasons why they are entering upon occupations removed from study and work with mind. The committee could learn at least two things that have escaped it in preparing this report: First, the organization of our school system needs overhauling in the interest of the individuality of the teacher. The excessive super- vision and requirements of principal, district superintendent, supervisor of drawing, super- visor of music, supervisor of gymnastics, and the criticisms and suggestions of parents and school trustees are all too prominent to make the life of the teacher attractive — contrari- wise, they make it petty. No business house is organized so that an employee may pass under the criticisms of suggestions, even the kindly, of five or six superior oflScers, and fifty non-commissioned officers; Second, There is slowly, but surely, a desirable part of America's daughters turning to other vocations than that of public-school teaching. It is not her sons alone that are failing to respond to her call. Finally, I wish to say that it is impossible for me to believe the committee is right in the stigma it casts upon the quality of men now engaged in teaching. This foolish attempt of the committee to stir up sex warfare is to be deprecated. Let us work from the stand- point of co-operation, not depreciation, one of another. PRELIMINARY REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT At the Los Angeles meeting of the National Council in 1907 it was ordered that a committee be appointed by the President of the Council to consider and make a preliminary report on provision for exceptional children in the public schools, and that the sum of five hundred dollars ($500), or so much thereof as may be necessary, be appropriated to defray the expenses of this committee. The President of the Council appointed as such committee: James H. Van Sickle, superintendent of city schools, Baltimore, Md., Chairman. Andrew W. Edson, associate superintendent of city schools. New York. Frank A. Fitzpatrick, Boston, Mass. Carroll G. Pearse, superintendent of city schools, Milwaukee, Wis. Lloyd E. Wolfe, superintendent of schools, San Antonio, Tex. The committee has held three meetings: one in New York City on January 13-14; one in Washington, D. C, February 25; and one in Cleveland, Ohio, May 11-12. While in New York the members visited types of all classes for exceptional children maintained at public expense in that city and matured plans for further study of the problem through correspondence, personal visits to special schools, and conferences with experts upon various phases of the investigation. Individual members of the committee visited the Training Schools for Feeble Minded Children at Vineland, N. J— Dr. E. R. Johnstone, superin- tendent; at O wings Mills, Md.— Dr. F. W. Keating, superintendent; and at Mt. Airy, Pa.— Dr. A. L. Crouter, superintendent; the Clinical School of the 346 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National University of Pennsylvania, under the direction of Dr. Lightner Witmer; and Dr. Maximilian P. E. Groszmann's School for Nervous and Atypical Children, at Plainfield, N. J. They visited day schools for the deaf at Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Boston; day schools for the blind in Chicago and Milwaukee; day schools for mentally defective children in New York, Roches- ter, Baltimore, Providence, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia; parental schools in Chicago, Toronto, New York, Baltimore, and Boston; as well as many state and private institutions. We have been aided in our work by the co-operation of Mr. W. A. Baldwin, principal of the Hyannis (Mass.) Normal School, and Dr. F. E. Farrington, professor of education in the University of California, from studies made in European schools; and by the advice of Dr. Lightner Witmer, of the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, who by invitation attended the Washington meeting of the committee. Nearly all provision now in existence for exceptional children in American cities has been made in very recent years. The problem is, therefore, a com- paratively new one. Before compulsory-attendance laws began to be strictly enforced, public-school authorities had no adequate idea of its magnitude. Children who could not get along fairly well in the ordinary classes, either by reason of their low mentality or their refractory bearing, or both, often ceased to attend and were absent or truant without the knowledge of the authorities. Doubtless there were as many of these special cases in any community then as there are now; few of them, however, remained long enough in school to allow a correct opinion to be formed as to the cause of their difl&culty. They are now in our schools, however, clogging the various grades, chiefly the lower, and we are forced to recognize the existence of a serious problem in connection with their education. It is a generally accepted principle that every child — normal or subnormal — — is entitled to all the education which he is capable of receiving. This principle implies that the state is in duty bound to provide an education for all children capable of intellectual improvement. As a question of good policy the state should see that all children are trained as far as possible to be right- minded, self-respecting, and self-supporting. Many cities at home and abroad are now providing instruction for backward children in the public schools in special classes and under the guidance of specially trained teachers. In 1867 Germany began the education and training of mentally deficient children in special day classes. The other leading countries of Europe soon followed, developing the work in various ways. The first school of this kind in America was established in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1875. In 1896 the city of Providence entered upon the work of grouping into special classes children who were backward and mentally deficient. Other American cities soon followed, though in a tentative and experimental way. The real move- ment in this country is only twelve years old. A discrimination must be made between backward and mentally defective Councill PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 347 children who may properly be taught in the public day schools, and children so feeble minded that they should be consigned to residential institutions. In the former class are the dull and the backward whose mental processes are slow, who perhaps can never take a high place in the social and industrial life of a community, and yet who under proper instruction are capable of great improvement, and possibly may be trained to self-support. These children require special environment and special training to prevent deteriora- tion. With those incapable of improvement — the imbecile and the idiot — the public schools have nothing to do. The causes of retarded or impaired brain development are many. In some children this is due to hereditary causes; in others to some physiological disorder, as impaired hearing or vision (often the result of scarlet fever or other diseases); to chronic catarrh, enlarged tonsils, or adenoid growths; in others to an accident, to a blow upon the head or back, to a sudden shock or fright; and in others to malnutrition, a lack of proper nourishment, or to fatigue from overwork. In many cases a careful study of causes will reveal clearly the present condition and the remedy needed. Much of the work is experimental in character and must necessarily continue to be so for some years to come. Your committee has undertaken in the following pages to set forth in a tentative way its review of American practice so far as it has developed in the treatment of exceptional children, and to suggest certain classifications, and to recommend a few of the plans of work which it finds in successful operation. For the plan of organization of special classes recently formed in St. Louis and for the details of management of a collection of disciplinary classes in New York City in one building, conducted as a Disciplinary Day School, readers are referred to the Appendix. For the latest developments in the education of exceptional children in some European school systems reference is made to Bulletin No. j (1907) of the United States Bureau of Education, and to the Appendix. To print all of the material which we have gathered would be impracti- cable at this time. It is the opinion of the present committee that work in this comparatively new field is of such vast importance as to warrant the continued interest and support of the Council, and we recommend that a committee be appointed with instructions to continue this tentative study, making such use as it may see fit of the materials which this committee has accumulated, and that an appropriation of $2,000 be made for the purpose of meeting the necessary expenses of a more thoro and exhaustive investi- gation. Respectfully submitted, James H. Van Sickle Andrew W. Edson Frank A. Fitzpatrick Carroll G. Pearse Lloyd E. Wolfe Committee 348 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS One of the fundamental purposes of a public educational system is to prepare all educable children of school age for a maximum of social service. The recognized educational instrumentalities employed are teachers, courses of study, buildings, and equipment. Children to whom these educational instrumentalities as ordinarily provided do not effectively or sufficiently appeal may properly be denominated "exceptional." They include the following: Physically exceptional Intellectually exceptional Morally exceptional ( Sight defective •< Hearing defective ( Crippled ( Mentally defective •j Backward ( Exceptionally capable { Truant I Refractory We do not know how many exceptional children of any type, or of all types together, there are in the United States, or in any single city in the United States. Accurate statistics are wanting. To secure them is an immediate and pressing need. In London the medical officer reported in 1904 that "At any time at least 10 per cent, of all the children whose names are on the rolls in London are such that, for reasons either of a permanent, or of a tem- porary but somewhat chronic nature, it may be considered that the ordinary elementary school work is almost wasted on them, and in many cases is actu- ally harmful." It is probable that careful and competent inspection would yield similar results in American cities. In so far as educational instrumentalities lack adaptation to all children of school age, the number of persons poorly prepared for the duties of life is multiplied, and society suffers through failure to receive from all its mem- bers a maximum of social service. Then our problem is — ^what changes should be made in our educational instrumentalities that these exceptional children may acquire the power of adaptation, to the end that they may render to society as great a social service as possible ? Care should be taken that any proposed changes in educational instrumen- talities for the purpose of making provision for exceptional children shall not be so extensive as to work injury to the whole body of children. Com- munities must also endeavor to solve the problem of provision for exceptional children with the least possible segregation, because the school as a whole composed of exceptional and non-exceptional children is, in miniature, the society for whose service the exceptional pupil is being prepared. Therefore, to keep in view this fundamental principle of a maximum of service to society, any changes in educational instrumentalities that are beneficial to both the exceptional and the non-exceptional child in their coeducation should be welcomed. Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 349 L We now come to inquire what further principle should control in the modification of educational instrumentalities as above contemplated. It is believed that a fundamental principle will be found in a stronger appeal to the motor side of the child. This appeal should be made not alone through actual doing, as in manual training and trade instruction, physical culture, games, natural science, and industrial excursions; but through pictures on canvas, on screen, and in books; through a reading of lifelike, detailed narra- tion of representative achievement in all the fields that make strongly for human well-being; and through greater emphasis upon oral composition, discussion, and debate. Assuming that any modification of the course of study to make it better adapted to the needs of all children would reduce the number who would be classed as exceptional, the importance of suitable revision of the traditional course of study can hardly be overestimated. Scarcely second in importance to readjusting the course of study is a proper classification of pupils. In deaHng with large numbers of children absolute perfection in grading is obviously out of the question, but a close approximation is attainable. The grouping of children into classes should be made with reference to their working power, each class working ahead without reference to the rate of movement of slower or faster groups, no children unduly hurried over the courses and none held back on account of slow-moving schoolmates. Annual, semiannual, or even more frequent reclassifications, if general for a school or school system, result in more or less repetition or retracing of steps for a large number of pupils, a few in each class. Very soon after children enter the first grade it is possible to make a tentative grouping in classes according to maturity and ability. The division of a class into sections for recitation and seat work facilitates early readjust- ments as individuals are discovered from day to day who belong in a stronger or weaker class of the grade. Such changes should be made without delay. In the course of the first few weeks the classes of beginners, if there are several, or the sections, if there is but one class of the grade, are properly organized for steady forward movement. The movement of a given class should be like that of a river which keeps its identity throughout its course, although it receives reinforcement from tributary streams and sustains great losses by seepage and evaporation. Our t)^ical class, as it moves through the eight grades, will from time to time part with a pupil to a slower or faster moving class or division, or will become depleted by the permanent withdrawal of children who, having reached the age limit set by the school-attendance law, seek employment; but these and other losses are made up by the reinforce- ments from other sections or classes of individuals who find the rate of move- ment of this particular stream better suited to their powers than the too swift or too slow current in which they have been. A period of illness may be the cause that brings one pupil over from an advanced class into our typical class; a sudden accession of mental strength due to natural physical growth 350 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National may bring in another pupil from a lower class. Whatever the cause, when- ever the need arises it should be discovered or recognized by the teacher and the adjustment made. There should be no time of the year when this cannot be done. Corresponding in importance to classification according to working power in the grades is provision for choice of studies in the high school, and an arrangement whereby the number of studies carried by different pupils at one time may vary according to their differing mental and physical strength. To care properly for the child of average or somewhat more than average capacity, a plan which permits of ready and easy ascent from a lower to a higher class will suffice if wisely administered. THE EXCEPTIONALLY CAPABLE But the gifted child, with his insight bridging great gulfs whose mazes he does not know and needs not know, must not be stopped in his flight to trace the steps necessary to the child of average powers. The real test of ability to go on with his studies is an affirmative answer to the question: Does he know enough of what he has gone over to pursue with profit what is yet to come? The educability of a child depends upon the nature and quality of his mental reactions and on his physique and his moral qualities. If the qualita- tive question is superseded by a quantitative question by his teacher, who does not appreciate the situation, a usual result is retardation in his progress. Since the question is chiefly one of quality rather than of quantity, the complete isolation of the gifted pupil, either by leaving him in a class of pupils of far less ability or by dealing with him individually, would have a tendency to diminish, or rather deteriorate, the quality of his own reactions. Much of the retardation now noticeable in the first, second, and third grades arises from the teacher's desire to enforce a quantitative accomplish- ment of certain tasks. She can measure only quantitative progress; therefore she is too often heedless of flashes of brilHancy, which should suggest to her the calibre of the pupil, and she brings him back again to earth by the demand for the doing of a specific task — one that perhaps has little relation to bis powers and activities. So the course of study which deals with the conven- tional studies, probably necessary for most children, may become a hindrance alike to the backward and the gifted child. There is measurable agreement so far as the training of the backward child is concerned. With the specially gifted child, however, questions of temperament, of quality of mind, of trend of mind, crowd themselves forward to such an extent as to make any general solution extremely difficult. Here consultations with parents, with competent authorities in psychology and pedagogy, the grouping of such pupils in a class under a teacher gifted with temperament and personality, are necessary conditions. In our conception of what the gifted child should do we are inclined to CouncU] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 351 look too exclusively upon the shorter time in which he can accomplish the tasks of the conventional course of study. Until we comprehend that for the gifted child a somewhat different atmosphere should be provided; that too, a different curriculum should be developed, we shall accomplish little. While the saving of time is not unimportant, the really important considera- tion is the ideal of effort and accomplishment which the child is forming. It is essential, therefore, that these gifted children have the stimulus that will react upon them in such a way as to cause them to become as vigorous in will as they are acute in intellect; for there is reason to believe that great achievements in leadership are due more to strength of will than to mere intelligence. This is a very difficult problem. It has not yet received the attention which its supreme importance warrants. In Worcester, Mass., Indianapolis, Ind., and Baltimore, Md., special provision has been made for pupils of ability in the last two years of the elementary school course. In Germany, notably in Mannheim, some progress has been made in the study of this question, but as yet no wholly adequate solution has been put forward. THE ABNORMAL In making provision for the public -school education of exceptional chil- dren attention must .be given to those who are more or less handicapped by some physical defect, to those who depart only temporarily from normality, to those commonly known as slow or backward, and to educable children of defective mentality. Among the instrumentalities which are of great use in dealing with such children, three are so generally useful and usable that they deserve special mention. They form a sequence considered with reference to the cases to which they apply and are (i) the Special Help Period, (2) the Special Class, and (3) the Parental School. I. The Special Help Period In almost every class of thirty or forty pupils some members of the class will each day need special attention and help from the teacher. It may be that a pupil has been absent and thus missed some lessons; or he has failed to comprehend some instruction given to the class; or some subject may offer special difficulty to him and this help and encouragement are needed to keep him abreast of his schoolmates. It may be that the pupil needs some counsel or admonition concerning his manners, or his behavior, or his attitude toward his classmates or toward the school work in general. The best teachers always find time for this work in some way. If a special time in the daily order is set apart for it, no teacher has any excuse for neglect- ing it. The regular time suggests the duty, and this important phase of school work is not likely to be omitted. In the four or five upper grades this object may be accomplished either by setting apart a special period to be devoted to special help as above, or by releasing from a given recitation, from time to time, those pupils who are well 352 NAl^lONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION LNationai prepared on the special phase of a subject under consideration, the teacher meanwhile devoting her attention to the pupils who are less strong in that topic. The pupils excused from the recitation may devote their time to a subject on which they are not so well prepared, or to suitable reading, or to assisting fellow-pupils. They are gaining power of self-direction and self-reliance by doing independent work while the teacher secures needed opportunity to give individual or group assistance to those who need it. Children who are unable by means of these forms of special help to com- plete the work of a grade in the time required by the majority of the children in the slowest division may be out of place in any regular class, but they should be carefully studied by the school physician as well as by the teacher and principal before a transfer to a special class is determined upon. Perhaps a change of teacher is the proper remedy. 2. The Special Class The special class may include five types: a) The Ungraded Class, for misfit children of normal powers and dispositions — some- times called the "helping class." h) The Disciplinary Class (or School), for truant and refractory pupils. c) The Special Class, for children of defective mentality. d) The class for the deaf. e) The class for the blind. Crippled children, if not hospital cases or too seriously crippled to occupy an ordinary school seat, may be taught in any regular or special class for which their mental powers fit them. Transportation is here the chief problem. Some cities make this a charge on the public purse. In 1904 Berlin started an open-air or pavilion school for children with heart or lung symptoms. Providence, Rhode Island, began a similar educational enterprise in January of the present year. (See Appendix.) In small cities the special cases falling under (&) and {c) might form a single class. There is good authority for saying that it is not necessary to separate the epileptic feeble-minded from other feeble-minded and backward children nor even from the disciplinary cases. The refractory boy is made more gentle and sympathetic by being allowed to help the teacher care for an afflicted classmate. In large cities only is it possible to follow strictly the above classification, and there only where the population is densest; nor is it necessary to do so. The refractory are often to some extent mentally defective. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mentally defective and the backward, nor can a final classification of cases be made quickly. The special class must at first be a sort of clearing-house to relieve the regular classes of misfit material. There, gradually and carefully, each case is to be studied at leisure and ultimately placed where it belongs. a) The ungraded class, for misfit children of normal powers and disposi- tions.— In most large schools children will be found for whose needs the special-help period does not sufl&ciently provide. These may be young Il: Council) PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 353 foreigners who do not know the language; they may have had good educational advantages or very scanty ones in the country from which they came. Some children entering the school may not have had any good schooling. Some- times a boy of fourteen enters who has had no teaching of any kind, or who has been entirely neglected in certain studies; such a boy must enter a first or second or third grade if placed where he can do the work the class is doing. Yet a boy of this age will be humiliated if so placed, and is Hkely to embrace the first opportunity for leaving school. It may be that a pupil has been badly taught or for some reason has failed to make progress in some one or two studies, these studies being such as to make it impracticable for him to go on with the class. All these cases and others require the ungraded class. Such a class must not contain more than twenty or twenty-five pupils — ^few enough to permit much individual work. Pupils of this kind placed in charge of a teacher chosen because of special fitness for this service can, by special adaptation, gain what they need in order to enter classes with pupils of corresponding age and general ability. Not infrequently this ungraded or "helping class" can be made to serve the need of pupils who are especially strong, and capable of doing more work. Ungraded classes of this type are not for disciplinary cases nor for children of weak or deficient mentality; they should be reserved for those children whose powers and inclinations are normal, but who, from lack of proper advantages, have not been able to make the progress which children of their ages should show. h) The disciplinary class {or school), for truant and refractory pupils. — Not uncommonly teachers find in the class one or more pupils not amenable to ordinary means of control. These children in various ways take the time of well-disposed pupils and interfere with their studies and their comfort. They take up a great deal of the time of the teacher, and demand attention and nervous energy which belong of right to the whole class. What is quite as important, not all teachers understand these troublesome pupils, and there- fore they do not receive the management and instruction which they need. For such children the disciplinary class is a necessity. It is, at least for a time, the proper place for them, whether they are habitual truants, or turbulent and rebellious, or obstinate, sulky, and contrary, or whether they are abusive and cruel to other pupils, or vile in habits of speech and corrupting to their schoolmates. They are disqualified for association with well-disposed pupils and for receiving instruction in the usual classes and under the usual school conditions. Such schools, placed in easily accessible localities, may occupy one or two or several rooms, as the number of pupils tributary to them may require. These schools must first of all be put in charge of teachers who understand such children, who know how to control and teach them, and who have a real interest in their progre.^s and welfare. The course of studies should be 354 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National arranged with more flexibility than is necessary in the usual schools. Special equipment should be provided for manual training and gymnastics. Special arrangements between these schools and the attendance department will make it possible to deal with truancy in a more effective manner than is practicable under usual conditions. The number of pupils to the teacher in these schools, as in ungraded classes, must be smaller than in regular classes. Such variations from the usual conditions permit great progress in bring- ing these troublesome children into conformity. Not all members of these schools acquire enough self-control to permit them to leave the disciplinary school; but many who, when sent there, are more or less refractory, overcome their faults to such an extent that they may be returned to the regular classes in their home schools. In new surroundings the refractory boy is likely to be regarded as less of a leader than perhaps he was in his former school. He finds his supremacy disputed by earlier comers who resent any attempt at domination on his part, and who, though without definite intention to aid the teacher, nevertheless help to give the newcomer a more modest bearing.^ c) The special class, for children of defective mentality. — If it were not for the fact that the presence of mentally defective children in a schoolroom inter- feres with the proper training of the capable children, their education would appeal less powerfully to boards of education and to the tax-paying public. It is manifestly more expensive to maintain small classes for slow and backward children who will profit relatively little by the instruction they receive than to maintain large classes for children of normal powers But the presence of one or two mentally defective children in a class so absorbs the energies of the teacher and makes so imperative a claim upon her attention that she cannot under these circumstances properly instruct the number commonly enrolled in a class. School authorities must therefore greatly reduce this number, employ many more teachers, and build many more schoolrooms to accom- modate a given number of pupils, or else they must withdraw into small classes these unfortunates who impede the progress of normal children. Of the two expedients the latter is the less expensive. The practice of teaching these children in separate classes is now fairly well established in large cities, and superintendents and teachers are working on the problem of their proper classification, so that the school may make the best of this imperfect material. The reasons which require normal children in the grades to be clasi^ified as far as possible according to working power apply with even greater force to the backward and the defective. Against this view we occasionally hear of the helpful influence of the more gifted upon their weaker or slower or more indo- lent classmates. If, however, their scanty power of attention, their mental indolence, or their lack of moral balance are due to physical causes, either temporary or constitutional, the more brilliant response of mentally capable I Miss Olive Jones, principal of public school No. 120, special, for refractory chil- dren, Broome Street, New York, whose school the committee visited, has at our request furnished an account of the origin and progress of her work. See Appendix. lb Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 355 children, far from tending to spur these children on to better accomplishment, will tend to discourage them and to produce all kinds of moral defects. An en- vironment that stimulates growth is one in which each individual gets a chance to show that he can do as well as others in the group. If he can do some one thing especially well in comparison with others, his success has the effect of making him courageous and hopeful. In intellectual work a child gets along best in that group whose members are nearest to his own mental condition, just as in athletics he is more energetic and makes more improvement when competing with others of^ somewhat similar strength. To compete with one who is sure to win despite our best efforts is disheartening, and the will fails to act energetically. The main purposes in providing special training for children of defective mentality are to arouse dormant energies, to strengthen muscular and nerve powers, to cultivate and strengthen the mtellectual, moral, and aesthetic faculties, to develop the power to obey directions, to cultivate self-control, and to train to self-dependence and to a mastery of some useful occupation. In the education and training of mental defectives there are certain ad- vantages in occupying one of the classrooms of a public-school building; they are in this way led to feel that they are "a part and parcel" of the school community. In their association with normal children on their journeys to and from school, on the street and on the playgrounds, and in some of the general exercises of the school, the defective children receive a valuable train- ing. Opportunity may be offered a child from the special class to go to a regular class at a certain hour of each day and participate in work in the subject in which he shows the most interest and greatest aptitude. This limited association of children of all mental grades, if under proper du*ection, will lead normal children to be kind and considerate to those in special need of guidance and help. The advantages attending the location of the special class in one of the rooms of a public-school building are thought by some to be outweighed by the disadvantages. In St. Louis small dwelling-houses are rented for the purpose. In Christiana, Norway, and in some other cities abroad separate buildings are used. (See Appendix.) The room selected for the special class should be large, sunny, and well equipped, located if possible on the ground floor, and accessible to the street, toilet-room, gymnasium, and playgrounds. The following equipment is provided in the city of New York: Fifteen movable and adjustable seats and desks; a number table three feet square; six work benches with equipment; physical training equipment— wands, dumb-bells, Indian clubs, ladder; dis- play cabinet ; a piano ; running water, and a porcelain sink. In the selection of teachers for defective children special care is needed. Among the chief requisites are the following: An even and sunny tempera- ment; infinite patience; unbounded tact; firmness that leads one to hold steadily to a course in spite of all obstacles; great resourcefulness in providing 356 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [isational ways and means for carrying on the work to the best advantage, even when ready resources are Hmited; an intense human sympathy with and love for these children so much in need of a helping hand; unbounded faith in the work; and an appreciation of effort that gives to the children constant hope and encouragement. The management of these children must be kind and sympathetic. In most cases they are unusually affectionate and will respond quickly to any reasonable demands of the teacher. Praise and encourage- ment at every effort are the indispensable means of arousing dormant energies. These teachers should have the spirit of a student; they should be familiar with the best literature on the subject; and they should visit schools and institu- tions for the training of exceptional children in order to become familiar with the best work of the kind. As has been well said, the great need of such schools is "Forward teachers for backward pupils." Such teachers can be found in any corps, teachers who have the natural qualifications and who are willing to undertake the neces- sary preparation. There are always some who are willing to engage in work somewhat out of the usual order, or to undertake the work from a missionary spirit. The education and training offered subnormal children should be adapted to meet their individual needs. The course should be flexible and of direct practical value. In the line of physical education the effort should be to develop a good physical organism. This can be done by giving emphasis to personal hygiene, to the value of frequent baths, of pure air, of well-directed exercise, of rest and relaxation. These children always respond readily to interesting exercises and games, as in marching in step to music ; calisthenics, military drill, and folk-dancing; kindergarten games, hop, skip, jump, run- ning, and May pole; in exercises with dumb-bells, wands, and hoops; and in all common games that require vigorous exercise. In all of this work the co-operation of skilled physicians is essential to the highest success. In manual and industrial lines the attempt should be to develop dexterity, skill, and motor control. All children can be trained effectively through well-organized manual work, as in cutting, folding, and weaving, and in con- structive work in cardboard, wood, leather, and iron. Elementary work with cord and rafl5a, sewing and garment-making, cooking, table-serving and house- keeping, shop-work in various forms, are pre-eminently practical and educative. In any appeal to the intellectual the attempt should be to cultivate mental alertness, to awaken and quicken the special senses, to strengthen the powers of attention, memory, and judgment, and to develop well-balanced will-power. One of the earliest and surest symptoms of mental defect is the inability to concentrate the mind for any time upon one line of thought. Interest must be the keynote to continued application. Humorous and interesting stories told or read, short memory selections, language lessons in which distinct articulation and connected thought are made prominent, will tend to strengthen the intellectual powers. Council! PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 357 In the games in which the pupils may be encouraged to participate, in the singing exercises, in the lessons on cleanliness, orderliness, obedience, help- fulness, and conduct, the elements of good morals and gentle manners should be implanted. In order to have the work well systematized, to note changes and evidences of growth, and to be sure that each pupil is receiving individual attention, a simple form of pedagogical record should be kept by the teacher.* d) Day schools for the deaf. — For many years practically all the deaf children, or those whose hearing was seriously impaired, were taught, if taught at all, in state or private institutions. In these schools the students formed a class apart from the community. They received intellectual education, often indus- trial education also, but they did not have the opportunity to retain knowledge of or connection with the community. 'They were separated from their homes and from the members of then: families. They grew, under these circum- stances, more and more apart from their families, and more and more apart from the members of the communities in which their homes were. They became more and more dependent each year on the special means of com- munication which they practiced among themselves, and were very little able to communicate with or be comfortable in the society of the other people of the community. A tendency developed among them to associate with one another to the exclusion of other persons. This tendency led to intermarriage of deaf persons, to their settlement in neighborhoods, and showed a tendency, noted nearly a generation ago, toward the development of a deaf variety of the human race. The most powerful deterrent to this tendency has been the establishment of day schools for the deaf. To these schools children come each day, return- ing to their homes at night. They remain members of the family; they mingle on the playgrounds and in the street with hearing children and with other persons of the community. They are taught exclusively by the ' * oral " method, that is, they are taught to read the lips of those who speak to them, and are taught, step by step, to use their organs of speech, to develop their voices, and to speak as other people do. They use the same textbooks that other children use. By the time that they have passed through the grades of the schools below the high school, they are able to go about, speak, and understand much as other children of similar age do. In a number of cases they go on into the high school, taking their places and carrying on their work successfully in classes with hearing pupils. They are able to take their places as members of the community, to engage comfortably in many occupations pursued by hear- ing people, and, in general, have ceased to be members of a class apart. These schools are much more costly per pupil than the usual day schools. The number of pupils to a teacher is necessarily small, ranging from five to I A suitable form for such record and a description of the method in use in the city of New York for determining which children may with advantage be transferred to the special class are given in the Appendix. 358 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National ten, and education in such schools therefore costs four or five times as much as for normal pupils. But the cost is only about half as great as where the chil- dren are cared for in institutions for the deaf, while the results are of far greater value. Deaf children do not usually begin to learn language or speech until they go to school at the age of five or six or more years. Hearing children at this age have a considerable vocabulary and speak freely. A new departure has recently been made in which deaf children are taught language and speech at the age when hearing children acquire these arts. When farther developed, this is likely to prove a great aid to these children and should make it possible for them to be farther advanced at the time of entering regular school classes than they can be under arrangements heretofore existing. e) Day schools jor the blind. — Of the blind, as of the deaf, it is true that until recently their chief reliance for education has been upon institutional schools. Within a decade day schools for the blind have begun to be estab- lished in different cities. In these schools, as in those for the deaf, the number of pupils to the teacher must be small, ranging from five to ten. A special room must be set aside in which they may study under the guidance of the special teacher. The pupils use the same books as the seeing pupils in the regular classes. These books are printed for the blind pupils in "point" letters. The pupils write out their exercises in. point letters by using little "slates" and typewriters which have been invented for their use. After the pupils have prepared their lessons in their study-rooms they go to the regular schoolrooms and recite with the seeing children, taking their regular turn in the reading, the spelling, the geography, and the other lessons. These schools have advantages for blind children similar to those that the day schools for deaf children have for the deaf. The blind do not seem to be quite so much cut off from their normal fellow-men as the deaf, nor is there so strong a tendency for them to shut themselves up in the society of those similarly afflicted and for that reason famihar with the special means of com- munication among themselves. " But the day schools will make it possible for blind children also to remain members of the home, and will make it unneces- sary for them to lose in institutions that touch with the community and with their fellow-men which it is so desirable that they should retain.' 3. The Parental School Every large community has a number of children who are homeless or whose home conditions are bad, perhaps so bad as to be worse than if they were homeless. For homeless children who are likely to fall into bad ways, and for those whose home conditions are bad, a parental school should be main- tained. Such a school is not a "reform school/' to which young criminals are to be sent. These belong usually in reformatory institutions maintained by 'For an instance illustrating the value of day-school associations see Appendix. CouucilJ FKOVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 359 the state. But to such a school ought to go those homeless children and those from unfortunate homes who are about to become or are in danger of becom- ing criminals if they are not properly cared for. These children are generally truants. They are wayward, and they may have bad, even criminal, associates, though they themselves have not yet taken the plunge into criminal ways. It is infinitely better and far less expensive for the public to provide for these children a parental or home school, where they may be regulated and educated for useful and industrious lives, than to allow them to go on into lives of crime and pauperism. Such a parental school should be situated in the country where land may be cultivated in garden and fields. The buildings should be arranged on the *' cottage system" and should provide for the sanitary housing of the boys and girls sent there, under conditions as little different from wholesome family life as possible. Here regular habits of sleeping, rising, work, study, and recreation may be taught by precept and confirmed by steady practice. Not only lessons from books but lessons from life may be inculcated, and a good disposition toward the authorities of the school and toward the fellow-pupils who are the fellow-citizens of this school community may be made the fore- runner of a good disposition toward the authorities of the state and toward the fellow-citizens of that state, which will later take the place of the school. In this parental school these children should remain until they may safely return to their homes, until new and satisfactory homes are opened to them, or until they arrive at years of discretion and develop stable characters. APPENDIX Following is a brief list of some of the best books and articles available on the subject under consideration : Anagnos. Education of the Blind. Rand-Avery. x\rnold. Method of Teaching the Deaf and Dumb. Macmillan. Berr. Mental Defectives. Blackiston, Bell. Visible Speech. Volta Bureau. Butler. History of Education in the United States. Lyon. Donaldson. Growth of the Brain. Scribner. Down. Ethnic Classification. London Hospital Reports. DuBois. The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders. Funk and Wagnalls. Fernald. Reports and Addresses. Waverly, Mass. Henderson. Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent Classes. Heath. Ireland. Mental Affections of Children. Blackiston. Ireland. The Blot on the Brain. Blackiston. Johnstone. Reports and Addresses. Vineland, N. J. LoMBROSO. Man o} Genius. Scribner. MacDonald. Abnormal Man. Bureau of Education. Mackenzie. Medical Inspection of Schools. Hodge. Maennel. The Auxiliary Schools of Germany, Bulletin No. 3, 1907, United States Bureau of Education. ' ' NORDAU. Degeneration. Appleton. NoRSWORTHY. The Psychology of Deficient Children. Science Press, Oppenheim. The Development of the Child. Macmillan. Prince. School Administration. Bardeen. Rachford. Neurotic Disorders of Childhood. Treat. RiBOT. Diseases of Memory. Watts & Co. 360 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nationa Shuttleworth. Mentally Deficient Children. Lewis. Seguin. Idiocy and Its Treatment. Wood. Story. Speech for the Deaf. Hughes and Harber. Talbot. Degeneracy; Causes, Signs, and Results. Scribnei . Warner. The Nervous System of the Child. Macmillan. Warner. The Study of Children. Macmillan. Education, Vol. XIX, p. 195, December, 1907. Educational Review, Vol. VII, p. 423; Vol. IX, p. 105; Vol. XX, pp. 296-302; Vol. XXVI, p. 362; Vol. XXXI, p. 484; Vol. XXXIII. p. 374. Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. Ill, p. 246; Vol. IV, p. 221; Vol. V, p. 386. National Educational Association, 1898, p. 270; 1900, p. 677; 1901, pp. 500, 820, 876; 1903, pp. 986, 1013; 1904, pp. 744, 754. Ed. Record, November, 1903. Report of United States Commissioner of Education, 1898-99, Vol. I, pp. 303-56; 1891, p. 775. Charities, September 3, 1904. New York. Journal of Psycho- Asthenics. Minneapolis, Minn. Psychological Clinic. Philadelphia, Pa. The Training School. Vineland, N. J. School Work, November, 1905. New York. Reports: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Providence, and London, England, School Boards. SPECIAL CLASSES IN ST. LOUIS In November, 1907, the superintendent of instruction reported to the Board of Educa- tion of St. Louis that there were at that time in the various public schools of the city 181 children so mentally defective as to be incapable of doing the regular school work provided for normal children. These were not merely slow or backward children. They were unable to do either the amount or kind of work which even a slow child can do; yet those children were considered capable of education with educational facilities adjusted to their needs, and with constant supervision of their physical condition. Nine children cited by Superintendent Soldan as typical of the entire list ranged from nine to fourteen and a half years of age. They had attended school from three to six years. Four had not advanced beyond the first grade; and only two had advanced beyond the second grade. "Nature," says the report, "puts the defective child in a class by himself and Education should take Nature's hint." It was recommended that twelve schoolrooms be selected and equipped, not as makeshifts, but in the best possible manner with a view to meeting a permanent demand. As to location, the report discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a central school; of vacant rooms in existing schools; and of small houses to be rented for the purpose; and recommends that ordinary two-story, six-room houses conveniently located with reference to the homes of the children be rented. Each house is to accom- modate two classes of fifteen children each and leave room enough for work and free move- ment and some yard room for recreation. Transportation is to be furnished to those children whose homes are not within walking-distance. There are to be two teachers in each center, and a woman attendant who will Live in the building and take care of the heating and cleaning and at times assist in taking some of the children to school. The instruction given will not follow any fixed course but will be adapted to individual needs. The teachers must be exceptionally capable and sympathetic and will be among the best- paid teachers in the service. Some strong teacher is to give her whole time to the super- vision of these classes and medical attendance is to be furnished. Imbecile or demented children are not to be admitted, nor are merely slow or backward children to be taken from schools near their homes and put into these classes. Attendance is not to be made com- pulsory. If the new institutions are made so excellent that it is a clear advantage to each defective child to attend, it is argued that no compulsion will be necessary. Should a parent prefer to send his child to one of the regular schools, no objection is to be made provided the child does not disturb the rest of the school by his presence. To meet the present needs of the city of St. Louis for the education of defective Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 361 children, the Board ordered that three houses be provided and they appropriated $13,000 to cover the expense of the special schools for the remainder of the present school year. A later report shows that three special school centers of two classes each organized on the above-described plan are now in operation and that each center has a waiting list of appli- cants for admission. PUBLIC SCHOOL NO. 120, SPECIAL, BROOME ST., NEW YORK In New York, when a case of truancy or incorrigibility develops, the usual method oi procedure is as follows : The boy is suspended by the principal, after giving him many warnings and trials under different teachers. Ofl&cial notice is sent to the parent and to the district superintendent. Parent and child are summoned to appear before the district superintendent. If upon investigation it is evident that the parent is to blame, warning is given the parent that the next offense will result in a summons to a magistrate's court and consequent fine. Whether parent or boy be in fault the boy is, if possible, transferred to another school, the principal of which is informed of all the circumstances in order that he may place the young offender where he will receive proper watching and care. The boy is also required to present, at the district superintendent's ofl&ce every Saturday, a parole card giving a record of his daily attendance and conduct. In the vast majority of cases this procedure is effective. If it fails, parent and child are again summoned to the district superintendent's office and previous threats are carried out. Right here is the point at which the system breaks. For often it happens that magistrates will not fine the parents and the schools suffer from lack of their co-operation, although, to be sure, conditions have slightly improved in this respect during the last year. It is, however, one first cause for failure. The second is that the accommodations of the two parental schools are not at all proportionate to the school population. Consequently we have threats of confinement and signed commitment papers, but the waiting list is so long that, as the boys phrase it, "Nothing happens if you play hookey" — and they try it yet again. Sometimes vacancies are created by returning the best-behaved boys to their homes and the regular schools before their term has really been completed. Most of these relapse. Sometimes the worst behaved are sent from the parental school to reformatory institutions. Nothing could be worse for reasons connected with such institutions to be noted later. The superintendent of my district wished to commit no more boys to reformatory schools, but to seek some other mode of reform, and finally succeeded in inducing the School Board, after long consideration, to establish a special school. The reasons for the need of constant individual care are : 1. Absolute lack of parental control. 2. Lack of any influence for good outside of the school. 3. Low, poor, degrading home surroundings. 4. Street influences, gangs, "Fagins," crap-shooting, the small candy stores with their slot machines, indecent postal cards, back rooms where boys are allowed to smoke and gamble, the "call of the street," "Wanderlust." 5. Exaggerated personal peculiarities, physical or mental, which expose them to the ridicule of their mates. 6. Lack of religious teaching. 7. Physical defects. 8. Defective mentality. In addition to these causes for incorrigibility and truancy, there are certain special causes which operate, directly or indirectly, to produce truancy. The first of these is the employment certificate system under the New York Child Labor Law. The second of these special causes is in consequence of the fact that school authorities in New York have no power to enforce attendance upon school by the truant under eight. The third is a psychological influence tending to truancy and incorrigibility, arising in the third, fourth, and fifth school years. 362 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Recognizing these influences tending to corrupt character and produce delinquency, the work of the special school was planned. The register at the date of opening, October 18, 1905, was 36; by the end of Novem- ber, 109. A list of 200 names was given me. Recognizing the dangers attendant upon gathering in large numbers of boys of such character, especially in such an entirely new, experimental manner, the number was increased very gradually, beginning with the very worst cases. The highest register possible at any one time is 135. Usually the register is not allowed to run over 125, so that there may always be room for emergency cases. At this date, June 30, 1907, the whole number of pupils admitted since the school opened is 304, coming from public schools and parochial schools within a radius of one mile from the school building, which is situated in the heart of the worst section of the lower east side. Sixty- five have been returned to public schools, forty-five of whom went with our recommendation as reformed. All but three have been reported as giving complete satis- faction by the principals of the schools they have since attended. About forty have been sent to pubhc institutions. Of these five were arrested and committed on my complaint; four by my recommendation, although arrested on outside charges; three were committed on charges of the parents; one was a hopeless defective taken from an immoral home; the rest were arrested and committed on charges by the police, mostly for larceny. About seventy have gone to work. Some important facts in relation to these boys are worthy of note. About twenty-five left at 16, having been compelled to remain until that age because of their inability to fulfill the requirements of the New York Child Labor Law. Our most severe diflSculties are always encountered with these boys who resent the law and, aided and abetted by their parents, visit their resentment on the teacher in the classroom. Twelve were allowed to go to work before 16 without an employment certifi- cate. It was a manifest injustice to retain them, since their only lack was legal proof of age, hopelessly unattainable in the case of a Russian Jew. Seven boys have been lost, one of whom ran away, a most distressing case of moral and mental degeneracy. It is impossible to make an accurate general estimate of how long it is necessary to keep boys in the school before returning them, for two reasons : In order to make a careful study of all the conditions which have tended to make these boys truants and incorrigibles, and in order to test the thoroness of their reform, many of these were kept for longer terms than was really necessary. There are some boys who can. never be returned to a regular school. These boys are not, however, institution cases. To place them in an institution would be a great wrong. They are peculiar in many ways; sometimes having tempers which no one has taught them to control; sometimes lacking in moral sense, but capable of learning; sometimes suffering from injustices which have made them morose and sullen. They do not get along well in the ordinary graded class, because the teacher must consider the good of the majority, and, having large numbers to care for, she cannot spare time to give such children individual attention even if she is capable of dealing with the problem. But in all cases they need the active, positive help of a good teacher and surroundings that are as nearly normal as possible. These they get in such a school as ours, because : In the first place, they receive careful teaching, planned to meet their individual needs and to help them overcome their peculiar difficulties and temptations. At the same time they are made self-dependent because they are not shut out of the life of the home, and must meet the buffets of the world as evidenced in miniature in the life of the street. In the second place, as already hinted at, it is with sadness recognized that boys com- mitted to reformatory institutions have too frequent opportunities to learn evil from one another. In this school they cannot engage in evil plans to any such extent, for during the day they have no free time together, except for half an hour at noon, and even then they are under the constant supervision of at least two men teachers, who play with them in more or less organized games. At dismissal they go to their homes, often widely separated. In the thirdfplace, they are given a fair chance to become respectable and self-sup Council! PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 363 porting, when they do go to work, since they leave us with none of the stigma attached to an institution. The fact that in organization, methods of teaching, course of study, and employment of teachers, we diflfer in no sense from any other elementary school, has an incalculably beneficial influence on the success of our work. Both teachers and boys are in the closest possible touch with all the schools around and never have any occasion to feel that there is any discrimination against them in ranking and opportunity, or stigma of any kind. Parents who would always absolutely refuse to sign commitment papers and who would, if coerced into it, evade the law and secretly abet the boy's escape, welcome the opportunity. Any suspicion of its being "an institution" has to be carefully removed from their minds before their co-operation can be secured. We try to keep track of the subsequent career of pupils who have left the school. Our knowledge is obtained by: Correspondence with principals of schools to which they have returned; correspond- ence with the boys themselves; visits from the boys; stories of classmates; visits to the homes; investigation by the attendance ofl&cer and neighborhood work. The method of instruction employed is class instruction, except that the gymnasium and shop are worked on a departmental schedule. In the class instruction we use the Group System, since it is naturally impossible to grade the classes evenly. The pupils are classified, now, by grade of mental attainment; originally, by ages, regardless of grade, in order to reduce discipline and moral problems to a minimum. I determined at the outset that each boy should begin his work where he actually belonged, as inability to keep up with the grade he was supposed to be in was the beginning of his troubles. For this reason we dropped the use of grade names and named each class after some great leader or writer; each class under the guidance of its teacher chose its own name and the boys have vied with one another in learning and reciting in the assembly room facts connected with their class hero. This has fostered a spirit of hero worship, the ethical influence of which has been very great and something we did not anticipate. In the ordinary school subjects we adhere to the same course of study as the regular schools, with the exception that we place greater emphasis upon physical training and manual training. The value of the shop as an incentive to useful, obedient, and trained occupation cannot be exaggerated, and we hope eventually to work it out along the lines of industrial training, and lead the boys to seek some other occupation than the sweat-shop or the oflSce. Considerable attention is given to physical training and athletic development. One of the most astonishing phases of this work is that these boys, although they live their lives on the street, are unable to do regular physical exercises and know nothing of the games and plays of the normal boy of happier homes. They are awkward, unwieldy, and heavy-footed, with the shuffling gait and hanging head which mark the loafer and criminal as well as the mental defective, and the simplest physical tasks are beyond their strength. In a few weeks' time the change in this direction is very great. Careful drill in marching, in steps, in posture, and exercises, calculated to remedy individual defects, form part of the scheme of work; teams for basket-ball, base-ball, running, etc., have been organized and the boys have learned to do creditable team-work. Here, again, we found an unexpected ethical good resulting from something begun for other purposes. The team spirit, thus induced, has led to personal pride as the member of a team; this personal pride has finally engendered self-respect. It would do no good to enlarge upon what we had to endure first, then to subdue, and finally to purge by inculcating a better spirit and nobler ideals. Sufiice it to say that any one who undertakes this work must be prepared to put all personal feeling aside and to accept vile language, violence, impudence, and insubordination as manifestations of disease, mental and moral disease, to be cured as the physician must cure loathsome physical disease. Parental and neighborhood opposition, from whatever cause arising, must.be 364 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nations overcome — best by a series of parents' meetings, visits to the homes, and frequent com- munication with the parents by mail or by required calls at the school office. The means by which our task has been accomplished indicate the only method of dealing with the bad boy. A child may be led into crime, but the germ of good is in everyone and it's our business as teachers to quicken and develop it. Punishment does not do it. It takes sympathetic understanding, patience, and power to forgive until seventy times seven and then begin all over again, and skillful teaching planned to meet not only the individual needs but the individual interest. Use every possible incentive to make the school attractive, keep academic requirements in the background, or only incidental, until you have given the boy respect for the teacher, for himself, and for author- ity. The boys who come to us are pariahs, hunted by the police, beaten by their parents, driven out from the schools, meeting only everywhere harsh treatment and dislike. Take such a boy and make him believe that you care when he tries, that your interest in him is sincerely friendly, and above all, that he cannot make you angry by any misdoing, but that instead you are grieved because he is dishonoring himself. Neither preaching nor scolding will accomplish anything. As all this indicates, teachers must put themselves into intimate social touch with the boy, make him feel his personal responsibility and the value of pride in himself, help him to help himself. The secret lies in tact, resourcefulness, a sympathy which is a sympathy that never for an instant tolerates familiarity, a calm and indifferent manner, which cannot be roused to irritation, alertness to foresee and prevent crises, and readiness to meet an emergency if it comes. Corporal punishment is not used as a form or mode of punish- ment although there have been a few instances where its use was unavoidable because the preceding incident precipitated a choice between surrender to the boy with defeat acknowledged to the whole school, or a blow on the spot to inspire wholesome fear and proper respect. The worst fault of the delinquent boy is lying. If the bad boy is to be helped, he must get at the truth, and be made to see that it is to his best interest to tell the truth. It should be kept in mind, however, that it is not wise through sympathy and friendly interest for the boy to lose sight of justice and law. There is no possibility to doubt that what our boys need most to-day in our country is a training in respect for law. There must be well-established rules, every infraction of which meets an appropriate punishment, the justice of which is clearly felt and acknowledged. By putting the administering of these rules into the hands of the boys themselves you can succeed in obtaining: first, more effective administration; second, self-reliance; third, respect for the law; and fourth, the beginnings of a thoro training for exercising the privileges of citizenship. The question of incorrigibility is in a way much harder to handle than that of truancy, because, once remove the causes that tend toward incorrigibility, and the boy ceases to be a truant of his own volition. A great many people who visit the school ask what methods are employed to secure either attendance or good conduct, and therefore it is worth while to note the following: 1. A system of privileges, based upon the idea expressed in the motto of the George Junior Republic: "Nothing without labor." 2. Commendation, not blame. This is now worked out into several systematically arranged schemes of star cards, commendation cards, honor rolls, special mention, etc. In addition to all these, which are open to the whole school and are managed from the office, each teacher has other schemes. None has any intrinsic value. The worth lies merely in the fact that they express appreciation of results achieved. 3. Trifling rewards: a much-desired book, game, excursion, etc. No prizes except once a term from an outside source. 4. Truant guard, modeled somewhat along the lines of School City. 5. Pride in class record. This has been very strongly developed and is our chief reliance. Council) PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 365 6. Visits to the homes. 7. Investigation of the particular influences tending to truancy, etc., in each case with a view to removing the cause. 8. Personal letters to the truant himself, instead of notice to his parents. He comes, even if only to exhibit the letter to his mates. You've got him then, if you work wisely. 9. Individual teaching and care, which make the boys feel the touch of personal sympathy, the nearest approach to affection that comes into many of their lives. 10. Interest in gymnasium and shop. 11. Getting into a boy's confidence, until his haunts become so well known that it is easy to trace him if absent. 12. Ingenuity and quick- wittedness in taking advantage of individual peculiarities. Miss Dunbar "borrows" daily from Isaac Nadler a cent to buy a paper, and promises to return it to him when she sees him in Une next morning. Every morning an important message is delivered to the individual (frequently a blank paper in a sealed envelope) by messenger always chosen the previous day. In short, the methods consist in using every device tending toward the establishment of the habit of regularity. Olive Jones, Principal FORM OF PEDAGOGICAL RECORD USED IN CLASSES OF DEFECTIVES IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK 19 19 Name Sept. 20 Dec. 20 Mar. 20 June 20 Sept. 20 Dec. 20 Mar. 20 June 20 Sense Training Taste Smell Touch Hearing Phys. Train, (imitation) Phys. Train, (command) Writing Industrial Train. Language (oral) Language (written) Reading Arithmetic Nature Study Personal Habits Self Control Effort Gen'l Information Power of Attention Power of Memory Power of Judgment Gen'l Health • Fatigue Attendance Teacher 366 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National The symptoms disclosed by even a superficial examination of a defective child are mental, neural, and physical. His abiKty to understand, his ability to inhibit and co- ordinate, his alertness, his sense of humor, his response to questions and directions, his power of application and his ability to imitate closely, his temperament, disposition, behavior, degree of refinement, habits, special tastes, and peculiarities, all reflect the mental status of the child. His motor control; the general balance of his body Mobile standing, sitting, or walking; his facial expression and eye-movement; the position and control of his head, hands, and limbs, if far from normal; his tendency to restlessness, irritability, nervousness, or hysteria; any evidences of epilepsy or chorea, are nerve signs that evidence the degree of impaired mentality. And his general bodily development and posture; the peculiarities of his head, its shape, size, and movement; the condition and appearance of the eyes; the size, shape, and appearance of the mouth, together with the throat, palate, tonsils, gums, teeth, tongue; the size and appearance of the nose; the size, location, and symmetry of the ears; the size and appearance of forehead and chin; the shape, size, and control of hands, the condition of flesh, joints, and nails; the shape, size, and control of feet, and position in standing and walking, all serve to assist in determining the mental development of the child. A preliminary blank filled out by the principal of a school will direct the attention of the medical inspector and assist him in making an examination. The following forms are used in the city of New York: OBSERVATIONS ON CHILD PROPOSED FOR SPECIAL CLASS (c) Name Address Age Grade Nationality F M Yrs. in U. S. Home Conditions HEALTH RECORD: Nutrition Bone Dis. Enl. Gl. Teeth Throat Nose Vision R. L. Hearing R. L. Nervous Disease SCHOOL RECORD: K'nd'g. terms lA terms iB terms 2A terms 2B terms 3A terms 3B terms Sp'c'l terms. School Att. Cause of Irreg. Absence in last two terms Attention Memory Oral Exp. Hand Work Phys. Tr. Number Reading Writing Sp. Tastes Disposition Behavior Habits Peculiarities Other information ' 19 SPECIAL MEDICAL EXAMINATION Date Principal 19 Name I. General Condition A. Anatomical Cranium Facial Asymmetry Palate Councill PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 367 Teeth Tongue Lips Eyes Ears Limbs bkin Body in General J3. Physiological I. Motor Function Tics Tremors Epilepsy Nystagmus Promptness Co-ordination Prehension R. L. Gait Speech Fatigue 2. bensory l" unction Eyes R. L. Ears R. L. 3. Condition of Heart Pulse C. Psychical Balance Proportion Moral Sense Attention Memory Will Peculiarities D. Development — Att. Diseases E. Family History: Births Miscar. Deaths Causes of Diseases F. M. Medical Examiner Recommendation Ip I StU( IL Inspector Special Classes The following account of the progress of a blind girl through the grades of one of the pubhc schools of Baltimore was written, at the request of the committee, by the mother of the child, formerly a teacher. The child is now in the seventh grade and is doing work that measures fully up to the average for the class. " This blind child learned her first play from children of normal vision in a public- school kindergarten and, on being sent to a residential school for the bhnd at six years of age, was then able to distinguish the differences in actions and to miss the kind of play to which she was accustomed. After about twelve months of attendance at the residential school we found that she was developing into a very different child from the one we sent away. Then we were thankful that she was so young; but it took several years of home influence, which means so much to a blind child, to eradicate the evils of association with children from the worst parts of a city. " Upon the advice of the Superintendent of the Institution for the Blind she was sent to a school among children who could see. He had noticed the change in her and said that a child who has a good home ought to have the benefit of home training. In most of the schools for the blind the number of attendants is insuflScient to give the care to young children necessary to train them to be clean both in body and in inind. "The first year in the public school was an experiment, the lack of books and appli- ances of all kinds being the greatest difiiculty. By using the Braille writer we copied the lessons from day to day and found on every hand someone to suggest ways and means of doing everything. The inability of the teachers to understand that a. bhnd child could comprehend as easily as a seeing child was another diflBculty. But after a few weeks that was overcome in every case where a change was necessary. Each year the work of the parents grew easier as they were able to procure more books as the child advanced in her studies. " She has become so much like the children with whom she associates that they often forget her affliction and treat her as any other playmate. She is independent of them in 368 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National every way possible for a blind child. From the children she has learned to sew, darn, knit, crochet, cook, and do many other things. She is happy excepting when she comes in contact with another bhnd person who speaks of his affliction. We have found that among themselves blind children dwell too often on this topic. "As the writer spent nine years in the schoolroom as a teacher, she feels justified in beUeving that the child is getting all, and more than all, it would be possible for her to get in a school where she would be among the bhnd and away from the outside world for the greater part of the year. She has now been in the public schools for four years with no special help excepting from home; but she has not had one complete year of school work on account of her health. She is thirteen years old, is well informed on the general news of the day, is a good musician, and is interested in everything about her. She reads all systems for the blind. On consulting her present teacher in the seventh grade we find her getting as much or more than any child in the class without any partiality being shown her or any extra work being given her by the teacher. It seems to me possible that any parent with a fair education would be able to take a blind child to the high school. "We have let each year take care of itself, and feel that we are doing the best possible thing for her. We do not find her an exceptionally bright child, but normal in all things." Note. — In a special class for the deaf or blind the special teacher would serve the purpose of this mother to a group of five or six afflicted children, and she would secure the co-operation of other teachers in the building in the ordinary classwork. Stenographic report of a statement made by Miss Paulsen, a teacher of a special class in Christiania, Norway. "In Christiania we have schools for backward and for feeble-minded children, with the number Umited to sixteen in a class. We have separate schools for feeble-minded children. These are home schools or boarding schools, the entire expense being paid by the city. The schools for the bhnd, deaf, and dumb are supported by the state, and not by the city. The schools for backward children are day schools. We have two of them in different sections of the city. It has been found by experience that the backward children do better when taught in a building by themselves, and, therefore, even though the building is quite distant from their homes, they are required to go to this separate school so they shall not be annoyed by the brighter pupils. About eight years ago these classes were taken out of the various schools of the city and brought together into these two schools. It takes some of the children three-quarters of an hour to get to school from their homes. "Attendance is secured in these schools for backward children in the following man- ner: If a child is absent one day, a school watchman is sent to his home. If the child is absent a second day, then the teacher writes a letter to the parent. If he is absent a third day, the teacher goes to see the parent. If the child is absent any more, there is one more resource — we get parents who are interested in the welfare of children to visit the parents of the absentee and prod them up about sending the children to school. In other words, the teacher has a mission in educating the parents who fail to send their children to school. If all these measures fail, the principal makes complaint and the parents are brought into court and fined ten crowns. "The curriculum is greatly reduced for these backward children. All studies are pursued, but in a more elementary way. There is a great deal of hand work, two hours being given to it every second day. This includes cooking, sewing, and knitting for the girls; for the boys pasteboard work and woodwork in a practical way. The large boys and girls learn to cook. Boys and girls are taught together in al) schools. We make much of special days. Then these schools march through the streets in procession under their own flag. "If a teacher in an ordinary school thinks a child in her room is backward, she reports it to her principal who examines the child to see if he is really backward. If he agrees with the teacher, he reports the case to the school for backward children. After that the prin- cipal of the backward children's school examines the child. If he agrees the transfer is made. If he disagrees with the teacher, the child must stay where he is. They some- times give the child to another teacher to see if he will do better. "The regular school hours for normal children are from nine to one for one set of children; and for another set from one to five, with five, ten, and fifteen minute recesses. For backward children the session is divided into five periods of three-fourths of an hour each. A teacher teaches from nine to one. There is no study in the afternoon. The teacher visits the homes in the afternoon when she has occasion to do so. She visits the home of every child when there is need. When the people are very poor they get clothes, shoes, etc., from the Charity Organization Society. The teacher communicates with the Charity Organization by 'phone." Selected and adapted from Reports of the Medical Officer of the London County Council, secured for the Committee by Mr. W. A. Baldwin, of Hyannis, Mass. I ^K easi Councill PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 369 [From the Report of IQ04] SUGGESTIONS FOR THE SPECIAL TREATMENT OF BACKWARD CHILDREN "It must be evident to anyone who visits many schools that much educational effort is wasted; If the elementary school is to attain its full usefulness it should be made such that a healthy child could attend without being hindered or kept down in level by others whose intelligence is below the average, or whose misfortunes have kept them back. On the other hand, the backward children should have some extra advantages in being taught with much care and trouble some of the conventional abstractions which lie at the basis of ordinary school work, and the realization of which to many forms a step of great difl&culty. "At any time at least 10 per cent, of all the children whose names are on the rolls in London are such that, for reasons either of a permanent, or of a temporary but somewhat chronic nature, it may be considered that the ordinary elementary school work is almost wasted on them, and in many cases is actually harmful. "To start with, the oculist's examinations have shown to per cent, in the standards to have visual acuity, only one-third the normal or worse (V = j% or less.) They fre- quently refer cases here, which are not to be considered blind, yet scarcely fit for the ordinary school. In the last Report a table was given comparing the percentage with poor vision among those who were older than the average age in their standards with the others —and showing the relation between retardation in education progress and visual defects. At almost every examination for admission to special schools candidates are presented and returned to the ordinary schools who have visual defects of such nature that some modified education is desirable, apart from being treated as blind. "A considerable number of children are also somewhat deaf. From examinations by others, and from my own experience in school testing of hearing, it may be taken that from 3 to 5 per cent, are so deaf that they are retarded through their whole school life by this defect. "Another very considerable number which it is at present quite impossible to estimate are debilitated children. This debility has many causes. It may be congenital; more generally it is acquired early in life; bad nursing and later improper feeding, and the effects of whooping cough and measles play a far greater part in causing backwardness and debility than most people would suppose. In the densely populated parts of any great town many already poorly nourished children, deprived of sufficient exercise, sunshine, and fresh air, have further to contend with illness after illness. Not only does one zymotic succeed another, but tuberculosis is frequently grafted on them, and by the age of seven or eight a considerable number of children have fallen eighteen months or more behind the average of their fellows as regards abilities and school attendance. Even now a small part of this number comes under special instruction owing to the crippling effects of hip or spinal diseases. "In addition to the children already separated into special classes are others who cannot be certified as fit for these classes, yet who are not fit for the ordinary school work. There are many such dubious cases presented. No doubt a good many in special schools now would do very much better in other schools, if such could be provided without involving the whole course of the ordinary school work — children whose mental constitution is such that abstractions are almost impossibilities to them. "Some of these seem sharp enough but cannot learn to spell simple words; to some others facile reading of ordinary English will always be impossible. Some of these chil- dren are put into special classes, probably in many cases to their harm; others merely remain stationary in the ordinary school. "Some of this heterogeneous mass of children who, in the progress through school, drop behind are of a mentally lower level, some are handicapped by nervousness and easily overtaxed, others by diseased or damaged hearing, sight, or speech. For these 370 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National backward children who now are crowded in the lower standards, some intermediate schools or departments of schools are required. The children should be classified according to their capability. Such schools should be organized with smaller classes, and greater elasticity allowing of more attention to individual development by hand and eye training, and work on a modified and simpler curriculum than that desirable in the ordinary school. Such children might also have some extra feeding, more play, and learn almost entirely by doing and saying, instead of reading and writing. Many semi-convalescents in a school of this type would soon recover a sufficient degree of health to regain their ordinary school place. On the other hand, some would remain thru their school days, whilst others would be found wanting even here, and pass to the special class for deaf, blind, physically or mentally defective. " Children could be transferred from the ordinary school to such schools on the report of the teacher and school inspector. Transfer from these intermediate schools other than back to the ordinary school after six or twelve months interval should only be on a medical certificate. The possibility of a child having to be transferred to such a school if defects remained unrelieved might often be an indirect means of bringing pressure to bear to obtain such relief. "These ideas have been obvious since first beginning work among the Bradford school children in 1893; but their practical fulfilment was shelved by the establishment of special classes on the London and Leicester model, which is the one that was finally approved by legislation half a dozen years later. "The experiment of intermediate schools graduated between the ordinary school and the special class has now been tried for some time at Mannheim, and Mrs. F. M. D. Berry, M.D., has drawn up the following account as given at the recent Congress on School Hygiene at Nuremberg, by Dr. Sickinger, member of the Educational Board, and Dr. Moses, the medical officer. " 'The main novelty of this system lies in the fact that, besides the classes of the ordinary schools and the classes for the mentally defective now found in all large educa- tional centers, there is a third system of classes — the Forderklassen system. These are for children who, from various causes, are unable to keep up with the ordinary school work. The reasons which caused the Mannheim authorities to found this class system were: " * (i) The capabilities of children of the same age are very various owing to physio- logical, psychological, pathological, and social reasons. It is impossible that all children in the elementary schools should follow the same course of instruction, and reach the same goal. A considerable number of pupils never reach the highest classes. " * (2) The old system by which backward children were left behind in a class when their classmates passed up, and had to go over the same ground again with younger com- panions, is found to have a discouraging and depressing effect. Such children, too, were liable to be neglected by the teachers. It was considered that children who, from per- manent or temporary causes, are below the average in their capacity for work, need special pedagogic and hygienic treatment in order that they might be developed as far as their powers admit, and may not suffer from school attendance. " * (3) The children of better capabilities benefit by the withdrawal of backward classmates, who act as a drag upon the rest of the class. " 'These auxiliary classes, the F order schule system, are run on similar lines to those of the ordinary school — they differ rather in the quantity than in the kind of work demanded. Instead of the seven or eight standards of the ordinary German school the curriculum con- sists of only five or six. The number of children in a class is smaller, thirty-five being the maximum number allowed, hence greater individuahty in the teaching is possible. Special facilities are afforded the children for participating in any hygienic adjuncts to the school, as baths, dinners, or holiday homes. "'These classes are found specially beneficial to the following groups of children — children who are of slow understanding, but who often are not without intellectual power; nervous, anaemic and debilitated children; children in a low physical and nervous condition owing to unsatisfactory home surroundings ; and children with defective sight or hearing, not severe enough to necessitate their being placed in schools for the blind or deaf. " 'The children are usually differentiated at the end of their first year, the backward Councilj PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 371 ones being passed out into the second or third system of classes, according as they arc merely backward or actually mentally deficient. One result of the formation of the auxili- ary school is that only cases of definite mental deficiency are admitted to centers for instruc- tion of the mentally defective, and once admitted it is rarely considered desirable to pass them out. It will be seen by reference to the accompanying diagram that, whereas each year children are passing from B to A, there is no such passage from C to B.' " Note. — The Mannheim plan is discussed at length in Bulletin No. j, 1907, United States Bureau of Education. The accompanying diagram is reprinted from that Bulletin, p. 122. Column Column Column Column -Regular grades containing more than 90 per cent, of the pupils B.— Grades for temporary aid. C. — Auxiliary grades or special schools. D. — Preparatory classes of high schools. Regularly promoted. Placed temporarily in separate classes for individual attention and returned to regular grades. Placed in separate classes owing to defective mentality. Id. — Institution for idiots. G. — Gymnasium. Rg. — Real Gymnasium. O.—Oberrealschule. R.— Reform Gymnasium. [From the Report of igo5\ SPECIAL SCHOOLS '' Examinations.— B^v^ten i and 2 per cent, of the children are so defective in some respect that they may be classed as unfit to benefit properly by instruction in the ordinary school. 372 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National "When such a child becomes known, the head teacher, or divisional superintendent if the child is not in school, gives particulars of the case on a form provided for the purpose. This form is then forwarded to the Medical OflQcer, and medical examinations are arranged at various centers, at each of which not more than twenty cases are presented. The Medical Officer makes a report on each case so examined, and the children are educated in accordance with this report. "The blind or deaf child is defined as one who is too blind or too deaf to benefit properly by instruction in the ordinary elementary school. "Blind. — There are nine schools for the instruction of children classed as blind. Of these seven are ordinary day classes and two are residential institutions. "Deaf. — There are ten day schools and three residential schools for the deaf. Great harm is undoubtedly done by voluntary institutions for the care and help of the deaf, collect- ing them together, and separating them from their fellows by encouraging the use of sign language, and, what is worse, in many cases leading to the marriage of congenital deaf mutes. "Mentally defective. — These children are provided for under the Elementary Educa- tion (Defective and Epileptic) Act, 1899. There are seventy-nine centers; of these seventy- three are ordinary special schools for day scholars, and four, classes for older boys. There is also one residential school. The mentally defective children are defined as those who, not being imbecile, are yet, by reason of mental (or physical) defect, unfit to benefit properly in the elementary school. "The Education Acts make no provision for the small class now termed "moral imbeciles, " "Morally defective. — Most of these have hitherto passed through the schools unno- ticed. They are really not provided for by the Education Acts, as they are quite capable of learning most things in school. Many in later life undoubtedly will become a danger to the community, and where this is associated with other defects which bring them into notice, should not be permitted to be in ordinary schools. Residential institutions or a colony or ship where they can be under constant observation will be the best treatment during school life. They should be registered by the finger-print method, so that in later life on once coming into the hands of the pohce their dangerous qualities will be known. "Epileptics. — ^A scheme is under consideration for dealing with epileptics. As yet epileptics are considered first with respect to their mental qualities. Are they fit for the ordinary school, or feeble-minded ? Then they are considered with regard to the epilepsy. Can this child attend school, or are the epileptic attacks too frequent for it to be advisable to attend ? If so the child is excluded as invalid. The absence of provision for this class is the greatest gap in our educational system. " {From the Report of igo6] "The day schools, both for the blind and deaf, are scattered widely apart all over London, and the distance some of the children from five to thirteen years of age travel is great, yet the attendance is very good. The parents seldom demur; they are generally anxious that the little ones should be under special instruction. The lack of accidents speaks well for the care with which the children are taken to school. The guides, who are often either brothers or sisters, attend the normal school near the school for the bhnd. The conductors of trams, etc., are found to be kind, and give particular attention to children traveling to special schools. This method of getting about is in itself an education for the children, accustoming them to the habit of crossing the streets, getting in and out of trams, trains, etc., and giving them a wider experience of the ordinary routine of life. Before the chil- dren leave the day for the residential schools they have usually reached Standard IV or V in addition to acquiring practice in various forms of manual occupations. Some, however, are .very backward on entering the special schools, and it is extremely difficult to classify these cases. Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 373 "Arrangements now exist in all the day schools for the blind and deaf whereby the children may have a hot dinner consisting of meat, vegetables, and pudding, for 2d. each. Usually this amount is forthcoming from the parents, but assistance is given from the "Referee" Fund where the parents are foimd to be unable to pay. The provision of a mid-day meal has filled a long-felt want, and a marked difference is already noticeable in the children. Ladies who are interested in the project attend at mid-day and help in the supervision of dinners generally. Thus it has also been the means of bringing new friends to the blind and deaf. "The removal of the mentally and physically defective blind boys to a residential school has helped to the classification of the day schools. "Organization of the Deaf Schools of London: " I. Mixed day schools for children up to thirteen years of age. " 2. Boarding-out facilities for those children whose homes are a considerable distance from the schools. "3. Semi-residential schools for children between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. " 4. A school for children with combined defects. "5. Training in the rudiments of trades in addition to ordinary school subjects for those between 13 and 16 years of age. " 6. Evening schools after school age. "7. After-Care Committee to deal with employment, etc., when they leave school. " The proper classification of the mentally deficient is, through lack of suitable accom- modation, still far from ideal, and this must be so until some authority makes provision for the lower class, which is hardly capable of benefiting by instruction in a day school, and requires permanent custodial treatment. They are often retained in the schools, because to exclude throws them upon the streets where they are a constant source of danger to all around them. ^'Mid-day meals. — On accoimt of the comparatively long distances which children often have to travel to attend a special school for the blind and the deaf, and of the delicate state of health of many of the children, the provision of a mid-day meal is a necessary adjunct of the work of the school. It is generally found that there is a considerable improvement in the physique of those children for whom a suitable dinner is provided. The dinners in the day schools for the blind and the deaf, like those in the schools for the physically defective, are under the supervision of a committee of representative managers, and the Council provides all the facilities, the parents, when able, paying 2d. per meal to cover the cost of food. Special School for No. OF Teachers Average No. on Roll Average No. of Children on Roll to Each Teacher iQOS 1906 1905 1906 190S 1906 Blind 28 71 210 47 29 81 226 66 271 576 4,050 962 273 619 9-7 0.6 Deaf 8.1 7.6 Mentally defective . . . Physically defective. . . 4,746 19-3 21 1.56s 1 20. 5 23.5 All schools 3S6 402 5,850 7,203 1 16. S 17-9 "In addition to teachers there were 169 helpers, bathers, etc., engaged in the special schools in 1906, as compared with 103 in 1905." [From the Report of iQoy] '^Special school.— There is no fresh departure to chronicle in connection with the special schools. ''Physically defective children. — There are now 23 invalid schools with approximately 1,802 children on the roll; 35 ambulance carriages and 11 omnibuses take these children daily to and from school, and 24 nurses attend to their conveyance and care in school." 374 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National BERLIN'S NEW SCHOOL IDEA AN OPEN-AIR PAVILION IN A SPLENDID GROVE — THERE CHILDREN WITH HEART OR LUNG SYMPTOUS COMBINE INSTRUCTION WITH HEALTH-SEEKING [From the Nuova Antologia. Reprinted in the Boston Transcript, March 28, 1008] Charlottenburg, in the neighborhood of Berlin, was the first city in Germany, perhaps the first in Europe, to take definite action in behalf of physically deficient children. This action resulted about three years ago in the establishment of an open-air school in a mag- nificent suburban forest known as the Griinewald. The medical supervision of the pupils is in the hands of the regular inspectors of the public schools, and to their superintendent, Dr. H. Neufert, the credit of the idea is due. The approach to the school is through a wooded path, which branches off from the highroad to Spandau opposite Ruhwald Castle, near the terminus of the electric railway. A few minutes' walk brings the visitor out into a clearing in the midst of a thick grove of tall firs A wide gateway hung with festoons of ivy, over which float the colors of Charlottenburg, admits the visitor to the precincts of the school. The school was first opened in the summer of nineteen hundred and four. The New West End Society, to whom this part of the forest belonged, gave the city the use of it, rent free, for a term of years, and the Women's Patriotic Alliance, an admirable charitable association of Berlin, promptly offered to assume the domestic management of the enter- prise, the running expenses being met by the city. The Alliance also put at the disposal of the city a good-sized barrack of the Docker type, furnished with everything needed for the kitchen. This made it possible, with comparatively limited means, to enroll ninety-five children of both sexes. At the end of six weeks the number had increased to 120. The children who attend the school are chosen by the medical examiners of the city schools. The preference is generally given to those showing signs of heart or lung affections, to anaemic and debilitated children; to children who, although not ill enough to be confined to their beds, are not able to bear the strain of study under ordinary conditions; and to convalescents. On the grounds of the school, which comprise about two and a half acres enclosed by a high fence of wire netting, are a large school-barrack, built of wood and tarred pasteboard, another barrack serving as kitchen, a roomy lavatory, a bathhouse with showers, and a big wooden shed open on one side and covered by a wide overhanging roof, under which the children take shelter when it rains. Everything is planned in accordance with the most modern theories of pedagogy and medicine. The food is of the best and is very inexpensive. In the morning, about a quarter after seven, when the pupils arrive at the school from the electric cars, breakfast is served. This meal consists of a glass of milk with bread and butter. At noon, for their dinner, they are given plenty of vegetables and about a quarter of a pound of meat apiece. At four they have another glass of milk with bread and marmalade, and at seven in the evening, before they leave for home, they are served with hot soup and bread and butter. The cost of all this does not exceed twelve cents a day for each child. As has been said, the expense is met by the city. Dr. Neufert reports that it is hard to realize what a great change takes place in the health of the children after a few weeks' attendance at the Forest School. The results are extraordinary, though obtained by the simplest and most natural hygienic and pedagogical methods. A continued sojourn in the fresh, pure air in all kinds of weather, the sunshine, the baths, the abundant and substantial food, the limited hours of study, rationally arranged, put new life into the little invalids. The visitor is filled with wonder upon hear- ing that during three months of out-door life in the forest, even in October and November, the children keep well, not so much as taking cold. Their increase in weight also is remark- able, the average gain being about seven pounds. Some gain as much as ten or twelve; some even sixteen or eighteen. The little pupils enter the school sickly and inattentive in their classes. They leave it well and strong, and so far advanced in their lessons as to be able at once to enter the ordinary grades of the Charlottenburg schools. A further benefit resulting from an institution of this sort is the affectionate intimacy which springs up be- tween teacher and pupil. In the year 1905 the expense to the city of the Forest School amounted to about $5,576. Within a few weeks London will also have its Forest School, patterned after the Charlottenburg example. The municipal authorities, during their recent tour of investi- gation in Germany, had occasion to visit the Charlottenburg institution and came back so enthusiastic that they at once resolved to establish a similar one in their own city. The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society, which owns a magnificent forest southwest of London, forthwith offered a part of it for the open-air school. The generous offer was accepted, and it is now only a question of days until the metropolis can provide accommodations for a Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 375 hundred children chosen from among the most sickly and debilitated of the wretched southwest section. These children will receive not only food and tuition, but clothing, too, free of expense. ' ABNORMAL CHILDREN FREDERIC E. FARRINGTON, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CAL. "In submitting the following brief notes in answer to your letter of January 7th last, and the accompanying outline, (i) I have taken the liberty of including also some informa- tion as to the state of affairs in Belgium. Some weeks ago, I was in Lille on a tour of inspection connected with my own investigations on the secondary school system of France and inasmuch as Brussels is only a couple of hours' ride and I had understood that they were doing a good deal in that city in the care of some of the classes of children covered by your investigations, I thought it worth while to run up there. I felt amply repaid for my trouble, as I trust you will see later. Furthermore, I am adding some material on the situation in Holland, obtained from Rouma, VEtat de V enseignement special pour enjants arrUres aux Pays-Bas (1906). "2) Permit me to call your attention to the extensive bibliography of books and pamphlets exhibited at the Kongress der Hilfschulen at Bremen in 1905. These are chiefly in German, and at that time, I believe, covered the ground very completely so far as Germany was concerned. "3) In France, where education is under state control and largely at state expense, nothing of a general nature has been undertaken. It is worth noting, too, that in the Low Countries, where so much has been done, it has all been undertaken at local initiative. Consequently all these various situations hereinafter described are only limited movements supported rather at municipal or private expense or sometimes with the co-operation of both. They are naturally confined to the important towns and cities. "4) For your own convenience I have attempted to follow the outline you sent out although the classification abroad does not correspond with your own. The greater part of these notes will bear upon the intellectually exceptional, and under this head upon the exceptionally dull, for I have thus far failed to find any provision or even mention in this connection of the exceptionally capable. A. MORALLY EXCEPTIONAL " I. Truants. — Since 1882 there has been a compulsory school law in France, requir- ing school attendance from six to thirteen years of age unless the child is otherwise educated. To satisfy themselves of the efficacy of this instruction outside the school, the authorities may require an annual examination. In case of deficiency here, the parent may be required to send his child to a public or a private school. This upper hmit of thirteen years of age may be cut down one and sometimes two years, for a child that has gained the leaving certificate is exempt from the operation of the attendance law. This certificate is granted on passing an examination based upon the work of the second third of the primary school course. (For further details as to the organization of this primary system, see my Public Primary School System of France.) The efforts made to raise the level of this examination have thus far proved unavailing. "Every fall just before the opening of the school year, the mayor of the commune sends to the principals of all public and private schools a list of all the pupils that ought to be at the various schools. In accordance with this information, the principals send to the mayor of the commune and to the school inspector a list of all absences for the month with the causes therefor. The mayor, as president of the local school commission, is then responsible for instituting proceedings against the parents of children that are not at school. If a child is absent for four or more half days in one month without satisfactory excuse (the only ones ordinarily valid are (i) sickness of the child; (2) death in the family; (3) suddenly interrupted means of communication), the mayor summons the parent to appear 376 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National before the school commission and explains to him his duty. Upon a repetition of the offense within the year, the school commission orders the parent's name posted on the bulletin board of the town hall. If this still has no effect the commission brings the matter before the district judge, and the latter has power to punish the offender. This is ordinarily done by inflicting a merely nominal fine of a few francs. Inasmuch as the mayor is a political ofl&ce holder (elected by the members of the municipal council who are in turn elected by popular vote), it may readily be inferred that he often hesitates to incur the enmity of the electors and that these processes are less frequent than they should be. These school commissions are reasonably eflQcient in the larger cities, though even there occasionally one finds in the report that the commission is "not acting. " There is a grow- ing feeling that the complaint in truancy cases should originate with the primary inspector, an official outside the pale of political influence, but as yet no great progress has been made toward effecting this change. Nevertheless, the school attendance is undoubtedly better than it is with us. Unfortunately the French school statistics do not give average attend- ance. The nearest approximation we can get, therefore, is the enrollment for December and June, the months of the highest and the lowest respectively, together with the actual attendance on the second day of each of these months. Barring unusual conditions this will give a general notion of average attendance. The figures for December, 1901, and June, 1902, the date of the last quinquennial report, give us 3,656,561 and 3,578,586 as the enrollment for the month, and the number present on the second day of those months as 3,311,826 and 3,128,047 respectively. This gives us an attendance of 90 per cent, and 87 per cent, on the enrollment for these months. SCHOOL KITCHEN IN THE CHIEF CITIES OF FRANCE' Cities Population 1901 Amount expended 1901-02 Number of meals served Number of free meals Number of schools i served Remarks Paris 2,657,335 1,469,018 9,108,463 5.561,903 In 19 of the 20 arron- dissements. AU free. MarseiUes.*. 491,161 84,000 70 Lyon 4S9.099 84 Free to poor. Bordeaux . . . 256,638 60 Lille 210,696 206,000 1,201,349 All quarters of city served 6,200 chil- dren daily. Toulouse 149,841 Free to poor. Saint-Etienne 146,599 45.782 136,000 SS.ooo 14 Roubaix 142,36s 118,90s 27 Nantes 132,990 No regular city or- ganization. Private society spends 10,- 000 francs per year. Le Havre — 130.196 27 903 out of 1,587 are paying pupils. Rouen 116,316 169.198 128,879 28 Reims 108,385 27,700 Nice 105,109 4 Nancy 102,559 No school kitchen. Toulon 101,602 30 Every school served. Total except Paris.... 2,653.516 » SUUistique de Penseignement primaire, 1Q01-IQ02. I have compiled this table from the various individual reports. The lack of uniformity in the returns of the reporting officers is responsible for the fragmentary appearance. "Poverty is a large factor in truancy. The encouragement of school attendance is put into the hands of a kind of local board (commission scolaire). This body, partly elective and partly appointive, however, exercises no control over the school or its work; its influence outside the above-mentioned duty is purely moral. Its most effective agents are the school fund (drawn upon for the purchase of shoes, clothing, and school supplies) and the school kitchen, both provided by municipal or private subscriptions. There are CouDcUl PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 377 no general statistics available for showing the importance of this work, but table on p. 36 will indicate the prevalence of the school kitchen in Paris and in the fourteen other cities of 100,000 inhabitants and over. Every one of these cities except Nancy has its school kitchen where a good, wholesome repast may be obtained at a merely nominal cost. The poor are provided gratuitously, "These school kitchens are open chiefly during the winter months. The meals (the regular mid-day meal) consist of soup, meat, vegetable, bread, and wine, though in most places the pupils bring their own bread and wine. The cost per meal per pupil in the primary schools varies from 10 to 20 centimes, about two to four cents. (In Saint-Etienne . it reaches as much as 40 centimes for the higher primary, and the commercial and indus- trial schools.) "So far as my information goes, there are no so-called truant schools. Truants are reached either through the parents by the ordinary legal methods or not at all. "2. Exceptionally dull. — This whole question is being discussed very seriously in France just now, but it is not very widespread and little has been actually accomplished in or in connection with the public schools. These mentally or intellectually abnormal children have been very carefully classified by Dr. Philippe and Dr. Boncour in Les anomalies meniales chez les ecoliers (1907), ranging from absolute idiots through imbeciles and feeble-minded to the intellectually or mentally normal. "The greater part of these, it goes without saying, are quite apart from the point in question. But somewhere above the feeble-minded we begin to find classes of children that we are likely to encounter in our schools; in other words, children that can profit to a greater or less extent by the instruction that is given them. "a) These begin with the intellectually or mentally backward children 'whose intel- lectual powers, taken as a whole, are all present, but which are manifestly inferior to those of an ordinary child of the same age. ' "6) The mentally unstable is one who cannot be depended upon to give any sustained attention for listening, for answering, or for understanding. He is often blamed for inat- tention or for poor work, when the difl&culty is something beyond his ordinary control. "c) The asthenic children who are suffering from a lack of vital energy are often accused of laziness when the real cause is due to inactivity of psychic function which they are not able to overcome. Such present all the signs of nervous fatigue, but it is not due so much to effort actually exerted as to congenital incapacity quite anterior to this effort. ''d) The epileptic. "«) The hysterical child. "/) The subnormal child. The preceding types are relatively easy to distinguish, but here we come across a type that is intermediate between the abnormal and the normal. These are the children that may easily be turned one way or the other; the 'bundle of nerves ' children whom care can restore to health or neglect can easily render permanently 'unstable;' those in whom hysterical tendencies are. but just appearing; in whom the asthenia is superficial rather than deep-rooted. Here, too, belong the children afflicted with adenoids. "The pedagogically backward child is an entirely different type. He is in no sense of the word mentally abnormal; his backwardness is purely a question of grading and not of the intellect; his position is due perhaps to lateness in entering school, perhaps to irregular attendance on account of illness, or truancy, perhaps to chronic and consistent laziness from which his teachers have failed to arouse him, perhaps to inability in knowing how to study or to apply himself. The reasons for this backwardness are well-nigh legion. "In Paris the idiots and imbeciles, properly speaking, are confined in hospitals or asylums supported by the state, the department, or the city, at Bic^tre, Salpgtrifere, Vaucluse, etc. "For the feeble-minded and the mentally abnormal children there are special classes in private institutions, notably those of Dr. Bourneville, Dr. Langlois, and Dr. Berillon, all in the suburbs of the city. On account of the private character of these schools and consequent expense connected therewith, they are available only for children whose parents are at least comfortably well-to-do. 378 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [l^ational " For these latter types of children, there are a few classes in public schools, but the movement has as yet made little progress. "The financial question seems to present the chief obstacle. According to M. BMorez, director of primary education for the Department of the Seine (i. e., practically Paris), 'If we establish schools of this class we cannot multiply them so as to have them in every quarter. At the most we can have only one per arrondissement (there are twenty arrondissements in Paris), and then who would bring the children? Would you require the parents to bring them and come for them ? Would you leave them to find their way alone ? In either case would you not increase the repugnance which the parents always have at seeing their children segregated ?'i "At Lyon and Bordeaux special classes have been organized, but I have been able to obtain no details of their results. "At Lille, M. Minet, the primary inspector in charge of the city schools, is making an effort to do something with the so-called abnormals. When I saw him last month he had only little more than begun. Out of 15,000 pupils in the public primary schools of that city, he had only seventeen boys and twenty-one girls that came in that category. He had asked the teachers to ascertain whether or not the parents would consent to have their children put in special classes. The 'replies that he read me were all favorable. The difficulty here as at Paris is chiefly a question of money. "These isolated examples, however, tend to indicate that there is no very general discussion of this question except among the specialists nor any very widespread move- ment to establish such schools. OTHER ABNORMAL CHILDREN IN PARIS "i. The blind are sent to a special institution — Ecole Braille. There is no provision for ordinary weak-sighted children. The theory of eye-strain is still looked upon as an oculists' fad. So far as my experience in French schoolrooms is concerned (I have prob- ably visited more than two hundred), I have never found a teacher that appeared to give the question a thought, and the light supply is almost invariably inadequate. " 2. The deaf and dumb are received in a special institution at Ansieres. " 3. The idiots, paralytics, and epileptics are cared for in the hospitals at Bicetre and Vaucluse for the boys, at Bicetre and* Salpgtriere for the girls. "4. The crippled, lame, hump-backed, etc., are found in the ordinary public primary schools. Their infirmity is certainly an inconvenience, but if they are endowed with normal intelligence, they can probably follow the regular class work. BRUSSELS " In order to show you the conditions at Brussels and the way of handling the situation there I am going to give you the result of an interview that I had with Mr. Arthur Nyns, the principal of one of the public primary schools of that city. "About ten years ago the city established a school for backward children. At the present time it has 210 children in eleven classes. Not long after its foundation the Flemish part of the population began calling it *L'ecole des fous' (lunatic school), and as most parents objected to sending heir children to an institution that bore this stigma, the school has never been very successful from the public point of view. Nevertheless professionally speaking, its principal, Dr. Demoor, has accomplished a great work for these unfortunate children. "Profiting by this experience (and it seems to me we can also learn wisdom from the experiment), Mr. Nyns in his own school started out on a different tack. Every child who comes to his school is assumed to be normal. Whatever opinion Mr. Nyns may have, he says nothing to his teacher. Before long, the teacher begins to notice things for himself. After three months the teacher reports that a certain child cannot learn. ' Laurent, La criminaliti infantile, pp. 147, 148. See the way this last objection is met in Brussels. Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 37Q " 'Try again,* says the principal. "After three months more the teacher reports again that the child cannot learn There is then a medical examination conducted by the principal and Dr. Decroly (a medical speciaUst for such diseases; he is paid by the city and has the same duties at one other public school). This examination is exhaustive, concerning sight, hearing, smell, nervous system, throat (for adenoids), heart, lungs, etc. " The principal examines th^ child from the intellectual point of view, using Binet's tests (a series of tests specially compiled by M. Binet, professor of psychology at the University of Paris). These give remarkably accurate information. Incidentally the principal sends for the parents and inquires exhaustively into the heredity of the child. The child is then put into one of the classes for backward children. These backward children fall into two general categories: " I. The pedagogically backward, i. e., those that for one reason or another are three years behind their normal grade for children of their age. " 2. The mentally backward, i. e., those that are really mentally deficient. "There are two classes for the former and four for the latter. The equipment of the school does not allow more. If the pedagogically deficient have not been able to catch up (they are rarely able to do so) during these two years, they are put in with the mentally backward. The ordinary pedagogically backward children, i. e., those less than three years behind the normal grade, are carried along at the regular rate. The Brussels schools are organized in four degrees with two classes or grades in each. The fourth degree cor- responds roughly with the first two years of our EngUsh high schools, so that the primary (or according to our nomenclature, the primary and grammar) work is covered in a six-year course. "The pedagogically backward classes are confined to the first and second grades; the mentally backward to the first four grades, in other words covering two-thirds of the regular elementary-school course. These mentally backward children, then, can never go beyond the fourth grade, and not all of them can get even to that point. PUBLIC SCHOOL NO 7, BRUSSELS Total in School Pedagogically Backward Mentally Backward HOC 27 90 2 Number classes 4 I "This gives 45 children in each of the pedagogically backward classes, and 30 in each of the mentally backward classes. The latter number is at least twice too large, but they are doing the best they can. "This gives a very large proportion of 'backward' — nearly 20 per cent. Other fig- ures for Belgium run from 12^ per cent, to 18 per cent. Among the children who do not come to school, the proportion would probably be still greater. " In Antwerp and Ghent, the only other cities in Belgium where these special classes are found, they are likewise supported at municipal expense. In Brussels the program in the backward classes is exactly the same as in the regular classes, the teacher accom- plishing as much of it as possible. A very important point about the administration of these classes is that there is no special designation for the class; the parents do not know that their children are in such classes. The principal and teachers are the only ones that know which are, the classes in question, and they are under strict instructions not to make it known. The result is that the opprobrium connected with the 'Ecole des fous' above referred to has been entirely avoided. This is practically necessary, for the educational authorities are afraid to have the question openly discussed 38o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National "The following table gives the figures up to March 27, 1908, for the schools of Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent: School Classes Pupils Boys — School No. 7 (Mr. Nyns's, above) 6 3 II 2 210 School No. 10 Qi School No. 14 (so-called Ecole des fous) School No. 18 67 Total. 23 578 Girls— School No. 3 5 3 S 52 66 School No. 8 School No. 16 Total 13 213 '1 3 797 126 Antwerp Schools Ghent Schools 60 "I have thought it worthwhile to add an adaptation from Rouma, UEtat de I'en- seignement special pour enfarUs arrieres aux Pays-Bas, on the situation in The Hague. SPECIAL INSTRUCTION FOR BACKWARD CHILDREN AT THE HAGXTEi A. — Historical "In 1902 the municipal authorities established an experimental class in connection with an ordinary school. It was placed imder the direction of Mr. Schreuder, a man who had already had some experience of a similar nature. "The results were so satisfactory that in 1903 the authorities established a second class, and in 1904 two new classes were added to those already in existence. A special building was fitted up, and the four classes were transferred there, thus forming a separate school. " Each year another class will be added until there are six graded classes and an obser- vation class. "At Scheveningen there is also a class which forms a part of the school at The Hague. A second class will shortly be established there. B. — Pupils. Recruitment "Every year the municipal authorities send the directors of the primary schools a notice inviting them to send the abnormal children enrolled with them up for a medico- pedagogical examination. "The school directors that have any such abnormal children first send for the parents in order to explain the situation and to show them the advantages to be gained by trans- ferring their children to the special school. After the parents have authorized the medical examination of their children, the school director fills out the accompanying blank and sends it with the child to the director of the school for the backward children. COMMUNE OF THE HAGUE Instruction of backward children — Questionnaire Information about , bom the , at Address School » Chiefly a translation from George? Rouma, VEtat de Venseignement spicial pour enfants arrUris aux Pays-Bas (1006). Council] PROVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 381 Name of father: Business of father: Ranked the in the Since in the class ( degree, class. year) Former schools attended : Is the child troublesome or well behaved ? Is it difficult to attract and to hold his attention ? Is he passionate or impulsive ? What is the general character ? Has he any moral defects ? How much does he know of arithmetic ? What reading book is he using ? Can he learn to recite from memory a four line stanza ? Can he learn a tune by hearing it ? How does he behave himself during free hand drawing ? Does he recognize common objects from drawings ? Has he any difficulty of speech ? How is his personal cleanUness ? How are his bowels ? Is he compelled to urinate frequently ? Has he any vicious habits ? Is he regular in attendance ? Have you any particular information concerning his family? Further information that might throw light upon the child: (Signature of the school principal) The examination is conducted by a physician (a specialist) and by the director of the special school. They follow the accompanying blank: COMMUNE OF THE HAGUE Name Instrtiction of backward children — Examination Born the at Address Religion I. Heredity and antecedents: 1. Father (name, age, birth-place, occupation) 2. Mother (name, age, birth-place, occupation) 3. Information about the parents (sickness, use of alcohol, poverty, misdeeds) 4. Similar information about the relations in direct line. 5. Similar information about the relations in collateral line. 6. Number of brothers and sisters living ? 7. Number of brothers and sisters dead ? Cause of death in each case ? 8. What is the place of this child in the family ? 9. State of the mother's health during pregnancy ? I o. Birth II. First years: a) Teeth b) Walking c) Talking b) At what age did he begin to be clean about his person ? e) Sicknesses. 382 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National II. Present conditions: 12. General impression 13. Physical condition: Height ~ Eyes Movements of the eyes Position of the ears Head Face Nose Mouth, and lips Palate Teeth 14. Mental condition: a) Sight (colors) li) Hearing (music) c) Muscular sensations: Can he stretch his hands out in front of him and hold them still ? Can he stand still with his feet together ? Can he keep his eyes closed ? Can he walk forward and backward with his eyes closed ? Can he put a key in the lock ? Can he cut along a line ? III. Representations and ideas: 15. Representations of form 16. Representations of volume 17. Representations of number 18. Representations of time 19. Ideas of the value of money 20. Ideas of family relations Association and reproduction 21. Illusion of weight 22. Tell something that happened 23. Arithmetic 24. Reading 25. Copying 26. Dictation 27. Draw a given figure from memory 28. Memory (visual, auditory, motor) 29. Association of ideas 30. Imagination IV. Sentimental life: 31. Does he have fits of temper? 32. Disposition Is he easily aroused ? Is he stubborn ? Is he timid ? 33. Does he love his family and his comrades ? 34. Does he like animals and little children ? 35. What is his idea of duty ? 36. What is his idea of repentance? CouqlUJ' FKOVISION FOR EXCEPTIONAL CHILDREN 383 37. Sexual sensations ? 38. How is he during sleep ? 39- Can he dress and undress himself ? 40. Can he go on an errand ? 41. Has he any difficulty of speech? 42. What is the opinion of the parents about their child ? "Not all the children thus examined are admitted to the school. Idiots and serious cases that give little promise of being benefited by the school are rejected and sent away to an institution for idiots. "From those that are left, those are selected who are most likely to profit by the special education enough to take care of themselves when forced to make their own way in the world. The choice is made without any regard to sex. At the most, sixteen chil- dren are selected to form the new class. If vacancies occur during the course of the year new applicants may be admitted, but the maximum number, sixteen per class, is never exceeded. The children that are admitted to the special school are kept under careful observation for the first six months. During this period, the teacher may propose that the children return to the ordinary schools if he judges them too little aflBicted to be restricted to the special instruction found in his school. "No children are admitted to the special school unless they have spent at least one year in an ordinary school. The number of abnormal children in the schools of The Hague is estimated at about 200. / C . — Instruction. "General considerations. — The special school at The Hague at the present time (i.e., 1906) is composed of four classes, each one of sixteen children (a dozen boys and five or six girls). "The two lowest classes, formed in 1904, are parallel. The class la is composed of apathetic and lazy children, slow of mind, who must be constantly spurred on to work. The class lb is composed of excitable, unruly children, those who must be constantly restrained and whose surplus activity must be allowed to flow off in other channels than are ordinarily afforded by school work. "The program of work is arranged by the director in co-operation with the teachers. It is essentially variable, and it depends upon the needs of the children. Much attention is given to the gifts and occupations of Froebel and to manual work in general, to drawing, practical arithmetic, language work, and to physical training. (See the program for the numerous lessons of gymnastics and the three recreations per day with a relatively small number of hours of class work.) "The time table, which is reproduced below, is arranged so as to permit a free inter- change of pupils in certain subjects, especially in arithmetic and reading. It helps those children who are very much behind or those who are very much ahead. This latter case is the more rare, although the director cited the instance of a child in class II who had his reading with the pupils in Class III. The opportunity of having part work in the higher class seemed to spur him on to greater efforts and two months later he also had his arithmetic with the pupils of Class III. He was finally promoted in every subject, and he was able to keep up with the work. This system has the further advantage of avoiding all "doubling." All the pupils must be promoted. They are never kept back except for those subjects in which they are behind. In general they are stimulated by pride, and they accomplish wonders. " Each teacher keeps his pupils thruout the entire course of their instruction, which lasts for eight years. It is easy to see what a wonderful influence the teacher can have over his pupils under these conditions, and the question of discipline is thus easily solved. "His perfect knowledge of the character of his children gives the teacher a great 384 NAl^IONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National moral influence over them. On the other hand, he is able to come into very close relations with the parents of his pupils and to exercise over them also a good influence which con- tinues thruout the school life of their children. " (From the text, it is evident that all the work is very closely correlated.) " Each class has a class notebook. A certain number of pages are reserved for each child, and here is also transcribed the information furnished by the two questionnaires above referred to. The teacher enters daily notes on the character, the moral tendencies, and the intellectual condition of each pupil. D.— "Baths. — On the authorization of their parents, the children are taken for a shower bath once a week. These baths are paid for by a charitable society. Six or seven of the upper class children take advantage of these free baths. "School kitchen. — Every day in winter, the poor children receive a mid-day meal con- sisting of soup, vegetables, potatoes, and meat. About 25 per cent, of the children share in this, a work supported by a private organization. "Shoes and clothing are likewise distributed by charitable societies. "Fresh-air society (Colonie scolaire). — A society has been formed to collect money in order to send the backward children to the sea shore for from three to five weeks. In 1904, the first group of eight children was sent to a children's boarding-house on the Zuyder Zee for three weeks. The results of this first colony were so satisfactory that an active propaganda has since been carried on in order to permit a still greater number of children to enjoy the benefits of the school colony and to spend a longer time at the sea shore, " This same society is also interested in the distribution of milk to poorly nourished children. "Placing children when they leave school. — ^When the first group of children finishes the course (this will occur in 1908), it is proposed to give each child a godfather, who will follow him and guide him through life. The godfathers are to be chosen from the members of the Fresh-Air Society. E. — Teaching Force "The personnel of this special school is chosen -from the regular teaching force. In order to be eligible for this appointment, the teacher (it is evidently a man) must hold the principal's certificate, awarded on examination after two years of actual teaching. He must know how to draw, and sing, and be competent to give instruction in manual training. "The preference is furthermore given to those that know the foreign languages. The teachers are first appointed on trial for five months. If successful, they receive an addi- tional salary of 200 gulden (about $80.00) per year. There is a definite attempt being made to establish a special course for the training of these teachers. "Every two weeks the director holds a teachers' meeting to discuss modifications in the school program. " The teachers also form a Study Club in two sections of three members each. Their object is the study and discussion of books, pamphlets, etc., in regard to special education of this kind. "Doctor. — The duty of the physician does not go beyond the medical examination of the children. He takes no part in the instruction, and he receives no salary. "Saturday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon are half holidays." DISCUSSION E. R. Johnstone, Vineland, N. J. — The most encouraging thing to us who are engaged in the work of training mentally deficient children, is the report of this committee. Teachers and superintendents do not realize the extent of the problem involved in the discovery, treatment and training of the "Special" Child. Council INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 385 It has been suggested that there are a large number of children in the public schools who really should be in institutions. The reason they are not there is largely because of this lack of knowledge on the part of public school men and women. We who have studied the problem have agreed to the statement that one in every five hundred of the population is actually feeble-minded, and know that we are making a conservative statement. This report states that one in ten of the school children needs a specialist's attention. The chairman has stated that 2 per cent, are feeble-minded. It has been my good fortune to visit a great many of the special classes in this country, and, without exception, I have found a large number of feeble-minded children who were supposed to be merely back- ward, but the full extent of their defect is not recognized. The advisable thing is for this committee to go right on with its investigations with a larger appropriation. I would sug- gest that special inquiry as to the number of these children be made first of all. Co-operation on the part of the physician and teacher is greatly needed. Altho special classes have been in existence in Europe for many years, they are accomplishing but little and working at cross-purposes because the physician and teacher do not work in harmony. The outlook in our own country is better, but close co-operation of these two, which will lead to study and work by the physchologist, is necessary. Up until the present, the medical inspector, excepting those who are doing unusually good work, has confined himself to looking for contagious diseases, filth, etc. And many are not sufficiently versed to recognize mental deficiency and remediable defects. The need of teachers in this "special" work is great indeed, and I would urge upon those of you who are in charge of Normal schools to have lectures given touching upon the cause, diagnosis, and prognosis of mental deficiency. The public institution must be a laboratory for public-school classes, for careful studies of abnormal children will undoubt- edly lead to radical changes in the course of study, at least for primary children. The National Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded, which met last week, passed an almost unanimous resolution to the effect that superintendents would receive public school teachers into their institutions for a period of one year and give them the best train- ing possible with the idea of fitting them for work in the special classes. The one important thing in all of this discussion however is that the normal child is suffering. Whenever a subnormal child is found in the regular classes there is no doubt whatever that the teacher of a class of forty children gives much more than one-fortieth of her time to the backward child, to the great disadvantage of the other thirty-nine, and without particularly helping the one. If the parents of the normal children realized the great loss to their children, due to the presence of the backward child, they would be the first to object. r REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES To the National Council 0} Education oj the National Education Association: The undersigned Committee on Industrial Education in Schools for Rural Communities, appointed by the President of the National Council of Educa- tion, by direction of the Council, July 11, 1907, has the honor to submit the following report on the subject assigned for its consideration. HISTORICAL STATEMENT This committee, as originally constituted by action of the Council in 1903, consisted of five members. The first report was submitted in 1905. This report was published in pamphlet form as one of the special committee reports of the National Educational Association. A second report was submitted at 386 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National the Los Angeles meeting in 1907, and was published in the volume of Proceed- ings of the Association for that year. In presenting this report of progress of the committee in its investigations, the chairman recommended that a new committee be appointed to continue investigations on this subject and report to the Council from time to time. The Council Committee on Investigations and Appropriations reported the following recommendation to the Council, July 11, 1907: That the sum of five hundred dollars ($500.00), or so much thereof as may be neces- sary, be appropriated for the use of the Committee on Industrial Education for Rural Schools, and that the present committee of five be reducefl to three, to be appointed by the President of the Council. The recommendation was adopted by the Council and the appropriation was made by action of the Board of Directors of the National Education Association, July 12, 1907. The present committee was subsequently ap- pointed by the President of the Council. The first report, made by the committee in 1905, presented an argu- ment for industrial education as a distinct feature of work in schools adapted to the needs of rural communities, and set forth the scope and character of the work adapted to the needs of these communities. It considered two types of elementary schools: First, the one-teacher district school; second, the con- solidated district school carrying no high-school work. Of the secondary schools adapted to rural communities, four types were considered: First, the consolidated school offering one or more years of high- school work; second, the rural high school of the county, township, or smaller district type; third, the village high school with a large percentage of attend- ance from the country; fourth, the agricultural high school, distinctively industrial in type, but not eliminating entirely the academic phases of instruc- tion. The report set forth the conditions under which these classes of schools were then being administered, and undertook to indicate the possibilities in the way of industrial education in each of them and the conditions under which these possibilities might be realized. A scheme of nature-study for the first five years of school work, and an outline of a course in agriculture for the sixth, seventh, and eighth years were given, and the problem of how to make a place for industrial education in existing rural schools was discussed. An argument was presented, designed to show the importance of secondary schools of agriculture and domestic economy, in presenting more advanced lines of work than can be given in the elementary schools, in setting standards for the aid of the elementary schools, and in organizing the requisite body of knowledge for instructional purposes. The most important agencies co-operating with the rural schools in the field of industrial education were named, and the character of their activities was outlined. The preparation of teachers of industrial subjects in the various types of rural schools was considered, showing the present lack of preparation Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 387 for this work on the part of the great body of teachers in these schools, the lack of means for giving the needed special preparation, and the agencies through which it might be secured. Four courses of study were given: 1. That of the Dunn County School of Agriculture and Domestic Economy in Wis- consin, setting forth what may be regarded as a typical course of study for the county school of agriculture, secondary in type. 2. The course of study as administered in the agricuhural high school connected with the Minnesota College of Agriculture and representing a type of state schools of agriculture of the secondary class. 3. An articulated industrial course arranged for consolidated rural schools, agri- cultural high schools, and agricultural colleges. 4. The syllabus of the elementary course in agriculture issued by the United States Department of Agriculture. Twelve conclusions of the committee were incorporated in the report. These conclusions are here given. CONCLUSIONS OF THE COMMITTEE The general conclusions reached by the committee may be summed up as follows: First, that in existing one-room district schools a limited amount of nature-study and work in the elements of agriculture, and handwork for both boys and girls may be under- taken; that in view of the quality of the teaching force available for these schools, the immaturity of the greater number of the pupils, the crowded condition of the program, and the lack of adequate supervision, but httle can be expected in the way of industrial edu- cation in this class of schools; but where enthusiastic teachers qualified for the work, and pupils of sufficient maturity are brought together in the same school, something worth while may be accomplished, and that the effort for such accomplishment should certainly be made. Second, that in the consolidated school having at least four teachers, one of whom is prepared to teach the elements of agriculture and manual training, and another domestic science, very much more in the field of industrial education may be attempted than in the one-room school, and with far better results. The committee beUeves this to be true, because in such schools teachers may be secured with far better qualifications than are possessed by most of the teachers in the one-room schools, and because in many cases pupils will remain for one or more years after completing the elementary school course, during which time the work in industrial education may be continued. In the consoli- dated school district, in most cases, new buildings must be erected. At small expense rooms may be provided for manual training and domestic science work, and a plot of land as a part of the school grounds set apart for illustrative and experimental work in agriculture. While the committee does not wish to enter into any argument in favor of consolidated schools for other reasons than for the faciUties they may afford for industrial education, it wishes to indorse most heartily that portion of the report of the Committee of Twelve on Rural Schools concerning the advantages of the consolidated school. Third, that in the township or other distinctively rural high school, and in the village high school attended by a considerable number of pupils from the country, a modification of courses of study should be made which shall provide for the introduction of work, especially in the elements of agriculture and domestic science, and such further hnes of industrial education as local conditions may make feasible. To make this work a success, teachers must be secured who have made special preparation for it. For such schools a textbook treating botany from an agricultural and economic standpoint is greatly needed. Fourth, that while the agricultural or industrial high school is found in but few local- 388 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National ities, the character of the work already done in the existing schools of this class, the interest they awaken, and the hearty support they receive from the agricultural communities main- taining them, the history of these schools in foreign countries, the value of their work both for disciplinary and practical purposes, all combine to present the strongest reasons for the organization of schools of this type in large numbers, in agricultural commu- nities. So thoroly is the committee convinced of the importance of industrial education in rural communities and what is essential for making this education effective, that in their opinion the establishment of secondary schools, distinctively industrial in their char- acter and of the type mentioned, is an absolute necessity for the proper development and organization of the rural school system. Fifth, that the agricultural colleges and experiment stations have already done much in the formulation of a body of knowledge essential in the field of industrial education, but more yet remains to be done in putting this body of knowledge into available form for use in elementary and secondary schools; and that effort in this direction should be made a prominent feature in the work of the agricultural colleges of the country. Sixth, that the mastery of such parts of this rapidly developing body of knowledge as is within the capabilities of elementary and secondary school pupils furnishes a mental training unsurpassed in extent and quality by the mastery of any other body of knowledge now regarded as essential in our common school courses and requiring an equal amount of time; and that for utility value it is not equalled by any other body of knowledge at present acquired thru the expenditure of the same amount of time and effort. Seventh, that for the improvement of educational conditions in rural communities, the people in those communities must be educated to see and appreciate the possibilities and value of industrial education; that the value of this kind of education in increasing the productive capacity of those being educated is the argument which appeals most strongly to the rural population. Therefore, in the beginnings of industrial education in any community, immediate, practical results that will appeal directly to the interests of the people who support and maintain the schools must be made prominent by those concerned with its development. Eighth, that the courses of study in rural schools should be framed with reference to meeting the needs of the children in those communities, and not with reference to preparing a small percentage of these children to enter higher schools whose courses of study are formulated, not to meet the needs of the great majority of those who attend them, but to prepare the remaining small minority to enter some still higher school. Ninth, that it is possible and desirable so to organize the rural school system as to present an articulated series of schools from the elementary school to and including the agricultural college, in which the work at every stage shall be planned and administered with reference to the needs of the pupils at that stage without the elimination of any valuable feature in the present school system, and without abridging in any way the opportunities for advancement of such pupils as wish to enter other schools of secondary or higher grades. Tenth, that in industrial education, as in every other form, the success of the work depends upon the quality of the teaching; and that therefore, since effort for industrial education in elementary and secondary schools is comparatively recent and teachers have not prepared themselves in this field, special opportunities and inducements must be offered to the teaching force to make the necessary preparation. Eleventh, that the organization of boys' and girls' clubs for definite industrial work outside the school, of clubs of farmers and of farmers' wives for the purpose of carrying on systematic reading courses in agriculture and household affairs, should be undertaken thru the co-operative effort of county and state superintendents and agricultural high schools and colleges, for the purpose of arousing a general interest in rural communities in the subject of industrial education. That the Patrons of Husbandry and farmers' institutes are potent forces in creating a demand for the introduction of the industrial phase of t'ducation into the rural school system, and that their influence can be made still more I and Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 389 effective by the establishment of working relations between their ofl&cers and workers and the school authorities. Twelfth, that when teachers are unprepared to give instruction in the elements of agriculture and other phases of industrial effort, the work is Ukely to result in failure; that, under existing conditions and under conditions Ukely to exist for a long time to come, comparatively few teachers in the country schools will be prepared for this work. There- fore, any law making mandatory the teaching of the elements of agriculture, manual training, or domestic science in the entire body of rural schools within a state is unwise, in that the lack of correct information and consequent faulty teaching on the part of the great mass of country school teachers will tend to bring the whole subject into disrepute and cause a reaction which will postpone the proper development of industrial education. But while the committee advises against making mandatory the teaching of these subjects, it advises just as strongly that every effort be made for the proper preparation of country school teachers to begin this instruction, and that every encouragement and inducement be offered those prepared to undertake it, to introduce and carry it on in the schools under their charge. The second report, made in 1907, was an individual report made by two members of the committee rather than a committee report. This was due to the fact that during the year 1906, in which year no meeting of the Association was held, three members of the committee were called to new fields of work, demanding their full time and energy, and making it impossible for them to devote needed time to the work of the committee. In this report there was presented a discussion of the general problem of industrial education in rural schools, setting forth the views of Dr. L. H. Bailey, a member of the committee. He also presented a summary of what is being attempted in the way of industrial education in rural communities in various parts of the country, especially in New England, New Jersey, and New York; and the experiences of individual teachers in different parts of the country in different types of schools. The chairman of the committee dis- cussed the problem of the preparation of teachers of industrial work in rural schools. In 1905 the committee was unable to find that in any of the consolidated rural schools there was anything being accomplished in the way of industrial education worthy of the name. In a few of the lairal high schools a limited amount of textbook work in the elements of agriculture had been introduced, as an optional study in most cases, and covering but a few weeks* work. The typical college preparatory course, or a cross-section of it, was the prevailing type in these schools ; the teachers were selected with reference to their ability to handle the traditional history, mathematics, language, and science work, rather than for any knowledge of, or interest in, the industrial phases of educa- tion appropriate for this class of schools. Such work as was done in agricul- ture was given as an incidental, permitted because of the growing demand for industrial education, and as interfering least with the traditional courses, while furnishing an excuse for the claim that this new demand was recognized and being met by the school authorities. In those cases where the school authorities recognized the importance of industrial education for the country 39© NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National boy and girl, and were really anxious to make provision for it, they found it impossible to organize and carry on the work with any high degree of efficiency because of the lack of teachers having the proper preparation for it. Since that report was made, there has been a continued and growing agitation in all parts of the country for the development of industrial education. This agitation and discussion deepened the interest in this subject among the farming population and among the school officials and teachers in rural com- munities. More schools in these communities are introducing instruction in agriculture. Improvement in the methods and scope of the instruction is slowly being made. Normal schools and other agencies for the training of teachers for carr)dng on this work are extending and strengthening their courses of instruction in this field, and courses of study in the rural high schools are receiving such modifications as to give a larger place and more time for this work. The gain has been in an extension of interest in, and a growing realization of the importance of this phase of educational effort, rather than in concrete, effective results in many schools. These results will come later. At the present time there are more than six hundred consolidated rural schools in the United States. From correspondence with state superintendents and many other school officials, the committee has been forced to the conclusion that in practically all of these schools the condition is the same as in the rural high schools ; as yet little has been done to modify the ideals or the teaching in these schools for effectiveness on the industrial side of education. The environment of these schools and the homogeneous character of the student body, coming as it does from the country, seem to make the demand impera- tive for this work, and to furnish conditions favorable for it within somewhat narrow limits. The lack of initiative on the part of teachers and school boards, the force of established custom in school work, the lack of enthusi- astic teachers competent to give the proper instruction, and of funds to employ them when available, and the lack of equipment, have been the deterring causes in this, as in other fields of educational uplift. The Bureau of Education early this year published a bulletin entitled, Agricultural Education, Including Nature-Study and School Gardens. This bulletin was prepared by Ralph Jewell, fellow of Clark University, and pre- sents an exhaustive summary of what is being attempted in this and other countries in the organization of agricultural education. It is probably the most complete study of the subject yet published. Its statements are based on a careful investigation of published reports, and on reports from individuals interested in agricultural education, and secured through an extensive corre- spondence. The completeness with which the subject is treated in this bul- letin makes it entirely unnecessary for your committee to attempt to cover this field. In view of the timely appearance of this bulletin and of the field covered in the two reports already made by your committee, and of the numerous calls CouncU) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 391 made upon the committee for information of what is actually being done in schools where this work has been undertaken, it was thought best to limit the scope of the present report to a presentation of what is being done in schools representing four different types of organization, as showing the possibilities in other schools of these types, and the conditions under which these possi- bilities may become actualities. The schools selected upon which to report were the Waterford High School, at Waterford, Pennsylvania, the Cecil County High School, at Calvert, Mary- land, the John Swaney Consolidated School, in Magnolia Township, Putnam County, Illinois, and the congressional district agricultural schools located at Americus, and Monroe, Georgia. These particular schools were chosen after an extended correspondence for the purpose of determining what schools of a given type would furnish the most profitable field for study. It is probable that there are other schools in each class which might have been studied with equal advantage, and it is not the intention of the committee to claim that any one of these schools is the best of its class. D. J. Crosby, expert in agricultural education in the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture, was invited by the committee to investigate the work of the Waterford and Calvert schools and to prepare a report of his investigations for the use of the committee. This special report set forth so fully the conditions under which the agri- cultural work in the two schools is being carried on, and the character of the work, that it is submitted without material modification. Your committee desires to express its appreciation of Mr. Crosby's interest in its work, of the value of his report, and of his kindness in preparing it, especially as he declined to accept payment for his services. At the request of the other members of the committee, Mr. O. J. Kern personally investigated the consolidated schools and the congressional district schools, and the result of his investigations is submitted as a special report. The Waterford school was chosen for investigation because it was one of the first high schools in the country to try the experiment of introducing instruc- tion in agriculture and employing an agricultural-college graduate to give this instruction, and was typical of the ordinary village high school, and of the township high school found in some states. The agricultural course, as at present administered, carries the study of field, orchard, and garden crops through one year; plant life one year; agricultural chemistry one year; soil physics one term, and animal husbandry two terms; the entire work in agriculture requiring a trifle more than one-fifth of the whole time devoted to recitations. The agricultural course is a modification of the scientific course offered in the school. This modification consists in the omission of one term's work in I each of the following subjects: English history. United States history, physical kr- ~ ■" "■ "■ " """ f 392 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National branches; one term's elective work in physical geography, bookkeeping, commercial law, and commercial geography; and the addition of the agri- cultural subjects named above. The modification of the course as shown in this school is doubtless the same in nature as is likely to be made in most high schools at the outset of this experiment in introducing industrial education. Here and there will be found a school board and principal radical enough to make more marked modification in the high-school course, especially in reducing the total amount of work required. The county and state secondary schools distinctively devoted to industrial education will furnish the suggestions for the modification of courses in the high schools, and in this respect they play a very important part in the development of the movement for industrial education through the rural high schools. The supervision of the outlying district schools of the township by the principal of this high school is a feature unknown in many states, and impos- sible in most of them without special legislation. It is a very suggestive arrangement, however, and where feasible would seem to be a desirable one, especially if the principal of the high school had the proper training for giving the instruction in agriculture in the high school and for guiding and directing the work of the teachers in the rural schools in their nature-study exercises and instruction in the elements of agriculture. The fact that during the four years the course has been organized six differ- ent teachers have been employed to give the instruction in agriculture brings out one of the serious problems connected with the carrying on of this work in the small high school. The special report shows that these teachers were re- quired to teach not only agriculture but a number of other high-school subjects. To do both lines of work well they must be persons who have had a breadth of training not found in the case of the ordinary high-school teacher, and with this preparation they can command a salary very much in excess of what has been paid these teachers in the Waterford school. As the principal of a school is always the best-paid teacher in it, it would seem that the solution suggested in connection with this school is the wise one ; viz., that the man selected as principal shall be one who has had special train- ing fitting him to give instruction in agriculture in a satisfactory manner. It is equally evident that he must have had such instruction and training as will fit him for teaching other subjects he must carry in the school. There is another decided advantage in this arrangement. The principal of a high school who has had good training in scientific agriculture and its applications is one likely to realize the value of this work and to be in sympathy with it and able to make the most of it. He will see that, if introduced into the school, it is given the time and attention necessary to do it in a satisfactory manner, and he will be more likely to find a place for it without overcrowding the students, than the principal who has never had such training and who does not appreciate the importance of this phase of education. The Calvert school in Cecil County, Maryland, is a type somewhat unusual b Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 393 as yet, in that it was organized as a county high school with the avowed purpose of making instruction in agriculture a distinct feature of the school. The course of study indicates that nearly two-fifths of the school time for both boys and girls is devoted to agricultural subjects and related laboratory and field- work, while the remaining portion of the time is given to the regular academic work found in most high schools. This school in its purpose and plan of organization stands between the ordinary high school with the college preparatory courses and the Wisconsin and Michigan county schools of agriculture and domestic economy. In the latter, more than one-half of the class work for the boys is given to agriculture and handwork in wood and iron, and the same amount of time is given the girls for work in the domestic arts; the remaining time being devoted to such of the ordinary high-school subjects as seem best suited to the needs of the students. Wisdom was shown by the organizers of this school in giving a preparatory course, thus offering the opportunities of the school to a larger number of pupils, inviting their attendance, and arousing their interest in completing the full course. It is probable that in the development of the work in this school provision will be made for substituting instruction in the household arts for the girls, in place of a considerable portion of the work in agriculture they are now required to take, and that for the boys some instruction and training may be offered in the use of farm tools and machines. The suggestion, that by consolidating a number of schools immediately contiguous to Calvert into a central school in connection with the high school, the per capita cost of instruction for pupils in the high school could be lowered, may be true because of peculiar conditions now existing in these outlying schools and in the county school. In most cases it is doubtful if such a lower- ing of cost of high-school instruction would result from consolidation unless the per capita rate were made to include all the pupils in the high-school and elementary grades. A comparison of the cost of the elementary grades in the consolidated school with the cost of the several outlying schools before consolidation will, in most cases, show an increase in the total expenditure atfer consolidation has been effected. Consolidation under ordinary conditions will in no way lessen the cost of instruction in the existing high school, unless it serves to increase the attendance in the high school when it is too small to occupy fully the time of all the teachers who must be employed. There seems to be no way of escaping the conclusion that practical and effective industrial education in any type of school adapted to -the needs of rural communities will make such school more expensive than those now found in these communities and which do not offer opportunity for any kind of industrial education. The John Swaney Consolidated School is a type of the consolidated country 394 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National school comprising an area less than an entire township. It was selected for the purpose of this report as affording the best illustration of splendid public sentiment, private liberality, and wise organization combined, that the committee was able to find in any consolidated district in the United States. In the opinion of the committee the work being done at this school is very suggestive: first, as to the conditions and sentiment which must exist in a community in order to secure the necessary funds for the establishment and maintenance of such a school; and second, that the success of the work in any school of this kind, no matter how adequate its equipment, must depend upon the quality of the teaching force. In any community where these conditions and sentiment can be developed, the consolidated school odfers great oppor- tunities for the development of industrial education in rural communities. But it is evident that this work cannot be carried on on a scale commensurate with the needs of the pupils, without a much larger expenditure of money for the maintenance of the school than is now common. The congressional-district agricultural schools of Georgia are a new type of schools, presenting many new and interesting problems not heretofore con- sidered in this country. For this reason it seemed important to present the plan of organization, purposes, and scope of work contemplated in them, as well as some account of what they are now doing. They have been established so recently and under such new and unusual conditions that the report of what is being done > necessarily deals with the preliminary work required in the organization of a school of this -type, where so much of the outside work, usually done before a school is opened, is done by students after entering the v:hool. The suggestions made in the report as to the character of the instruction and the amount of work required upon the farm in connection with the schools are not intended in any way as criticisms, but are designed to call attention to the difficulties presented in the organization of such schools under conditions which exist. It is already apparent that further provision in the way of funds must be made for carrying on these schools successfully. The same problem of adequate equipment and competent and sufficient teaching force is presented here as in the other schools considered. The spirit of the New South is warrant for the belief that the legislature of Georgia will realize the necessities of the schools and will as rapidly as possible increase the fund for their main- tenance. The surest way for these schools to command the support of the people and of their representatives in the legislature is. to give such practical instruction and training to the young people attending them as will soonest show results upon the farms in the districts where the schools are located. No report is made of the work being done in the one-room rural schools. Correspondence with school officials indicates a great interest in this subject, and an increase in the agencies offered for giving some preparation to the ^ teachers of these schools for intelligent work in the industrial field. Work in Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 395 this type of schools, of one sort or another, is being undertaken in most of the agricultural states. Wherever success is being secured, it is due to the prepara- tion and personality of the teacher. It must not be forgotten that experiments carried on here and there in school gardening, nature-study, and elementary agriculture are awakening a general interest in this subject, but at the same time are demonstrating the total inadequacy of this work in the district school with one teacher, to meet the needs of the children in rural communities. The committee cannot escape the conviction that adequate facilities for meeting the increasing demand for industrial education must come through schools of secondary type, and that it is far easier at the present time to secure this instruc- tion in adequate form in schools which are distinctively organized for this special work. As has already been set forth in the first report, such schools will show the possibilities of work in the industrial field. They will call into the fieM teachers who are prepared to carry it on intelligently. They will encourage those who have already begun this work in existing schools, and incite other schools to introduce it. They will in time organize matter for instruction in far better form than it exists today, and they will serve materially to aid the ordinary high school in adjusting its work, through the experience of the special school, to meet the needs of the community it serves. In most states legislation is needed for the organization of this type of school, but the demand for it is coming from the farming population backed by arguments so strong that legislatures are likely to heed. For such schools, not numerous at first, it is possible to secure appropriations far in excess of what can be secured for the ordinary high school or the consolidated school. This will make it possible to command the services of better trained teachers and secure better equip- ment for work. It will dignify the whole subject of industrial education in the estimation of the farming population, and will open up possibilities of utilizing such schools for carrying on this work still further than is done at present. K WATERFORD HIGH SCHOOL, WATERFORD, PENNSYLVANIA D. J. CROSBY About fourteen miles south of Erie, Pennsylvania, surrounded by rich undulating farming lands, is the thriving little village of Waterford, the English successor of old Fort Le Bceuf, which was established in 1753 as one of the line of French forts between Quebec and New Orleans. After the English had come into possession of this territory the name of the place was changed in 1794 to Waterford and four years later the first school in Erie County was established there. In 181 1 Waterford Academy was incorporated, in 1822 the substantial stone academy building now occupied by the high school was erected, and in 1826 the academy was opened. In 1899 the Waterford High School was established and the property of the academy was formally turned over to it. The high-school building as it now stands consists of the old stone 396 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National academy building, a brick extension which served for many years as a dormitory for pupils in the academy but is now occupied as a residence by the principal of the high school, and a one-story ell containing two rooms about sixteen feet square, one used as a laboratory and the other as a recitation room. The main stone structure contains a large classroom on the first floor and an assembly and study-room and a library on the second floor. The free public-school system of Waterford boro and township, as now organized, consists of the Waterford High School, conducted jointly by the boro and township, the Waterford boro primary and grammar schools of eight grades employing three teachers, and fifteen graded district schools in Water- ford township. The principal of the high school has general supervision over all of the schools of the two districts, the same course of study has been adopted for all, and largely the same textbooks are used. The population of Waterford boro is about 800, that of Waterford township, exclusive of the boro, about 1,500. During 1907-8 the enrollment of pupils in township schools was 227, in boro grades 93, and in the high school 89, a total of 409. REVENUE AND EXPENDITURES Waterford High School is supported entirely by local (boro and township) taxation. There is a law providing state aid for township high schools, but since this is supported jointly by the township and boro the state superintendent of public instruction holds that it cannot receive state aid. The funds raised by taxation amount to about $2,400 a year and of this amount $2,025 is expended for teacher's salaries and the remaining $375, for janitor work, textbooks, supplies, and repairs. Entertainments given by the school bring in small sums which are used in purchasing books, pictures, apparatus, etc. TEACHERS There are three teachers in the high school and they are hired for nine months. The principal receives $900 and house, teaches science, and super- vises the primary and grammar schools of the boro and township. The first assistant receives $675 and teaches agriculture and several other subjects. The second assistant receives $450 and teaches language, mathematics, and history. There is so much work for three teachers that it is difl&cult to arrange a daily program with a satisfactory division of subjects. Below is given a typical daily program. DAILY PROGRAM SPRING TERM, 1908 9-9:20. Morning Exercises. Miss Wheeler Mr. Mixer Mr. Button 9:20-9:50. Geometry. Arithmetic. English. 9:50-10:20. 3d German. Geology. Physiology. 10:20-10:50. Latin. Physics. Cereals of America. 10:50-11:20. Latin. ist Literature. 4th Literature. 11: 20-11:50. 3d Chemistry. Plant Life. Councill INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 397 Noon Intermission. 1-1:35. Rhetoricals. Botany. ist Algebra. 1:35-2:10. Latin. Physical Geography. Rhetoric. 2: 10-2:45. General History. 2d Literature. 2:45-3: 25. Latin. Poultry. 3 : 25-4 : 00. Poultry. The principal is supposed to have his afternoons free for supervision but it is usually necessary, as in the above program, for him to conduct one or two recitations in the afternoon. The first assistant has every period taken up with class work and thus has very little time to prepare practicums or other special work in agriculture. The second assistant has two vacant periods, but these are devoted to rehearsals in rhetoricals. The first assistant and teacher of agriculture is a graduate of a high school and of the New York State Agricultural College at Cornell University. He spent two years after graduation in the nature-study bureau at Cornell and one year in field-work testing cattle for the state. He is a practical farmer and has been for several years a successful exhibitor of live stock at agricultural fairs. This is his first year as a high-school teacher, and he has gone into this work because he believes that the important developments of the near future in agricultural education will be in its secondary phases. HIGH-SCHOOL PUPILS The enrollment of pupils is shown in the following table: ENROLLMENT IN WATERFORD HIGH SCHOOL 1907-8 Qth Grade loth Grade nth Grade Z2th Grade Total Total enrollment 46 44 18 16 5 4 20 15 89 Number Studying Agr 79 Apparently agriculture is popular at Waterford. The agricultural course is elective and over 88 per cent, of the pupils are taking work in agriculture. It should be explained, however, that not all of these are taking the regular agricultural course. Quite a number of students in other courses, girls as well as boys, are taking special work in poultry culture. COURSES OF STUDY Three courses are open to pupils in the Waterford High School, a language or college-preparatory course, a scientific course intended to prepare for busi- ness pursuits, and an agricultural course. About tliree-fourths of the work is alike in all courses; the remainder consists mainly of Latin and German in the language course, history, the physical and biological sciences, bookkeeping and commercial law in the scientific course, and the physical'and biological sciences and agriculture in the agricultural course. All of the courses appear to be rather top-heavy with literature studies. On p. 398 is a program showing the three courses arranged in parallel columns for comparison. 398 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National INSTRUCTION IN AGRICULTURE Agriculture was first offered at the Waterford High School in the fall of 1904 and since that time, in spite of frequent changes of teachers of agriculture, the work has been kept up and has grown in popularity. All of the teachers thus fg-r, with one exception, have been agricultural-college graduates, and the exception was a college graduate, a teacher of considerable experience, and had been for two years connected with the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station. Agriculture is taught by means of textbooks, lectures, demonstrations, laboratory exercises, and outdoor practicums. Students in the agricultural course have one 30-minute period in agriculture daily for four years. This is the regular work of the classroom, the laboratory, or the field. They are also PROGRAM OF THE WATERFORD HIGH SCHOOL First Year Terms Language Course Scientific Course Agricultural Course Fall Winter Spring English — Grammar. Literature. Algebra. Physical Geography. Latin. English Grammar. Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Physical Geography (Elective). Latin English — Grammar. Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Physical Geography. Latin. English Grammar. Literature. Algebra. Physical Geography. English History. Enghsh Grammar. Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Physical Geography (Elective). English — Grammar. Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Physical Geography. English Grammar. Literature. Algebra. Physical Geography. Agr.— Plant Life. English — Grammar. Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Agr.— Plant Life. English — G rammar . Literature. Arithmetic. Algebra. Agr.— Plant Life. Second Year Fall English. Literature. Algebra. Latin. English. Literature. Zoology (Elective). Algebra. Bookkeeping. (Elect.) English. Literature. Zoology. Algebra. Agr.— Field, Orchard, and Garden Crops. Winter English. Literature. Latin. Algebra. English. Literature. Physiology (Elective). Com'l Law (Elective). Algebra. English. Literature. Algebra. Agr.— Field, Orchard, and Garden Crops. Spring English. Literature. Civics. Latin. English. Literature. Civics. Com'l Geog. (Elect.) Physiology (Elective). English. Literature. Civics. Physiology. Agr. — Field, Orchard, and Garden CroDS. Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 399 PROGRAM OF THE WATERFORD HIGH SCHOOL— Con/m««4 Third Year Fall Winter Spring Fall Winter Spring English — Rhetoric . Literature. Physics. Latin. German, English — Rhetoric. Literature. Physics. Latin. German, English — Rhetoric . Literature. Physics. Latin. German. English — Rhetoric. Literature, Physics, Chemistry. United States History. English — Rhetoric. Literature. Physics. Astronomy. Chemistry. EngUsh — Rhetoric. Literature. Physics. Botany. Chemistry. I English— Rhetoric. j Literature. ; Physics. Chemistry, Agr. — Domestic Ani- mal Studies, English — Rhetoric. Literature. Physics. Chemistry. Agr. — Domestic Ani- mal Studies. EngUsh — Rhetoric. Physics. Botany. Chemistry. Agr. — Soil Physics. Fourth Year Literature. General History. Geometry. Latin. German. General History. Geometry. Latin. German. General History. Geometry. Latin. German. Literature. General History. Geometry. Psychology. Chemistry, Literature, General History, Geometry. Chemistry. Literature. General History. Geometry. Geology. Common Branches. Literature. General History. Geometry. Agr. — Chemistry of Soils. English Literature. General History. Geometry. Agr. — Chemistry of Plant and Animal Life. Literature. General History. Geometry. Geology. Agr. — Chemistry of Plant and Animal Life. given special assignments which increase considerably the time devoted to agriculture. Thus, at the present time one group of pupils is caring for incubators, another for brooders containing about 175 chicks, another is testing a lot of seed corn, and another is testing milk. No special periods are assigned in the school program for work of this kind; the assignments are arranged personally with the different groups. The uniform arrangement of recitation periods and the fact that the teacher of agriculture has every period in the day taken up with class work make it difficult to arrange outside trips or to keep close oversight of the laboratory work and special assignments of the pupils. With all the dis- advantages of such an arrangement there appears to be one compensating advantage — ^pupils are thrown very largely on their own responsibility and 400 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National must trust to the textbook, the notebook, and their own resources to carry them through. SPECIAL APPARATUS OR OTHER EQUIPMENTS FOR AGRICULTURE The school has very little equipment designed especially for agriculture. It has a fairly good line of apparatus for physics and botany which is used to some extent in the class in plant life and soils; and a laboratory about i6 feet square, with chemical glassware, reagents, an ordinary kitchen sink, and tables which serve for laboratory exercises in the chemistry of soils and plant and animal life. This laboratory room is at present used as an incubator room for the special course in poultry culture. It contains five incubators ranging in capacity from 380 eggs to 50 eggs. One of these was loaned by the manu- facturer and four by farmers. The laboratory room also contains an 8-bottle Babcock milk tester belonging to the school, two oil stoves, and considerable home-made apparatus set up by the pupils, including seed testers in which corn and clover seed, etc. , are now being tested. In the agricultural classrooms, adjoining the laboratory, are a number of seed testers, a hand milk separator, the agricultural library of the school consisting of reports, bulletins, textbooks, and reference books, and twenty-eight agricultural journals. One of the seniors in the agricultural course has charge of the agricultural library and keeps the latest papers in the room for the use of the pupils. Outside of the school building there are two borrowed brooders containing chicks and one brooder designed and made by one of the pupils, which is proving quite satisfactory. Heretofore the school has labored under the difficulty of not having land for field-work, although it is doubtful whether much could be done in the way of raising farm crops or attempting any experiments which need to be looked after during the summer months, owing to the fact that the teacher of agri- culture is paid such a small salary that he cannot afford to spend his summer looking after the work of this school. This year one of the residents of the village has donated to the school for an indefinite period the use of three and one- half acres of land, a part of which is occupied by twenty old apple trees. Some work has been done in this orchard, and plans have been made for completely renovating it, grafting some of the trees and spraying all of them. This will be the horticultural laboratory of the school. The school has already done some orchard work in the way of spraying, pruning, and grafting other orchards. It is proposed also, if possible, to put out a patch of potatoes and conduct some spraying experiments to prevent potato blight. WORK IN NATURE-STUDY AND SCIENCE TO PREPARE FOR AGRICULTURE Comparatively little attention is given to nature-study exercises in any of the township or boro schools. Bird study is required by law and this with elementary lessons in physiology and hygiene constitutes about the only work relating to science before the pupils reach the high school. In the high-school agricultural course instruction in physical geography precedes the study of Councill INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 401 soils and instruction in zoology precedes the study of domestic animals. The instruction in botany, which comes in the last term of the third year, proceeds largely along the line of analytical and herbarium work; that in general chem- istry, which prepares the way for agricultural chemistry, is textbook work supplemented by laboratory demonstrations and practice that in zoology is textbook study with a little laboratory work with crustaceans. OBSERVATIONS BY THE VISITOR I reached the school in the morning in time for the opening exercises which occupy about twenty minutes daily throughout the year, and usually consist of a chapter from the Bible, one or two recitations, and one or two essays by the pupils. Each pupil is required to give four recitations and read four essays of his own composition during the course of the year and this, instead of being given in a number of special programs, is distributed over the morning exercises of the year. On the first morning of my visit there were two recitations and two essays. One of the essays was on the subject of corn breeding and is given below. On the second morning one of the essays was on the subject of wood and included a discussion of the uses of wood, protection of forests, and other matters concerned with practical farm foi^estry. CORN BREEDING EARL BARNS, SECOND YEAR, AGRICULTURAL COURSE As corn has developed in yield and composition high above its wild prototypes, it has a constant tendency to revert back to its original form. This is commonly known as "running-out." To keep corn up to its present standard and to improve it if possible, we practice corn breeding. So much progress has been made in corn breeding that it is hard to tell what was its ancestor. It has been bred in many different directions. This is marked by the great number of types and varieties of corn. The principle of selection is the method employed in breeding maize as well as in breeding all other things. Seed corn is usually selected in one of three ways: Selecting ears of corn from crib; selecting at the time of husking; or selecting while the corn is growing in the field. The advantage of the second over the first is that one can select with some regard to the stock. The last though is best, because it enables one to deter- mine whether the good quality is the result of environment or whether it is the result of hereditary force. Corn is usually bred with one or more of the following objects in view— namely, com- position, proportion of grain to cob, and yield per acre. The general run of corn is high in carbohydrate material and low in both protein and ash. As farmers of the northern states have to buy much protein, it might seem desirable that maize should contain more protein. To do this we must breed up a strain of com with a large proportion of corneous endosperm, because that part contains the most protein of any part of the grain. If the breeder wishes to increase the fat percentage he should select those ears the kernels of which have large embryos. The selection of ears of the right proportion of com to cob is also of 'great importance and is closely connected with high yield. A small cob is usually desirable as the grain cures and keeps much longer if the cob is small. About i part of cob to 4 or 4i of corn is a desirable proportion. Very little can be told as to the proportion of cob to grain without the use of accurate scales. 402 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National In breeding corn one, to begin with, should select loo ears having the qualities desired. These should be tested and the 40 which germinate best selected out. Number the best ear 13, the two next best 1 2 and 14, etc., until the two poorest are numbered i and 25. Then choose a plot 50 hills square and number the rows from i to 50. Plant ear No. i in rows number i and 26, etc., until ear number 25 is planted on rows 25 and 50. Other corn of the same variety should be planted around the breeding plat so as to insure thorough pollination. When the corn ripens, select 20 ears from each of the five best rows and proceed as the year before. As another special feature in English, two seniors are selected each week to report " School Notes " to the local weekly paper. These notes consist of personals, mention of examinations, new work, and other special features, including frequent mention of agricultural work in progress. The following' items were clipped from the Water jord Leader of March 5, 1908: Farmers who wish to find out the best cows in their herds may do so by sending in a sample of milk to the agricultural department of the school, which will be glad to test the milk. As cows vary widely from milking to milking in the per cent, of fat, the sample should be of equal parts from four consecutive milkings, each being carefully mixed by pouring from pail to pail before the sample is taken. A two-ounce bottle is sufficient. If it is desired to make a test for a longer time. Professor Button will be glad to furnish preservative for the sample of milk. As a result of the enthusiasm and interest shown by the scholars who attended Mrs. Allen's lectures on poultry at the institute, a class in poultry husbandry is to be started in the high school for the spring term. Professor Button has already been promised the use of three incubators. It is proposed to run the incubators with marked eggs brought in by the students and it is hoped that each breed will be represented if possible. After hatching, the chicks will be kept for several weeks in the brooder and instruction given in the feeding of them and in the management of the brooder. There is every indication that this will prove highly interesting and profitable work, both for the students and their parents. The amqunt of food which an animal consumes above the life-sustaining point brings the profit to the owner. Now is a good time to trim up the orchard and take a" trip around the fences with a pocketful of nails and staples. CLASSES IN AGRICULTURE The first class visited was studying Hunt's Cereals of North America, and consisted of fifteen pupils mostly belonging to the second-year class, although there were a few fourth-year pupils who were not taking the regular agricul- tural course. This class was considering corn production — the different ways in which weeds injure corn, such as reducing the available supply of moisture, using up plant food, and shading the ground and keeping it cool, which is injurious in regions lying in the northern limits of corn production; deep and shallow cultivation, and early and late cultivation and their uses. When dis- cussing the importance of early cultivation and the fact that it allows air to reach the germinating kernels the teacher illustrated the necessity of air in this connection by displaying two samples of corn which had been put in water at the same time, one sample being partly covered with water, while the other was completely immersed in water which had been boiled to drive out air. The Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 403 sample which had access to air was sprouting nicely while the other had not started. The two were set aside to be observed from time to time until the pupils were satisfied whether the sample excluded from air would germinate or rot. The plant-life class on the first day discussed the selecting and breeding of corn and gave some attention to the history of its development and the causes of variation. They were frequently called upon to verify their statements by illustrations taken from their own experiences or from their study of publica- tions other than the textbook. On the second day this class took up the selection of potatoes for seed and discussed the relative value of bin selection and hill selection, the points to be observed in making the selection, and the methods to be used in fixing types. Potatoes were passed around the class illustrating characteristics discussed by the instructor and thin sections were cut to show the structure of the potato. The class in poultry culture was so large that it recited in two sections, each containing about thirty-five pupils. This class was organized for one term of special work at the beginning of the spring term and the four third-year pupils were allowed to take this instead of the regular work assigned for this term which was soil physics. The third-year class is so small this year that there has been .considerable difficulty in arranging its work. The instruction in poultry culture is given by lectures and the study of bulletins from the United States Department of Agriculture and the Experiment Stations. On the day of my visit the discussion was on the fattening of poultry and marketing of eggs, with some attention to the most desirable breeds for early broilers, for roasters, and for egg production. As indicated above, the pupils in the poultry courses are given assignments in caring for the incubators and brooders. In the incubator work two pupils are assigned to look after each tray of eggs for one week, at the end of which time the assignments are shifted. I spent considerable time in the incubator room, looking over the incubators, talking with the boys, and listening to their talk with each other. I found them very much interested and thoroly impressed with the responsibility thrown upon them. None of them, however, was anxious to get rid of this responsibility; on the other hand, they would have liked to have their assignments extended to cover the three weeks of incubation. The work with the brooders outside seemed also to be very attractive. The pupils who had charge of these would tun out every littie while to see that everything was all right, and during intermissions the brooders were sur- rounded by a crowd of pupils. There is a large poultry establishment in the outskirts of the village which the students in poultry culture have visited for the purpose of studying different types of incubators and brooders and the construction of poultry buildings. Toward the close of the year students will be given some practice in judging poultry with the score card. 404 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National It is seldom practicable to take a whole class in agriculture into the labora- tory for practice work. Instead of doing this the pupils are given assignments similar to the assignments in poultry culture. Thus three of the boys were given three samples of milk which had been sent in for testing and told to go into the laboratory and conduct the test. This they did without aid from the teacher except to find the sulphuric acid which had been misplaced, and about as readily as college students go through their exercises for the first time. Each of the three boys took one sample and made two tests of it, one as a check upon the other, and only one apparent error was made in carrying out the exercise. The work of the school in testing milk has aroused considerable interest in the vicinity owing to the fact that some milk tested for the cheese factory was found to contain entirely too much water. Of course the name of the man whose cow got too near the pump was not made public but the people of the village tell an amusing story of the excuse made by this man when the superin- tendent of the cheese factory confronted him with the evidence furnished by the school. He admitted that his milk had been "watered" that morning but stated it was a mistake of his. He had picked up a small can which he had supposed contained milk and emptied it hurriedly into a larger milk can. Just as the last of the contents was dripping into the large can he discovered it was water. He did not explain how water got into the milk on other morn- ings, although the adulteration had been going on for some time. The school is testing seed corn this spring for a half-dozen or more farmers and is now making some tests of clover seed. It has also made some micro- scopic tests of cattle feeds and in one case discovered that a considerable consignment of bran which had been purchased by a local dealer was badly adulterated with ground corn cobs. This discovery was made just before the farmers' 'institute was held at Waterford this year and it caused a good deal of discussion. In this connection it may be stated that one indication of the hold that the instruction in agriculture has taken upon the pupils is found in the increasing attendance not only of farmers, but of their sons and daughters, at the farmers' institutes. This year practically the whole school attended the • sessions of the farmers' institutes and they did this, not because they were required or urged to do so, but because they were interested in the discussions. The members of the last institute force who took part in the institute at Water- ford were astonished at the number of young people in attendance, and spoke in high praise of the work of the school as indicated by the knowledge of agricultural subjects displayed by the pupils. OPINIONS OF PATRONS OF THE SCHOOL Eight patrons of the school were visited. Four of these were members of the high-school board and two were residents of an adjoining township, who were paying tuition for their sons. The question of abandoning the teaching of agriculture was not once hinted at, although the members of the board I Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FORJRURAL COMMUNITIES 405 were considerably worried over the problem of keeping a good teacher of agriculture. In the four years that agriculture has been taught at Waterford six different teachers of agriculture have been employed. Four of those who have left have gone to more lucrative positions and one resigned to assume charge of the home farm after his father's death. The members of the board are convinced that they cannot retain a good teacher of agriculture on a salary of $75 .00 a month for nine months, but they do not feel able to pay more. Any increase in the expense of conducting the school is quickly felt owing to the fact that the funds for the school are raised entirely by local taxation. The annual cost of running the school is only about $27.00 a pupil, and yet the question of high salaries was raised three or four times, while in the case of the Cecil County Agricultural School in Maryland, where the cost is over $50. 00 a pupil annually, salaries aggregating 19 per cent, more for the same number of teachers in a much smaller school were not once mentioned. The only solution of the salary problem at Waterford seems to' be the election of an agricultural-college graduate as principal of the school. This plan was suggested by each of the four members of the board interviewed, but will not be put in operation until the present principal retires to accept a better position, which he is likely to do in the near future. One of the older members of the board, the member who first suggested the introduction of agriculture, believes not only in this program but also in the employment of one assistant who can teach domestic science subjects for the girls. The president of the board believes in the teaching of agriculture because so many of the high-school graduates return to the farm and so few go on to college. He and several others called attention to the fact that nearly every householder in the boro is a farmer, a merchant who also owns one or more farms, or a retired farmer. There is no manufacturing in the village except that which depends directly upon the surrounding farms; a cheese factory, a creamery, a flouring mill, and the usual repair shops are about the only indus- trial plants. It is not strange therefore that many patrons of the school should look with favor upon the teaching of agriculture. One of the farmers visited, father of two boys in the first-year class, was a renter who had moved into the township for the express purpose of educating his children in a school where they could study agriculture. He had carefully considered the relative advantages of moving to a farm near one of the state normal schools or to one near the Waterford High School and had decided in favor of the latter. His boys had been in the high school seven months and he had no reason to regret the choice he had made. Following are brief statements gleaned from opinions expressed by some of the farmers interviewed: "The teaching of agriculture has increased the respect of our farmers for *book farming.' It has awakened an interest in farming and in farmers* 4o6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National institutes. A few years ago we couldn't get anybody to attend the institutes; this year there wasn't standing-room. It has encouraged several boys to go to agricultural colleges. It is turning the minds of the boys toward farming as a desirable occupation. My boy talks of nothing else and constantly surprises me with the knowledge of agriculture he has gained. It is a good deal better for boys than going to the state normal school (this from a graduate of both schools). I believe it will help keep the boys on the farm; my boy is more interested in agriculture than in any other subject. It should be taught in all village and township high schools in the state. " A mother who had taught for years thinks agriculture the best thing in the school and is especially pleased with the written work in agriculture. Her boy chooses agricultural subjects for his compositions. A father would rather see any other study thrown out of the course. His boy takes much interest in the poultry work and is becoming a much closer observer on the farm. DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR REMEDY The chief difficulty in carrying on the instruction in agriculture at Water- ford — that of retaining the services of a good teacher — ^has already been .alluded to in the opinions of patrons of the school. And the members of the board are about right in their conclusion that when it becomes necessary to select a new principal, it will be advisable to get a man who can teach agriculture. This would be an ideal arrangement. The principal of the high school, as super- visor of the boro and township schools, would be able to do much to encourage and direct nature-study work leading directly and effectively up to the agri- cultural work of the high school. By arranging his work so as to keep his afternoons entirely free from instruction in the classroom he could also devote more time than can the present teacher of agriculture to the outdoor features of instruction in this subject. In this connection I believe it would serve a very useful purpose if the board would hire the new principal by the year, pay him a salary larger in proportion, and arrange to have him give his whole time,* for eleven months at least, to the school and its patrons. With such an arrangement, demon- stration experiments could be conducted throughout the summer to illustrate the value of different fertilizers and different methods of cultivation, the^effect of spraying orchards and vegetables, and numerous other features of agricul- tural practice which are now well established in the more highly specialized agricultural districts but are coming too slowly into general practice. During the school vacations the principal could also render effective aid to the farmers of the township by visiting their orchards, gardens, and fields and advising them on matters of practice which are as yet new and unfamiliar to them. He could show them how to mix their own fertilizers, how to prepare and apply various liquid and dust insecticides and fungicides, how to breed up their field crops, how to renovate the many neglected orchards, etc. Of course Councill INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 407 there are many good farmers who are able to get and are now getting just such information from books and bulletins and agricultural journals, but there are also many who are not so fortunate and will go on doing things "in the good old way" until they fall hopelessly behind their neighbors in the struggle for existence. Such men need to be shown. The Waterford High School is a small school and an inexpensive school. It is one of the oldest schools in western Pennsylvania and is located in a com- munity which is almost purely agricultural and inclined to be conservative. And yet it has broken away from old ideals more completely than any other school in the state and for four years has offered its pupils the opportunity to pursue a vocational course of study. That this opportunity has been appre- ciated is fully demonstrated by the fact that during these four years at least 45 per cent, of the pupils have elected the vocational course and at the present time over 88 per cent, of them are taking this course. The agricultural course at Waterford embraces practically all of the educa- tional features of the other courses, gives valuable manual training in the making and manipulation of apparatus and materials which the other courses do not afford, arouses interest and gives considerable information concerning the fundamental industry of the community, and in several ways renders effective aid to the members of the community outside of the school. Thus it is making real progress in bringing the interests of the school and the home closer together. CECIL COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SCHOOL, CALVERT, MARYLAND D. J. CROSBY Prior to the autumn of 1906 the northwestern part of Cecil County, Mary- land, was without high-school facilities of any kind. There were numerous small country schools but none of these carried the pupils beyond the seventh grade and several of them failed to carry them much beyond the sixth grade. Upon the request of the patrons of Calvert and vicinity the Cecil County School Board decided in the summer of 1906 to establish at Calvert a high school, and to give the course of study an agricultural trend. Calvert is a small hamlet consisting of two stores, a church, a Quaker meeting-house, a blacksmith shop, a primary-school building, and a few scat- tered dwellings. It is surrounded by rich farm land which is occupied by a thriving rural population engaged in general farming and the production of milk. 'Having decided upon a school at this point, the school board appealed to the Maryland Agricultural College and the United States Department of Agriculture for aid in securing a competent teacher and outlining a suitable course of study. The Department of Agriculture, through its Office of Experiment Stations, responded to this appeal by furloughing Mr. H. O. Sampson, a graduate of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, who had had experience in teaching agriculture in an elementary high 4o8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National school in Pennsylvania, to take charge of the school as principal and teacher of agriculture. The school was opened November 5, 1906, in a small two-room school building rented for a nominal sum from the Society of Friends. This build- ing, which is still occupied by the school, is 45 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 16 feet high to the eaves. It contains a schoolroom 31 feet long by 28^ feet wide. In the rear of thio is a recitation room 28 J feet by 11 feet. In the large room there are seats for 52 pupils. Two teachers were employed the first year, the principal and one assistant, and the salary roll was $1,100. Thirty- eight pupils were enrolled on the first day and fifty-eight during the year. The small recitation room was supplied with a case for supplies and apparatus, and a laboratory table, and became the agricultural laboratory of the school. All pupils were required to study agriculture which was taught by means of textbooks, lectures, laboratory exercises, and field trips. The following statement from the Annual Report of the Director of the OflSce of Experiment Stations for 1907 gives an indication of the success of the school during this first year and the estimation placed upon it by the patrons of the school. The principal, in addition to his regular work, visited the elementary schools within a radius of four or five miles from Calvert, giving talks on nature-study and elementary agriculture, and helping the teachers to start work along these lines, and in the spring months conducted night school for the large boys who were compelled to drop out of day school to assist in farm work. Practically all of the boys attended night school regularly, and at the close of the year passed the examinations given to the other students. The school won the approval of the community almost immediately. Within four months after it opened plans for a permanent school were set in motion, with the result that the county school board appropriated $5,000 for a high-school building at Calvert. Plans for this building were drawn and submitted for bids and a site was donated, but it was found that the appropriation would not cover the cost of the structure planned. Building operations have therefore been postponed until more money can be raised. REVENUE AND EXPENDITURES The school is supported by state and county taxes. The budget for 1907-8 includes nearly $3,000 from the county fund. A bill was before the legislature providing for the appropriation of $2,000 annually by the state in support of this school. At the time of my visit it was supposed that the bill had become a law. It was discovered later that in the confusion incident to the closing work of the session it had been overlooked and consequently the school will not secure state aid this year. The expenditures for the cur- rent school year will be approximately as follows : equipment, $300, repairing buildings, $200. TEACHERS The principal receives $1,600 for 9 months, and teaches agriculture, science, and mathematics. The first assistant receives $400 and teaches literature, rhetoric, geography, and grammar. The second assistant receives $400 and teaches literature, history, and mathematics: total expenditure, $2,900. CouncJU INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 409 PUPILS The enrollment of pupils during the present year has been 17 in the prepar- atory class, 15 in the first-year class, and 25 in the second-year class. COURSE OF STUDY Grade Prep. year. First year. Second y6ar Third vear. Fourth year. Language mg, r. Ul mar, hterature Spelling, gram- mar, composi- Grammar, liter- ature, compo- sition Literature, rhe- toric, compo- sition, Latin Literature, rhe- toric, compo- sition, Latin Mathematics Arithmetic Arithmetic, gebra Farm and busi- ness arithme- tic, algebra Farm book- keeping, plane and solid ge- ometry Geometry, trig- onometry, and farm survey- ing Science Elementary ag- riculture, ge- ography Agriculture, plants and soils, physical geography Agriculture, farm crops, botany Agriculture, domestic ani- mals, physics Agriculture, farm manage- ment; chemis- try, general and agricul- tural History United States and Maryland history United States and Maryland history; civics English history; civics Ancient history Mediaeval and modem his- tory; review of United States history General* Exercises Agricultural practice Agricultural practice Agricultural practice Farm mechan- ics; agricultvu-- al practice Farm mechan- ics; field sur- veying and mappmg; agricultural practice * Including special agricxiltural programs every three or four weeks on Friday afternoon. AGRICULTURE I. Class-Room Exercises Preparatory Year Study of a textbook covering in a very elementary way the subject of agriculture. Hatch and Haselwood's Elementary Agriculture. First Year The structure and physiology of plants. — How plants feed, grow, and reproduce, and their relation to light, heat) moisture, air, and soil. Goff's Principles 0} Plant Culture. Soils. — Their nature, functions, origin, properties, classes; relation to temperature, air, and moisture, and their management, including tillage, drainage, the use of manures, and the effect of cropping. Lectures and laboratory work. Second Year Farm crops. — Study of the principal field, orchard, and garden crops of the region with reference to culture, protection from insect pests and diseases, and methods of har- vesting and marketing. Hunt's Cereals. Bailey's Principles of Fruit Culture. Third Year Domestic animals. — Classes, types, breeds, care, and management of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, and poultry. Score card and judging practice. Study of dairy animals — their feeding, care, and management. Milk — its composition, handling, and uses. Brooks's Animal Husbandry. Fourth Year Farm management. — Comparison of dififerent systems of cropping and tillage; different types of farming — such as grain farming, stock farming, and dairy farming. Farm plans including size and location of fields, location of buildings, fences, drains, and roads. Study of buildings, water and sewage systems, and roads. Use, care, and management of farm machinery. Farm accounts, including feed, milk, crop, and breeding records. 4IO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nationa. II. Practice Work Preparatory Year Laboratory exercises. — Demonstrations by the teacher and simple experiments with soils and plants by pupils. First Year Laboratory exercises. — Seed testing, experiments with plants and soils. Field exercises. — Studies of plants and soils and farm operations. Plat work. Second Year Laboratory exercises. — Selecting and scoring farm crops, study of injurious insects. Field exercises. — Plat work, spraying and pruning, field excursions, and corn and grain judging. Third Year Laboratory exercises. — Studies of milk, butter, and other dairy products. Field exercises. — Plat work and stock judging. Fourth Year Laboratory exercises. — Chemistry of soils and plant and animal life. Field exercises. — Plat work, stock judging, study of farm machinery, buildings, roads, drainage systems, etc. Originally it was intended to begin the work of the school with the eighth grade as is done in the standard high schools of Maryland, but owing to the poor preparation of many of the pupils it was found advisable to admit some who really belonged in the seventh grade and to introduce a preparatory or seventh-grade year. Agriculture is taught in the three grades now represented in the school and will be taught in the two remaining grades as soon as the pupils reach these. Five recitation periods of thirty minutes each are devoted to class work in agriculture during the thirty-six weeks that the school is in session, and from three to five thirty-minute laboratory periods during each week are devoted to experiments and demonstrations. Field trips and studies are usually taken on Friday afternoons between the afternoon recess and the closing hour. Sometimes on the longer trips the students are held until five o'clock. About once a month the last half of Friday afternoon is devoted to an agricultural program consisting of music, recitations, essays on agricultural subjects, and debates. AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT The school has very little special equipment for laboratory work in agri- culture. It has a few test tubes, an evaporating dish, one or two beakers, a Florence flask, a kitchen scale, a laboratory table, a lot of tin tomato cans, a number of sieves, seed testing boxes, and other simple contrivances made by the boys. Some land is available which might be used for school gardens but no gardens have been started at the school except flower gardens for decorative purposes. During the past year, however, the pupils had gardens at their homes which were planted with seeds furnished by the principal and some of which were inspected by the principal. Councilj INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 411 OBSERVATIONS BY THE VISITOR General Condition oj the School My arrival at the school was entirely unexpected. I reached the building about eleven o'clock and found the pupils industriously but quietly going about their work. The large room which I enteied first was not unlike an ordinary country schoolroom with a stove in the center and rows of seats running from front to rear. In the rear of the room was a raised platform with a piano purchased with the proceeds of entertainments held by the pupils. In the middle of the platform was the principal's table and at the left a long laboratory table. The latter held fourteen tomato cans containing soil experiments by seven boys and girls in the preparatory class who were endeavoring to learn whether surface tillage would conserve moisture in the soil. Each pupil had filled two cans with soil which was packed and saturated with moisture and then allowed to stand on the table while the moisture gradually evaporated. The surface in one can was stirred daily while that in the other was allowed to bake. Near at hand was a kitchen scale upon which the pupils weighed their cans, and found clear indication of the value of tillage as a moisture conservator. On one edge of the table was a piece of apparatus consisting of three lamp chimneys which the principal had arranged to demonstrate the difference between capillary and free moisture or drainage water in soils. The remainder of the table was occupied by three boxes about two feet wide and two and one- half feet long and four inches deep, containing samples of corn which were being tested for farmers by the second-year pupils. The principal had charge of the large room and conducted most of his classes and demonstrations there. One of his assistants occupied the recitation room in the rear; the other assistant was ill at the time of my visit and her work was being carried on by the principal and first assistant. I was told that her work was carried on largely in a small room in a building across the way. Condticting a Recitation in Agriculture I listened to recitations in agriculture by pupils of the preparatory class, the first-year class, and the second-year class. As yet there has been no third- or fourth-year class. The preparatory students were using Hatch and Haselwood's Elementary Agriculture, and the recitation I heard was on ** Feed- ing the Stock." The pupils in this class were only about thirteen to fifteen years old, but they seemed to have a pretty good comprehension of the different purposes for which we feed farm animals and the kinds of feed. The teacher did not confine himself to the textbook but asked questions which would bring out expressions of opinion from the pupils concerning their own experiences or observations concerning the feeding of animals. Such terms as fats, car- bohydrates, and protein were understood as well apparently as pupils could understand them without a previous knowledge of chemistry. The first-year class, with Goff's Principles oj Plant Culture as a textbook, were studying ''Insect Enemies of Plants." They distinguished clearly and 412 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National intelligently between insects with biting mouth-parts and insects with sucking mouth-parts and explained the kind of spraying material or other remedies which must be used to combat these different classes of insects. It was appar- ent that they had studied a textbook and yet there was a notable absence of implicit and unquestioning reliance upon the textbook which is often painfully apparent among pupils studying more or less abstract subjects. They had applied the information in the textbook to their own conditions and drawn upon their own experiences for examples to confirm or combat the theories advanced in the textbook. The pupils of the second-year class were studying Bailey's Principles of Fruit Culture. Their recitation on the first day of my visit was in the nature of a written review discussing the relative value of tillage and commercial fertil- izers in orchard management. The papers had been written on the previous day and were read in class and criticized on the day of my visit. Some of the papers were excellent, and some were full of the ordinary crudities of expression of the high-school pupil, but nearly all showed originality in content. The two papers given below, one by a boy of sixteen, and the other by a girl of seventeen, are among the best of those which were read. THE USE OF TILLAGE AND FERTILIZER IN GROWING CROPS VICTOR WILSON, AGED 1 6 YEARS To obtain the best results in growing crops it is often necessary to till the land well and also to use fertilizers in a judicious manner. The benefits derived from tillage are very numerous, and show that tillage is of very great importance. Tillage improves the physical condition of the land. It makes the soil finer and gives greater feeding surface to the roots. It increases the depth of the soil and gives the roots more room. It also improves the physical condition by warming and drying the soil in spring, and reducing the extremes of temperature and moisture. That the soil is in good physical condition is of great importance. The texture of the soil influ- ences its physical condition, and is really of more importance than the amount of plant food which the soil contains. If the texture is very coarse or the land becomes hard or lumpy, plants will not thrive because they cannot use the plant food that is in the soil. Tillage tends to remedy this. By breaking up the soil it makes the plant food available as the roots can then penetrate the soil better, and get the food. It is said that "the chemist cannot tell what a soil will produce, he can only tell what it contains." This is because tillage has such a great influence. The rich soil may yield a poor crop if not well tilled and allowed to become poor in physical condition. So we see that tillage is of great importance, and it may well be said that tillage is manure. Tillage, besides improving the physical condition of the land, does a great deal toward saving moisture. It increases the water-holding capacity of the soil, as in breaking up the soil particles there is a greater surface of soil particles surrounded with water. Tillage checks evaporation from the surface, by stopping the water from rising so rapidly by capil- lary attraction. In this way tillage may save a great deal of soil moisture, and is said to be next to irrigation in power to hold water. In dry regions tillage in this way may be very useful. Tillage also augments chemical activities in the soil by aiding in setting free plant food, by promoting nitrification, and by hastening the decomposition of organic matter. So we see that tillage may do a great deal for the soil, and this is the reason why lands which are well tilled always grow better crops. Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 413 As plants use up a certain amount of the plant food, lands which are farmed a long time may become deficient in the food elements used by the plant. It then becomes neces- sary to return this plant food in the form of fertilizers. What kind and the amount of fertilizers to use is a question which the farmer himself must answer, as all lands are not the same. He himself, by working with his soil and observing things about it, may dis- cover the treatment which it needs. If his orchard or other crop is doing well, it probably is receiving the right treatment, but if it is not doing well some change is needed. If there is an excessive growth of wood in the orchard at the expense of fruit, there is probably too much nitrogen in the soil, but if there is not enough of wood growth and the leaves turn yellow and drop off early, this is a sign that the soil is deficient in nitrogen. This nitrogen may be obtained in sufl5cient amount by good tillage, by the use of leguminous cover crops, and by stable manures. Quick results are obtained by using nitrogenous materials such as nitrate of soda. The farmer should remember that plants need all of the plant food-elements instead of just some of them. For instance, if the soil is deficient in phosphoric acid and potash, it would be useless to apply nitrogen. Heavy clay soils mostly contain phosphoric acid and potash in a sufficient amount, and this may be made available by tillage and applying humus. However, it is advisable to add these elements to the soil if it is cropped a great deal. The farmer should not rely on chemical fertilizers altogether, as they contain no humus. If there is no humus present, the soil will become lifeless in spite of plant food It is better to use commercial fertilizers in rotation with stable manures, or other things supplying humus. It is not always well to mix the fertilizers, but apply the different ones separately, as some parts of the land may need more of a certain element than in other places. Farmers sometimes do not appreciate the importance of humus in the soil. A clay soil which has become hard and lumpy has gotten that way on account of having no humus. If the farmer has much of this kind of soil he should take measures to improve it. The first step is to improve the physical condition of this soil by adding humus. Stable manure is useful in doing this. He may plow under a crop of some kind, and after a while may get a catch of clover. This when turned under will supply humus. After the physical condition of the soil is improved fertilizers may then be applied with benefit. This may take a long time and hard work, but can be done if it is carried out wisely. In the use of fertilizers the farmer should experiment and learn what his soil seems to need. In the case of fruit growing, the only general statement which can be made is that liberal applications of phosphoric acid and potash should be made if the best results are expected and he may be able to supply his nitrogen more cheaply by cover crops and tillage than by buying chemicals. So we see that the subject of tillage and the use of fertilizers is very important, and if the farmer uses good judgment about these things he will be successful. THE USE OF TILLAGE AND FERTILIZER IN THE GROWING OF CROPS ANNA K. RITTENHOUSE, AGED 1 7 YEARS This should be a very important question to every farmer in the community. Some farmers may say that commercial fertilizer which has been applied to the soil will produce the best crops while others will hold that thoro tillage will be better, thus causing a great difference of opinion. We are told that some farmers who are not over fond of the farm will ask needless questions regarding the kind and quantity of fertilizers to apply to his land. No person can answer the questions for him but by careful study of his plantation day after day he will soon discover the kind of treatment which the soil needs. If his plantation is giving satis- factory results we may be sure that a certain amount of fertilizer, which is needful, has Ibeen applied. 414 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National One should be very careful in using these commercial fertilizers, as all the land does not require the same kind of plant food. For example, a large application of nitrogen upon the soil which is deficient in potash and phosphorus cannot be expected to give the best results. In regard to tilling an orchard some very satisfactory results have been obtained. An orchard which is in sod and not doing well should certainly be plowed and tilled. Sufficient nitrogen which is necessary for the welfare of the plant may be gotten into the soil by thoro tillage, by the use of leguminous cover crops, and by using stable manure. Some farmers do not appreciate the importance of the presence of humus in their soils. If humus is not present in the sandy soils they become loose and leachy while clay soils bake and become lumpy. If a farmer has much of this kind of soil it would be of little benefit to apply commercial fertilizers. He should first put it in the right kind of a condition to grow crops, after which a crop of clover should be plowed under. If this does not give immediate satisfactory results stable manure should then be applied. In time the land which has undergone thorough tillage will grow a good crop of crimson clover. There is no other way to find out which will produce the better crops, commercial fertilizer or thorough tillage, than to try for oneself, as farming cannot be done by recipe. Thus we see there is much to be learned about the important question of tilling and fertilizing a crop of any kind. This class on the second day of my visit recited on principles governing the selection of varieties and the selection of varieties of apples for Cecil County. In this they depended upon the textbook for the principles of selec- tion but were compelled to draw upon their own information and judgment in making selections for Cecil County. At the close of the recitation they were referred to a Farmers' Bulletin of the United States Department of Agri- culture on Varieties of Fruit Recommended for Planting which contains lists of apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits which are "highly recommended," ''recommended," and "recommended for trial" in the different fruit districts of the United States. In this they were to study the fruits recommended for the. district in which Maryland is located and check up or make additions to their lists. LABORATORY WORK The preparatory class and the second-year class had laboratory exercises or laboratory work in progress at the time of my visit. The laboratory work of. the preparatory class was concerned with the conservation of moisture in soils, a subject which they had studied a few days before. This has been described above. On the first day of my visit the teacher performed a demon- stration to show the difference between capillary moisture and free moisture in soils. He filled three lamp chimneys, mentioned above, with finely pul- verized soil which was supported below by pieces of cheesecloth tied over the lower ends of the chimneys. One of the chimneys was suspended with its lower end dipping into a tumbler of water, another was given a small amount of moisture at the top, and the third was saturated. The first two were to show that small amounts of moisture move up and down readily in the soil, the third was to show that wherever there is an excess of moisture in the soil it Coundll INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 41;; readily passes off below. While the water was permeating the dry soil in these chimneys the teacher held the attention of the class by performing a little demonstration to show the presence of moisture in soil which seems *'as dry as powder. " He put a teaspoonful of "dust" in a test-tube and held the latter in the flame of an alcohol lamp, at the same time telling the children ]Lo watch closely for any indications of moisture. In just a moment there were excited exclamations from a half-dozen of the boys and girls ; an abundance of moisture was seen distinctly in the inside of the test-tube. This the teacher explained was the hydroscopic moisture or film moisture which surrounds each individual particle in the soil and can only be driven off by the application of considerable heat. I was told that demonstrations and laboratory exercises by the pupils similar to those described above have been in progress practically all of the time since the school began, and there was abundant evidence in a number of pieces of home-made apparatus in the back room of the schoolhouse to show that much attention is given to the laboratory features of instruction. Prac- tically all of the apparatus except a few articles mentioned previously is made by the boys, either at home or at the schoolhouse. The second-year class had no new laboratory exercises in progress at the time of my visit. The members of this class were making practical application of the laboratory work which they performed last year at about this time. They were testing seed corn for farmers. A few weeks ago the principal of the school announced through the different county papers that farmers who desired to have their seed corn tested could number the ears they had selected for seed and send six kernels taken from different parts of each ear to the school in packets numbered to correspond with the numbers on the ears and the pupils would test the vitality of the corn and send reports to the farmers. Up to the time of my visit eighteen farmers had sent in seed corn to be tested and one set of samples from fifty ears was received while I was there. The following letter accompanied the samples: Rising Sun, Maryland April 7, 1908 Mr. H. O. Sampson, Calvert, Maryland. Dear Sir: I mailed you yesterday samples from 50 ears, seed corn that I have kept in the kitchen during the winter. Will you please test the growing qualities of same and report and oblige, Very truly yours, A stamped addressed envelope accompanied the letter for the return of the report. These samples were turned over to two boys in the second-year class who arranged the seed tester according to the Holden method and assumed entire charge of the testing. They will closely observe the progress of germination of the corn, set the boxes by the stove on cold nights, carry them home on 4i6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Friday nights in case there is danger of cold weather and in six or seven days prepare a report showing the percentage of kernels that germinated from each ear. This service on the part of the school is of considerable assistance this year owing to the fact that so much of the seed corn thruout the country is low tn vitality. The work of the school has also resulted in several farmers undertaking to test their own seed corn. Some of these, it was related, were farmers who have opposed the school and are not yet willing to come to it for assistance but are not so short-sighted as to refuse to make the most of valuable suggestions reaching them indirectly from the school. I inquired diligently but failed to hear of anyone who had ever tested seed corn in this vicinity before the work was taken up with the pupils in the Cecil County School. FIELD TRIPS The field trip is employed as another means of illustrating the work of the textbook, or perhaps it would be better to speak of it as a means of vitalizing the work of the textbook. The pupils go out into the stone quarries or highway cuts to study the formation of soils, into the fields to study corn, alfalfa, and other field crops, into home yards and cemeteries to study shrubbery and orna- mental trees, and to different nearby farms to study the farm animals, the construction of buildings, methods of farming, etc. SPECIAL EXERCISES About once a month a. special agricultural program is given on Friday afternoon between 2 130 and 4 o'clock. I had the pleasure of listening to one of these. The following is the program: AGRICULTURAL PROGRAM Song, School. Recitation, Esther White. Essay — "Windbreaks for Fruit Orchards," Lucy Yerkes. Essay — "How to Protect Plants from Unfavorable Environment," Ruth Murray. Essay — "Selecting a Seed Corn Sample," Margaret Cameron. Essay — "Plant Foods," Leonard Wilson. Debate: "Resolved, That Tillage Is of More Importance Than Fertilizers." Victor Wilson, Maris Touchton, Affirmative. Earl Anderson, Robert Caruthers, Negative. Essay — "Why Girls Should Study Agriculture," Mabel Barber. Essay — "Some Interesting Facts We Have Learned About Agriculture," Norman Eng- land. Recitation, Edna Mayberry. Song, School. I was much surprised at the facility of expression aind the originality dis- played not only in the written exercises but also in the debate. I have taught college rhetoric and examined thousands of written exercises and I think I fully appreciate the difficulties confronting the teacher who has essay subjects to assign or the pupil who has a subject to select. I am also painfully aware of u Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 417 the prevailing stiffness, woodenness, and lack of personality and originality in the average written exercises. I was happily surprised at the almost entire lack of such symptoms in the written exercises making up this agricultural program. The pupils had written about subjects which they had made their own, subjects upon which they had personal knowledge, and they had drawn upon their personal knowledge fully as much as upon books. The debate was especially good. The debaters referred to the publications of the Mary- land, the New York, and other experiment stations as authorities for their statements and also drew upon their personal observations and knowledge for illustrations. For young boys they were skillful in presentation and quick to take advantage of any weakness of the argument of their opponents. HOViT THE SCHOOL IS HELPING THE FARMERS The service of the school in testing seed corn for farmers has already been mentioned. A corn show was held at the schoolhouse recently and seventy samples of corn were exhibited. There were a farmers' exhibit, a boys' exhibit, and a girls' exhibit. Some of the best-appearing samples at the corn show were subsequently tested and found to be surprisingly low in vitality. This, accord- ing to a statement made to me by one of the patrons of the school, was a great surprise to the farmers and led several of them directly to make application to the school to have their seed corn tested. The school is aiding the farmers in a number of other ways. About a year ago the principal of the school made arrangements with a farmer not far from the schoolhouse to conduct a spraying demonstration to rid the farmer's orchard of San Jose scale. The farmer pruned his orchard according to sug- gestions made by the principal and authorized the latter to procure for him a spraying outfit. The principal arranged with the state entomologist to order the spraying outfit and later to come to Calvert and conduct a spraying demon- stration. The state entomologist came to Calvert on Friday afternoon and gave the pupils a talk on insect friends and enemies. In the evening a public meeting was held in the local church and farmers and their families from six to eight miles around drove in to hear the lecture on spraying to combat the San Jose scale and other harmful insects. On Saturday morning a meeting was held in the orchard which had been prepared for the demonstration, and practically all of those who had attended the meeting on the previous evening were on hand to see the demonstration. The state entomologist prepared the lime-sulphur-salt solution, explaining carefully each step in the process and calling upon different farmers to describe what had been done. In this way he made sure that everyone present comprehended each step in the operation. When everything was ready the tank of the spraying apparatus was filled and the orchard was sprayed. It was far simpler and less laborious than many of the farmers had anticipated and as a result of this demonstration at least four orchards have been sprayed this year which had never before been treated to an application of insecticide or fungicide. 4l8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Farmers are coming to look upon the school as a sort of clearing-house for information. They call upon the principal to speak or get speakers at the farmers' club. They apply to him for pupils to take part in their institute programs. The newspapers of the county are anxious to have the pupils report news items from the school each week and a number of them print at frequent intervals essays on agricultural subjects written by the pupils. The school has tested one sample of clover seed which was found to contain dodder and trefoil, and has sent ten samples of clover seed to the United States De- partment of Agriculture to be tested. At the request of farmers it has for- warded samples of fertilizers to the state experiment stations for analysis. The principal is frequently asked to get seeds for teachers in the surrounding schools, to identify varieties of apples, to tell the age of horses, and to perform other little services not only for the immediate patrons of the school but for farmers living several miles beyond the home of the most distant pupil. All of this indicates to me, not only that the Cecil County Agricultural School is fortunate in having a principal who commands the respect and con- fidence of the patrons of the school, but also that the most unpretentious county high school if given the right kind of teachers, teachers with the right point of view toward country life, can be of immense service, not only to the pupils who are enrolled in the school, but also to all of the patrons of the school. The home and the school can be brought together to their mutual advantage. OPINIONS OF PATRONS OF THE SCHOOL I talked with one or more of the parents in ten of the homes represented at the Cecil County Agricultural School. Only three of these had any unfavor- able criticisms to offer and only one of the three criticized the teaching of agriculture. Nearly all commended the work of the school in unqualified terms. I will give below substantially all the opinions expressed, designating the different patrons by number. No. I. — The father of two girls in the school who are glad to have an opportunity to study agriculture because they expect to teach in rural districts and think that the study of agriculture will help to make their work more successful. No. 2. — Is one of the three trustees of the local county school. Is sure that the patrons like the school better on account of agriculture being taught. Called attention to the valuable work the school is doing for the farmers by testing their seed corn. No. 3. — Mother of a boy in the preparatory class and a girl in the second-year class. Is well pleased with the school. Her children Uke agriculture better than most of the other subjects taught. No. 4. — Father of a boy in the preparatory class and a boy in the second-year class. Thinks his boys are much interested in the study of agriculture. Is sure that the school is of great value to boys who have fallen behind and would not be able to carry the full course of study. (It seems that several such boys were allowed by the principal to take agriculture and such other work as they could handle.) The school is also reaching a number of boys of limited means whose parents would not be able to send them away to school. No. 5. — Father of a boy in the preparatory class. His boy "just loves agriculture and that is the only thing he does like." The boy could not be kept in school were it not I Couucin INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 419 for his interest in agriculture. The mother of this boy agreed that the school was well suited to the needs of the boys but thought that a local normal school would be better for the girls, many of whom expect to teach. No. 6. — Father of a boy in the preparatory class and a boy in the second-year class. Has taken both boys out of school because he needs them on the farm. Criticizes the teachers for leaving the schoolhouse at the noon recess, but had nothing to say against the teaching of agriculture. Thinks it would be of great service to the boys if they could continue in school and to him if his boys could stay with him. No. 7. — Father of a boy in the preparatory class. Is well pleased with the school. Has no criticism to ofifer. Is in favor of the teaching of agriculture. The only unfavorable criticisms he has heard came from people who have no children in school. No. 8. — Father of two boys in the preparatory class. Is well satisfied. Does not know much about the school, but knows that his bojrs are interested in agriculture. No. 9. — Father of a girl in the second-year class. Is dissatisfied. Was one of the original petitioners for the school but thinks it is not the right kind of school. He would prefer "an ordinary graded high school. "^ Thinks the pupils are pushed ahead too rapidly. Does not believe in teaching agriculture in the school. Thinks that the boys who want to learn how to farm should spend several years as apprentices to such farmers as he is. No. 10. — ^A country physician and father of two girls in the school. Gives unqualified indorsement to the school and believes it enables many boys and girls whose parents could not afford to send them away to continue their education beyond the common schools. He goes into practically every home represented in the school and finds very little unfavorable criticism. DIFFICULTIES AND THEIR REMEDY Only two serious difficulties have arisen in this school and these are by no means insurmountable. The first and most obvious difficulty is one common to all rural schools, that of keeping the large boys in school thruout the year. These boys are needed on the farms and it seems impossible to get them started with the opening of school in September or to keep them after the rush of farm work begins in the spring. The other difficulty is a financial one. The school is expensive. It will cost this year over $50 . 00 for each pupil. The question of expense was not raised by any of the patrons of the school with whom I talked, and it is not likely that the patrons have felt the expense. With all of the funds coming from state and county taxes, the expense of conducting a new school is not felt in any one locality. I asked one man if his taxes had been much higher since the school had been running. "Not a cent," was his immediate reply. But the school board and other county and state officers charged with the administration of public funds will discover sooner or later that this school is costing more per pupil than some other larger high schools are costing and will then demand a reason, and the reason given must be pretty direct and tangible or the funds will be cut down. Both difficulties could be easily removed by consolidating three or four of « The course of study of the Calvert Agricultural High School follows closely the course laid down by the: state superintendent for high schools in Maryland. 420 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nationai the small schools near Calvert with the primary school and the high school at Calvert. Seven public roads converge at Calvert and on these roads there are at least two schools within easy walking-distance of Calvert and several others within a radius of three miles. For the pupils living outside of a radius of one and a half miles school-wagon routes could be arranged with the greatest of ease. With a strong consolidated school at Calvert the cost per pupil in the high school could be considerably reduced. At the same time provision for the boys who have to work on the farms could be made by offering a six-months course opening October 15 and closing April 15. A plan similar to this has been followed with gratifying success in agricultural high schools in Minnesota, and Nebraska, where none of the courses are continued longer than six months in a year. The problem at Calvert would not be quite so simple because it would be necessary to provide not only the six-months special courses for boys but also the regular nine-months courses in the high school and the lower grades. It is probable that some separate classes for the special pupils would have to be organized in the fall and spring terms and th*is could be done by making the work of the teacher of agriculture light in the regular classes in these two terms. But whether changes are made or not the Cecil County Agricultural School is doing good work, unusually good for the size of the school and the resources at its command. There is nothing phenomenal about it. The school has met with popular approval simply because a good teacher, trained in agriculture and familiar with the needs of the rural community, is making the most of the means at his command to train his pupils to know, use, and enjoy the common things around them on the farm. THE JOHN SWANEY CONSOLIDATED COUNTRY SCHOOL IN MAGNOLIA TOWNSHIP, PUTNAM COUNTY, ILLINOIS O. J. KERN The John Swaney Consolidated Country School is located in Magnolia Township, Putnam County, Illinois, beside a country road, two miles from the small village of McNabb. The building stands near the north side of a beautiful campus consisting of twenty-four acres of timber pasture. This campus was donated by Mr. John Swaney, a farmer of moderate circumstances, a man who believes in better things for country children. His was a worthy deed in behalf of a worthy cause and should prove a suggestion and an inspira- tion to public-spirited farmers in other communities. This consolidated school is an illustration of the fundamental fact that if the country people want better schools in the country for country children they must spend more money for education and spend it in a better way. There is no other way. It is comparatively easy for a speaker before a farmers' insti- tute meeting to gain the intellectual assent of the average farming community to the above monetary proposition. But to go to the farmers on the morning Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 421 after, and get their financial consent to vote bonds for a better equipment and make an increased tax levy for a better teaching force is quite a different matter. And yet this is actually what must be done, and is what has been done in Mag- nolia township. SOME FINANCIAL DATA Unit of organization. — ^The consolidated district comprises three ordinary country-school districts that were consolidated by due process under the Illinois school law. Land area and valuation. — ^The consolidated district comprises fourteen sections of land and the assessed valuation under the Illinois revenue law is one hundred seventy-nine thousand dollars ($179,000). By the Illinois revenue law the assessed valuation is supposed to represent one-fifth of the fair cash value. It is upon the assessed valuation that all taxes are levied. The selling price of improved farms which comprise three-fourths of the district is $150 per acre. The selling price of the timber land which comprises the remaining one-fourth is $75 per acre. School levy. — ^The school levy for the school year of 1907-8 was $2,900 for the building fund to pay bonds issued for the erection of the new building, and $3,900 for general educational purposes: securing better teachers, janitor service, etc. Twenty pupils are paying tuition at present, bringing in an annual revenue of $375. Practically all the money raised for school purposes in Illi- nois is raised by local taxation. THE BUILDING AND EQUIPMENT The school is housed in a $12,000 two and a half-story brick building, containing four recitation rooms, two laboratories, a large auditorium, two library and office-rooms, a boys' manual-training room, a girls' playroom, furnace-room and cloakrooms. All are lighted with gasoline gas generated by a plant, the reservoir of which is stored outside of the building. The labora- tories are also furnished with gas from this plant. The building is heated with steam and furnished with running water supplied by an air-pressure system. The building and equipment cost $16,000. Donations. — There are people living in this consolidated district and community who are unselfish enough and who have sufficient faith in the consolidation of schools to aid the movement by material gifts. As a conse- quence the beautiful campus of twenty-four acres was donated by Mr. John Swaney. County Superintendent G. W. Hunt gave a set of manual-training tools. Besides these, the John A. Kay's estate, W. G. Griffith, F. E. Smith, John Wilson, Perry Mills, W. L. Mills, and Louis Priebe gave neat sums of money. In all about $2,000, besides the grounds, were donated to the school. TRANSPORTATION Wagons and cost. — Two teams are employed in bringing in the children from two of the old districts. The wagons cost $175 each and are owned by the district. Distance, round trip for one wagon, is nine miles, and nine and 422 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National one-half miles for the other. Drivers of the wagons are farmer boys living in the community who are in the high-school room. The horses are put in the school barn located on the campus. Each team costs $40 per month for twenty-two round trips, thus making an outlay of $1.82 per day for each wagon. As each wagon carries twenty children the cost per pupil daily is nine cents, about the price of two street car fares in a city. Grounds. — No finer environment, perhaps, can be found for a country school. The grounds, twenty-four acres in extent, are dotted with groups of the native forest trees. It is the purpose of the district to beautify the grounds still further according to a plan prepared by the Horticultural Department of the Illinois College of Agriculture. The teachers^ home. — Four or five farmers at their own expense fitted up one of the abandoned schoolhouses for a teachers' home, thus solving the prob- lem of a boarding-place for the teachers. The cost to the farmers was $500. The teachers pay nine dollars a month rent and hire an elderly woman for housekeeper. The teachers club together for the living expenses of the home. Janitor^s home. — An old tenant building located on the school grounds was fitted up for a janitor's home. The janitor has charge of the grounds, school building, and stables. He receives a salary of $30 per month and pays $5 dollars per month rent for his home. COURSE OF STUDY High school. — The course of study for the high school is given here in full. The reader will note that agriculture, manual training, and domestic art have a very important place along with the "culture" studies of the ordinary high-school course. The high-school course in the John Swaney Consoli- dated School is being flavored with country life and its interests. FIRST YEAR First Semester Second Semester English I. English I. Algebra. Algebra. Physiology. Physical Geography. Agronomy I, or Latin. Horticulture or Latin. Household Science or Manual Training. Household Science or Manual Training. SECOND YEAR EngUsh II. EngUsh II. Algebra 10 weeks. Geometry. Geometry 10 weeks. Botany. Zoology. Ancient History 10 weeks. Ancient History. Animal Husbandry or Household Science 10 Drawing. weeks. Music. THIRD YEAR English III. English III. Chemistry. Chemistry. Agronomy II, or Latin or Household Animal Husbandry or Latin or Household Science. 'Science. English History. English,,History. I Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 423 FOURTH YEAR English IV. English IV. Physics. Physics. Household Science or Agronomy III. Bookkeeping 10 weeks. American History. Arithmetic 10 weeks. Civics. A brief outline of the work in manual training, household science, and agriculture is here given. HOUSEHOLD SCIENCE Two and one-half years' work is offered in household science. The course runs parallel with that of the manual training and a part of the agriculture, and is elective. It includes an elementary study of: I. The composition and nutritive value of our common foods. II. Their relation to the needs of the body. • III. The principles of cooking of different foods. Besides this some work will be done in sewing and raflSa weaving. The first year only two hours a week are devoted to the work. MANUAL TRAINING Two hours a week during both semesters of the first year will be devoted to manual training. The course will be made up of a study of the construction of our common tools and of the structure of different kinds of woods. Bench work will be done; this work will occupy most of the time. AGRICULTURE — AGRONOMY I This course consists of a study of the seeds of our common grasses, grains, and garden vegetables. Some of the subjects noted are: the separation, identification, germination, and vitality of these seeds. The corn score card is also studied, and practical work in scoring is done. Along with this is a study of our most harmful weeds, and modes of eradicating them. Shaw's Weeds and How to Eradicate Them is used as a text. Bulle- tins from experiment stations are made use of. AGRONOMY II — SOIL PHYSICS In this course a study is made of the physical features of the soil. The origin of soils; different types of soils, and their characteristics; the composition of these soils and their behavior under different treatments are some of the subjects which will be considered. The work from the text will be supplemented by laboratory exercises which will occupy half the time given to the course. Laboratory work will be recorded in notebooks. , AGRONOMY III — SOIL FERTILITY In this course the chemical constituents of the soil will be considered. The effects of the rotation of crops and the different systems of farming will be noted. Laboratory work will accompany the recitation work. Bulletins from the experiment stations will be made use of. Notebooks will be kept. ANIMAL HUSBANDRY— ANIMAL HUSBANDRY I This course occupies the second half of the semester and takes up the study of swine; market classes and their grades, the breeding and care of swine, and judging will be studied. ANIMAL HUSBANDRY II This includes a semester's work, the first half of which will include a study of the principles of feeding. The second half will be given to the judging of horses and cattle. HORTICULTURE This course takes up the principles of fruit growing. The following subjects respecting fruit lands are considered: Location and climate, tillage, fertilizing, planting, and incidental care. Diseases of fruits, insects which injure fruits, and spraying are also 424 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Studied, the texts, H. Bailey Pruning receives much attention. Field trips and laboratory work supplement which are The Principles of Fruit Growing, and The Pruning Book, both by L. EXPERIMENT STATION SERIES I 1 2 3 4 5 SERIES II 2 3 4 5 SERIES III 1 2 3 4 5 SERIES IV 2 3 4 5 In order that the state may learn the needs and methods of improvement of the different large soil areas, experiment stations are established in these areas; in all there are now twenty-three. One of these stations is now being installed adjoining the campus on the east. This station contains a plat of ground consist- ing of six acres, and is divided into four series with five breeding plats in each series. This is to be conducted by the state, but the school will have the priv- ilege of observing the work of the station, and will have access to the records of results. A plan of the grounds is given here : Series I will be planted to corn; series II to oats and clover; series III to oats; series IV to cow peas, in 1907. Plats 2 and 4 have been fertilized with rock phosphate. The others were not. COURSE OF STUDY FOR THE GRADES BELOW THE HIGH-SCHOOL ROOM The pupils below the high school are grouped in two rooms in the same building and are taught by two normal graduates. The teachers are experi- enced and trained for their work. They are paid a salary of $60 per month each for a school year of nine months. The principal is also a normal-school graduate with one year and a half additional training in the Illinois College of Agriculture and receives $100 per month. His assistant in the high school is also teacher of domestic science with special training for this work, and receives the same salary as the grade teachers. The course of study for the first eight grades is that adopted for the country schools of lUinois, known as the State Course of Study for the Common Schools of Illinois. A copy may be obtained from C. M. Parker, publisher, Taylorville, Illinois. As far as the industrial features of this course are con- cerned it includes the following lines of work: 1. Construction work for the first and second grades. 2. Bench work for the eighth grade. 3. Household arts in connection with the physiology for seventh and eighth grades. 4. Course in argiculture for the seventh and eighth grades. It is not thought necessary to give the outlines in full in this report. THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL The first room visited was the primary room. The room was attractive in every respect, showing that a person of taste had charge of the instruction Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 425 of the little ones. This is in strong contrast to the interior of many country schoolrooms. Here was a trained teacher with but four grades, instead of the entire eight with perhaps only four or five primary pupils. These four or five beginners, in so many country schools as now organized and taught, are the very ones that are neglected. One objection to consolidation is that country people fear the evils of a crowded graded school. This must be guarded against of course, and the unit must be small enough so that the school shall not be crowded, but remain a local school and near the people. This can be done when only three country districts are grouped together. The mistake in consolidation is bringing the children to the town school. The country school then has disappeared. To be sure, a village of three or four hundred is essentially rural, but to consolidate with a center much above five hundred in population in general will weaken the country interest and take away the effect of the school as a force in the social life of the country community. In this primary room there were flowers on the teacher's desk and the organ. The presence of the organ showed that the teacher knew something about music and that the children were being taught it as a part of their education. The teacher could find time for it in the organization of the school with only four grades to teach instead of eight. There were not so many different recita- tions as in the ungraded country school, and consequently longer time for the class exercises. A beginner's class in reading was listened to with delight. This trained teacher had good methods and the primary pupils were learning to read in the right way. If the average patron of the country school could listen to this class exercise in reading and then listen to the alleged reading in many country schools as now taught, surely he would have a more open mind toward better teachers and better organized schools. A work table was at one end of the room and while one class was on the floor reciting, the smaller ones, especially, were grouped about this table seated on small kindergarten chairs and engaged in some occupation work of an educational character. This is in strong contrast to the occupations of primary children in the average country school. Too often they do nothing most of the day, either because the teacher does not know what to do with them, or cannot find time for what she would like to do. This teacher found time to give the children instruction in form and color; hence the work in clay-modeling and water color. It is not deemed necessary here to enlarge upon this in the education of country children. It is valuable, and this teacher was securing some good results. When these pupils finish the primary grades under training of the character they were receiving, even if they never pass through the high schools, they will have a finer insight into country life, for this teacher was utilizing the material surrounding this school. The room was glorified with the autumn beauty. Many variously colored leaves from the beautiful trees on the campus were used in the schoolroom decoration for the week. Contrast this with what actually obtains in thousands of country schools. 426 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (National The outlines for construction work for the month of November for the first grade, as given in the course of study referred to above, are as follows: Continue cutting and tearing to illustrate stories. Cut wigwams, bow and arrows, tomahawk, etc. Continue to use an occasional lesson in cutting from memory and ob- jects. Use shoe pegs and tooth picks in arranging design on desk. Fold pyramid, Thanksgiving basket. Combine house, ' square prism, and pyramid in making church. Fold Mayflower, cradle, and lanterns. The November outline for construction work in the second grade is as follows: Let the cutting and constructive work relate directly to the Thanksgiving work. Free cutting of turkey, pumpkin, Indian, Puritan, etc. Arrange these to form a complete picture. Make Puritan cradle, bonnet, canoe, wigwam, quiver, bow and arrow, mocca- sins, candle stick, lantern. Thanksgiving basket. Present a completed exercise and have pupils construct one like it without direction from the teacher. Teach pupils to under- stand the drawing of a pattern when drawn on the board. This will lead to the translation of a working drawing. Discriminate between a pattern and a working drawing. Plan suitable decorations by cutting from the paper desired units to be repeated in borders or surface designs. The exhibition of the work the pupils had done, as shown on the walls, reveals what the country children can do if they have wise educational leader- ship. The children in this room were having their training related to their environment. To do this there must be a trained teacher with a s)niipathetic insight into country life. This teacher seemed to have the insight and also the outlook. Such work is possible in the one-room country school, of course, if the right kind of a teacher is there; but with the consolidation of three small schools, or four at most, there are decided advantages. There is more likeli- hood of getting better teachers; somewhat larger classes can be formed, thus getting the enthusiasm that usually comes with numbers; better equipment is assured; larger school grounds are a certainty and a necessity; the social life of the child is enriched; and best of all, the school of three or four districts consolidated into one, out in the country, is still a local country school, and with telephones and transportation is nearer to the activities of all the people of the larger unit than was the one -room country school of twenty-five years ago to the people of the then smaller unit. There is danger in making the con- solidated unit too large. The writer pleads guilty to the fact of only a limited experience in consolidation. But it is his judgment that for the average township of six miles square with ten one-room country schools, instead of combining all ten near the geographical center, or with a town school of two or three thousand population not at the center, the farm would be better served, country life preserved, and agriculture spritualized, if the ten country schools were consolidated into three groups according to conditions, with the high- school work attempted in but one, and that school located as near as possible to the center of the township, the central school doing high-school work, having an additional force of instructors. To this central school all the older pupils could go who have finished the eighth grade of the three consolidated Councfll INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 427 schools. Consolidation must come, but it must come in response to natural needs to suit local conditions. This is true at the John Swaney Consolidated School in Magnolia township. It will cost more than the ordinary one-room school. It should cost more for it gives better service. The grammar-room was visited where are the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades under the direction of a teacher, a graduate of a state normal, a person trained for the specific work of the teacher. A recitation in United States history was listened to. The Impression produced on the listener was that the academic work was being well done. Here was a class in history taught by a person who knew history and its methods of presentation. There was time for a recitation. The pupils, under the questioning of the teacher, revealed whether they had mastered the lesson or not, and in the character of these statements revealed the method of work. There was clean-cut, clear, definite work in the ordinary academic subjects of the country-school course. There was an objective point and the pupils were shown how to arrive. Con- trast this with the average country school taught by the average teacher with from twenty-five to thirty-two daily recitations, and consider how much definite work could be expected from a recitation period of seven minutes in history or geography ? That there are one-room country schools in which good work is being done under such conditions only emphasizes what better results could be obtained under more favorable conditions. And the favorable conditions are here in this consolidated school, viz., a trained teacher; better organization; better equipment. These are fundamental in making better country schools. The agricultural work done in this grade was according to the outlines given in the state course. The visitor was shown some drawing work of the pupils where an ear of corn was the subject. There was a collection of short papers on thoroughbred stock, written by pupils, both as the result of observa- tion and reading. The history of course would come from reading, while economic facts, etc., would come from talks with fathers and those owning such breeds as were under discussion. Thus two school studies, language and drawing, at least, were being vitalized by the farm. The pupils were studying the score card for judging live stock and com. This in an elementary way, of course, leaving a more scientific study for the high school. Pupils had made a collection of leaves which were studied at the proper time. There was good water-color work being done by pupils of this room. Thus these country boys and girls were getting fundamental ideas of harmony of color and symmetry of form based on the life around them. Why ? Because this is a necessary part of their education and there was a trained teacher here who could give the necessary instruction. The outlines in agriculture as given for the month of November for the seventh, and also for the eighth grade, here follow : MONTH OF NOVEMBER— SEVENTH GRADE I. What insects have damaged the crops of the year in your district? Describe the damage and the extent of the loss. 428 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National 2. Stick a pin into a rotten apple and then into a sound one. Put the sound apple away and look at it every few days. Record what you find. Place another sound apple which has been treated in the same way in a refrigerator. Examine frequently and com- pare its condition with the apple kept in the temperature of the outside air. Explain the differences. What do the results suggest? 3. Make a map of the farm on which you live or of some farm in the district. 4. What farm, garden, and orchard plants reproduce only from seeds ? What ones by some other method than by seed ? What ones will not produce valuable varieties (not "come true") by seed ? (Read Farmers^ Bulletin No. 157.) 5. Fill one fruit jar with sand, another with loam, both free from sticks, stones, or other foreign matter; put on the cover loosely without rubber. Set in a warm place imtil well dried out. Weigh and determine the amount of soil. Then turn the cans bottom up in a dish of water. Note the comparative rapidity with which water will rise on the soil within the cans, when it has reached all the soil of each. Then dry them out again slowly, see which soil retains its moisture longest, and compute the amount taken up by each. (Read Goodrich, First Book of Farming, chapter iv.) 6. On how many days last year did the sun shine ? HOME WORK 7. Find how much a horse will eat in a month, and what will it cost to keep him a year. (Read Farmers' Bulletin No. 22.) 8. Where does a spavin grow on a horse? Sidebone? Splint? Curb? Thoro- pin? What does "knee sprung" mean? Ask a horseman. (Read Mcintosh, Diseases of Horses and Cattle, chap, xix.) 9. Find what is a day's work at the following: Plowing; cultivating com; husking com on the hill; husking from the shock; cutting wheat with the binder; shocking wheat; threshing; cutting hay; digging a ditch three feet deep for tile; digging a ditch three and one-half feet deep for tile. 10. Make an inventory of all the machinery used on the farm on which you live, with the cost of each piece. MONTH OF NOVEMBER— EIGHTH GRADE 1. Name some insects injurious to crops which have (a) biting mouth-parts; some insects which have (6) sucking mouth-parts. What kind of treatment is used to destroy the first class of insects ? What for the second class ? (Read Bailey, Principles of Agri- culture, pp. 166-69.) 2. What insect pests cause greatest loss to the apple growers in your section ? Write in your notebooks a description of one of these pests. (Read University of Illinois Agri- cultural Experiment Station Bulletins Nos. 108, 114, and Circular No. 107.) 3. Weigh a bushel of ears of corn just as it runs in husking. How many ears in the bushel ? Find the length of each ear. What is the average length of all the ears ? Select the best twenty ears in the bushel. What is their average length? Find the circum- ference (measured at one-third the distance from butt to tip) of these twenty ears. What is the average circumference of these ears ? What is the ratio of the average circumference to the average length ? Select the best ten ears and the poorest ten ears in the bushel. Weigh and record the weight of each ear. Shell each ear and weigh its cob. The weight of ear less the weight of its cob equals the weight of grain. Find the percentage of weight of grain to weight of ear in each of the ears in these two sets of ten. In what ears, best or poorest, is the percentage highest ? 4. What are the symptoms of colic in a horse ? What are the common causes for colic in horses ? What is the proper treatment for a horse suffering with the colic ? (Read Mcintosh, Diseases of Horses and Cattle, pp. 50-56.) 5. What is meant by a "balanced ration" for a dairy cow? Why is such a ration important ? What foods ordinarily fed to dairy cows are especially rich in carbohydrates ? ' U sch( IL Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIKS 429 What in fats ? What in protein materials ? What would be a properly balanced daily ration for a cow giving thirty pounds of milk a day ? (Read Farmers' Bulletin No. 22.) 6. Select a young fruit tree (apple, plum, or cherry) for study. By the use of a step- ladder carefully examine all of the branches. Can you tell by any marks on the twigs the amount of growth each branch has made during this season ? What is the greatest length in inches of this year's growth made by any twig ? Does the rate of growth vary on different parts of the tree ? Explain as well as you can why this is so. Make a careful drawing of this tree. (Refer to Bailey's Pruning-Book. Read Cornell Nature-Study Leaflet XXXI.) 7. How many pounds of hay and how many pounds of grain per day are required for a 1 200-pound horse doing ordinary farm work ? Would a heavier horse require more ? Why ? Is less required when the horse is not working ? Why ? Would it be as well to feed all hay, or all grain ? Why ? Should a horse be given water before, or after feeding ? Why ? (Read Farmers' Bulletin No. 22.) THE HIGH SCHOOL This room was visited in the afternoon and a recitation in agronomy was the first exercise. The first- and second-year classes were combined for this particular recitation. Corn was the subject of study with Reid's Yellow Dent as the particular variety. Each pupil had brought com from home and they were studying samples according to the Score Card adopted by the Illinois Corn Growers' Association. The principal of the school called on each mem- ber of the class to state which ear of the number he had brought had the best tips, the best butts, and the various items as given on the score card. The pupils were required to give a reason for their answers. The answers revealed that some observation and thinking had been done. Shapes of ears, kernel shape, yields or variety, etc., were discussed. While this was going on, two boys in the soil-study class were testing soils for loss of organic matter. Types of both the cropped and uncropped soils were being used for this test. The gasoline plant in connection with the building furnished the heat for the experi- mental work as well as the domestic science work. The air-pressure water tank in the basement furnished water necessary for laboratory purposes. In the regular science work an earnest effort was being made, with success, to correlate with the environment of the pupil. Thus the zoology correlated with fall agriculture. Emphasis was being placed on the life-history of insects as related to the farm, their economic value, etc. The principal took the pupils to the fields and made an examination of corn roots to find the insects injurious to corn. A new insect was discovered and sent to the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, for identification. In addition to the regular text on zoology, use was made of the United States entomological bulletins and the very valuable reports of Professor Forbes, who, under special appropria- tion of the Illinois legislature, is making most important investigations with reference to insects injurious to the Illinois farmer. No more valuable bul- letin in that particular subject has been printed than the one by Professor Forbes on Insects Injurious to Indian Corn. The future farmers in this school were having this information brought in as a part of their science work, in economic zoology. This could be done in this country school, with a high- 430 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fNational school course flavored with country Hfe and its interests, for two reasons mainly: first, the school was so organized and equipped that it was possible to relate the laboratory and classroom with the immediate environment of the pupils; second, there was a trained teacher with a sympathetic insight into the conditions of country life, and a realization of the importance of vitalizing these conditions in the training of country children; a teacher who vitalized his science work with a study of environment; a country high-school science teacher who did not put the emphasis on the oyster or the lower forms of marine life. Likewise with botany: the pupils did have notebooks in their science work; they did make drawings of flowers, plants, and insects; they did mount specimens, etc. But they went farther. They planted seeds at "school and home and made a study in an experimental way to discover the relations of plants to soil, water, climate, etc. In the soil work the instruction was practical and scientific. In this sub- ject, especially, one could note how this high school was putting these farmer boys in touch with the great soil work carried on by the Illinois College of Agriculture under the direction of Dr. C. G. Hopkins. In classroom and laboratory, use was being made of King's The Soil, Hosier's Soil Physics (this a laboratory manual), and bulletins from the Illinois experiment station. Last but not least, the school had access to the experimental plot of six acres adjoining the school campus. The Illinois College of Agriculture has a ninety- nine year lease on this small field and under the direction of the faculty of this college some valuable experimental work is being carried on, not only in soil improvement, but in crop rotation, farm practices, etc. This being close to the school, as was stated, it becomes a valuable out-door laboratory for both the school and the farmer of the consolidated district. The three and one- half years' work in agriculture are made just as scientific as the physics or chemistry work. The horticulture work is made as scientific as the botany work in the ordinary high school. Thus in economic entomology, worms working on vegetation were brought to the schoolroom and placed in jars. Cages were shown that had been made by the pupils for the larva, and as soon as the larva had passed into the pupa state this pupa was put away in a safe place for spring study. Some specimens were being preserved in formaldehyde. In the agronomy work a collection was made of the worst weeds on the farm to be studied in connection with the text. There were small bottles of seeds. A collection especially noted, collected by a boy, contained the following inj^irious weed seeds: Spanish needles, pepper grass, mustard, plantain, tickle grass, giant rag weed, fox tail, rag weed, wild parsnip, lamb's quarter, wild sunflower, horse mint, sand burr, cockle burr. The building was well equipped with the necessary laboratories. One member of the school board is a graduate of the University of Illinois and a farmer. A second is a graduate of the Central Illinois State Normal School and also a farmer. The third member of the board is an intelligent farmer, Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 431 and their wisdom is strikingly shown in the way they have equipped the school building for doing good work. This is possible in a consolidated school that fits local conditions; and lastly, a consolidated school with a board and com- munity actuated by liberal ideas and right ideals in the equipment of a building and the employment of trained teachers to manage the educational plant for training boys and girls in the life they now live. Shopwork in manual training was not in progress at the time this visit was made, but the visitor did see the domestic-science work in the chemistry labora- tory. All years of the high school were represented. Cream of wheat was the especial subject of study for the day. The girls were getting a training in food values, chemistry of foods, preparation of food for the table, etc. The teacher had training for this special work, and in addition taught Latin and English as a part of her regular high-school work. The principal taught agriculture, manual training, science, and some mathematics. The literature, language, and some history were taught by the domestic-science teacher. These country girls were having their school work related to the home life in a most helpful manner. Some of this may be done in the one-room school as now organized, provided the proper equipment and a properly prepared teacher are furnished, but it will then be a very expensive school, based on the day's average attendance. Even thus vitalized it will still lack the social enrichment possible in the larger unit. And it is the larger social participation that must enrich the life of coun- try people. This social efficiency must come through education. The ideal conditions seem to obtain at the John Swaney Consolidated School. The unit is not so large as to take away the local character of the school. It is still a country school beside a country road. And the work of the schoolroom is not entirely industrial. It seems that a right balance of educational values is being maintained. A few schools like this one are needed, scattered over the country, to show what is really possible for thousands of farming communities. With that there must be some medium to let those communities know what is going on out on the front line of country-school improvement. That medium, whatever it is, must be a medium thoroly in sympathy with country life and its interests and occupations. THE CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS OF GEORGIA O. J. KERN Introductory. — ^No attempt here will be made to set forth an argument for or against the congressional district agricultural school. The school man in Ohio, a state which it is claimed now has one-tenth of the total number of high schools in the United States, may advocate the introduction of agriculture, manual training, and domestic arts into the course of study for these high schools and thus bring industrial education much nearer to all the boys and girls on the farms than could be done in one secondary school for the entire 432 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fNationai congressional district. The school man in Illinois may claim that consolida- tion of country schools and the already existing small high schools in towns and villages furnish the type of schools suitable for industrial education in Illinois, while the Wisconsin school man may claim that in addition to the consolidated school and the existing town and village high schools there is needed the county school of agriculture as a distinct type of the secondary school for country communities. This report attempts to settle none of these contentions. The data here given for the congressional district schools of Georgia were obtained by the writer as a result of a personal visit to two of the schools in April, 1908. Conditions in Georgia differ very much from the conditions in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The high school has no legal standing in Georgia, for by constitutional restriction education in that state so far as state aid is concerned, below the state university, is limited to the first seven grades of the elementary school. The educational leaders hope soon to have the constitutional restriction removed. In the meantime, considering the lack of sufl5cient number of local high schools and considering also that the one-room country school as now administered does nbt and cannot furnish all the training demanded by the boys and girls living on the farm, the con- gressional district school of agriculture comes as an inspiration and a positive help. Two things need to be guarded with respect to these schools, and of this the educational leaders of Georgia are fully aware: first, that the school of agriculture, manual training, and domestic art, does not lose its industrial flavor and become an ordinary high school preparing for a liberal arts course in some college where the trend is away from the farm; second, that the state legislature must not fail to support the splendid foundations thus laid so that in actual farm practices, laboratory, and shopwork, as well as academic work, these schools may meet the fondest expectations of those who have toiled so earnestly to establish them. The era of settlement has passed and now has come the period of development. It is for the educational interests of Georgia to show to the country the value of this particular type of school for the farm and the country home. The schools visited were those of Americus and Monroe. Before an account is given of what was seen, here follows the act of the legislature estab- lishing those schools, and the tentative course of study adopted for them, so that a clearer idea may be obtained with respect to the relation of the congres- sional district agricultural schools to the state school system, and of the work to be undertaken in them. Note the relation to the State College of" Agri- culture. The act creating these schools passed the legislature in August, 1906. A BILL To be entitled an Act to provide for the establishment and maintenance of schools of agriculture and the mechanic arts in the respectiv econgressional districts of this state. Section i. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, and it is hereby enacted by authority of the same, That the governor is hereby authorized to establish and cause to be maintained in each congressional district of the state an industrial CounciJl INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 433 and agricultural school in accordance with the further provisions of this act. Said schools shall be branches of the State College of Agriculture, a department of the University of (Georgia. The general board of trustees of the university shall exercise such supervision as in their judgment may be necessary to secure unity of plan and efficiency in said schools. Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That all fees received from the inspection of fertilizers, oils, and alf other inspection fees received by the Department of Agriculture in this state, after the present year, over the expenses of such inspection, and after any portion of said fund otherwise appropriated, shall be used as a fund for the purpose of establishing and maintaining such schools, and, as far as practicable, be equally divided between such schools, and the said governor is authorized to pay to the trustees of said schools, from time to time, their respective portions of said fund. Sec. 3. Be it further enacted. That the governor is authorized and directed to appoint from each county in the respective congressional districts one trustee for the school to be established in such districts; such trustee to hold office for the term of six years from his appointment and until his successor is appointed, and that the trustees selected in each district shall constitute a board of trustees for the school in said district, with power to control the management of said school, and make rules and regulations for the same, subject to the provisions of this act. Sec. 4. Be it further enacted. That the governor shall be authorized to receive from any county, or any of the citizens thereof, a donation of a tract of land in such county, not less than two hundred acres, on which to locate a school for the district in which such county is situated, together with any additional donation in the way of buildings and money; and if there are two or more ofiFers of such donations, the governor, with the aid of the trustees of such school, shall select w^hich to accept, taking into consideration the title, value, the centralness of location, accessibility and suitableness in any respect for the purpose intended, and upon the acceptance of any such donation, and the execution of proper deeds vesting title in the trustees, within a reasonable time, the school for said district shall be established on the tract selected; with the right to select another locality should such deeds not be made to the satisfaction of the governor. And if no such donation is made or perfected in any district within one year from passage of this act the pro rata share of the fund going to said district shall go into and be prorated in the regular common school fund in said district. Sec. 5. Be it further enacted. That the principal of said schools shall, under the direction of the trustees, keep an account of all receipts from the sale of the products of the farm or shops which are not consumed in said school, and one-half of said receipts for each year shall be set aside as a fund to pay the students. That each pupil, having per- formed to the satisfaction of the principal his duties for an entire school year, shall receive his pro rata of said fund, the amount going to each pupil not to exceed one hundred dollars, and the balance, if any, to be replaced in the general fund of the school. Sec. 6. Be it further enacted. That the course of studies in said schools shall be confined to the elementary branches of an English education, and practical treatises or lectures on agriculture in all its branches, and the mechanic arts, and such other studies as will enable students completing the course to enter the Freshman class of the State College of Agriculture on certificate of the principal. Sec. 7. Be it further enacted. That the faculty of such schools shall consist of the principal, who shall be an intelUgent farmer; one superintendent and instructor in farm work; one intelligent mechanic, who shall direct and instruct in all mechanical work in and out of the shops; one practical instructor in care of stock and dairying; one instructor in English, and such other instructors and assistants as the funds of the college will permit. That the trustees may dispense with and combine the duties of any of the above, as neces- sity may require, and it shall be the duty of said instructors in said school to co-operate in conducting farmers' institutes and farm and stock demonstrations in the several counties of their respective districts. 434 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Sec. 8. Be it further enacted, That after the first buildings are erected, before the opening of such schools, which shall be only such as are absolutely necessary for temporary use, all work on, in, and about said schools, or on the farm, or on or in the bams and shops connected with said schools, whether it be farming, building, care of stock, or work of whatever kind, shall be performed exclusively by the students of said schools, under such regulations for the proper division and alterations in such work as may be provided by the trustees. Sec. 9. Be it further enacted. That tuition in said schools shall be free, and the trustees may limit the number of students from time to time, according to the capacity and means of the institution, and shall make such rules of admission so as to equalize, as far as practicable, the privileges of the school among the counties according to population. And the trustees may defer the actual opening of the school until such time as may be necessary to prepare reasonably proper facilities and equipment for beginning the same, in the meantime accumulating for said purpose the funds going to said school which may be received from the rent of any portion of the property; but it is made the duty of said trustees to open said school, even though it may have to be done at first on a limited scale, as early as practicable, and afterward extend its operations as circumstances may permit; and the trustees are authorized to rent to the best advantage, from time to time, any portion of the property of said school not required for the purpose of said school. Sec. 10. Be it further enacted, That all laws and parts of laws in conflict with this Act be, and the same are, hereby repealed. LOCATION OF AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS The following are the accepted bids for the district agricultural schools of Georgia. The total value of the bids is nearly $850,000, and the rejected bids amount to fully as much. It is a splendid tribute to the progressive spirit of the Georgia farmer, and to the wisdom of the plans of the proposed schools. First District. — Statesboro. Sixty thousand dollars cash; 300 acres of land, $20,000; electric lights, water and sewerage, $20,000. Second District. — Tifton. Donations same as first district, except market value of land, probably $20,000. Third District. — Americus. Forty thousand dollars cash; 300 acres of land, $20,000; lights, water and sewerage, $5,000. Fourth District. — Carrollton. Thirty thousand dollars cash; 300 acres of land, $15,000; lights and water, $15,000. (I understand that at least $10,000 more cash will be added to this donation.) Fifth District. — Monroe. Thirty-one thousand dollars cash; 250 acres land, $10,000; lights and water, $15,000. Sixth District. — Bamesville. — Fifty-one thousand dollars cash; 300 acres land, $20,000; lights and water, $15,000. Seventh District. — Powder Springs. Academic building and boys' dormitory, accord- ing to architect's plans, $28,000; 240 acres land, $20,000; lights and water, $15,000. Eighth District. — Madison. Forty thousand and five hundred dollars cash; 300 acres land, $20,000; lights and water, $15,000. Ninth District. — Near Clarksville, $25,000 cash and 300 acres of land. Tenth District. — Sparta. Forty-seven thousand dollars; 250 acres land, $10,000. Eleventh District. — Douglas. Fifty-five thousand dollars cash; 300 acres land, $20,000; lights, water and sewerage are valued at about the cost of same, and the land is estimated at the market value. RESOLUTIONS OFFERED BY GOVERNOR JOSEPH M. TERRELL BEFORE THE^BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, JANUARY, 1907, AND ADOPTED Whereas the act providing for the establishment and maintainance of an Industrial and Agricultural School in each Congressional District declares in section i that "the Council) INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 435 general Board of Trustees of the University shall exercise such supervision as in their judgment may be necessary to secure unity of plan and efficiency in said schools." And whereas section 6 of said act prescribes "that the course of study in said schools shall be confined to the elementary branches of an English education, and practical treatises and lectures on agriculture in all its branches, and the mechanic arts, and such other studies as will enable the students completing the course to enter the Freshman class of the state college of agriculture on certificate of the principal." And whereas the paramount object of these schools being the education of the pupils, both theoretically and practically, in the sciences of agriculture and the mechanic arts, and preparing them for citizenship, a curriculum should be prescribed that will include only those studies which are in their nature and tendency contributory to that end. There- fore, Be It Resolved, First, that the minimum age for entrance into said schools shall be fixed at fourteen years for males and thirteen years for females, and that there be an equitable division of the dormitory space among the counties of the district as provided in section 9 of the act, and should all the space allotted to a county be not applied for at the beginning of a scholastic year, such unused space may be allotted for such year to any other county. Second, That the course of study be limited to four years' work, including at least one year of common-school or elementary studies, and that the scholastic year be forty weeks. The school day to be so arranged as to assure at least three hours a day of class- room work in agriculture and related sciences, EngUsh, mathematics, and history, and at least three hours a day on the farm or in the laboratory or ghop, the hours in actual farm work to be regulated by the exigencies of the farm; the program being such as to provide for alteration of the work and study among the classes morning and afternoon, thereby securing continuous operation of the farm and shop. The female students to be provided with a practicable and comprehensive course in domestic science, sewing, household economics, and kindred studies. Third, That the Principals of said schools shall provide from time to time for such lectures on agriculture and related subjects as the funds of the school will permit, and shall also provide for short courses for adult farmers in so far as the same may not conflict with the other work of the schools. Fourth, That for satisfactory work done on the farm and in the shops students may be allowed fair compensation by the principal, per hour, or per piece, to be credited to the dormitory expenses of the students. In addition thereto students shall receive their pro rata of the net profit arising from the farm as provided in section 5, but the same shall be credited to their dormitory and other school expenses. Fifth, That one-fourth of the students, or such number as the principal may determine as necessary to continue the operation of the farm and shop, be required to remain on the farm during vacation, and for work required during this time the students be given fair compensation. Students of the third and fourth year may be given acre plots for indi- vidual cultivation, or small farms for supervision, the profits to be their own, the same, however, to be first applied to payment of their dormitory or other expenses. Sixth, That the State Farmers' Institutes Director shall arrange farmers' institutes at these schools and secure the help of the faculties thereof in conducting institutes in other counties; that the Professor of Forestry in the State University be authorized and directed to aid the several schools in caring for the forests on the farms; that the Professor of Secondary Education be required to give such aid as is consistent with his other duties, and that the other professors of the State Agricultural College be authorized to co-operate in the work of these schools and that of their respective departments. Seventh, That the principal of each school shall make an annual report to the board of trustees of his district, showing attendance, program of hours, income and expenditures, and furnish a copy for publication in the annual bulletin of the State Agricultural College. 436 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION fNational REPORT OF COMMITTEE TO BOARD OF TRUSTEES June 15, 1907 To the Board of Trustees, University of Georgia: Gentlemen: The committee appointed at your meeting in January to recommend a course of study for the District Agricultural Schools of Georgia beg leave to submit the following report. The tentative curriculum submitted to your board last January by Professor Stewart, being the joint work of him and of Professor D. J. Crosby, of the Department of Agriculture at Washington, was submitted to leading agricultural professors throughout the Union and criticisms asked. Many letters commending the general plan were received. Some minor suggestions were made. After receiving all the data possible your committee met in Atlanta January 22 and went over in detail every item of the proposed curriculum — Professor Coon of Georgia Tech was by resolution of the committee elected a member thereof. All the members' of the committee were present, as well as Professor Crosby and two other experts from Washington and a committee from the Farmers' Union. Acting under your instructions optional foreign languages were eliminated from the original report. A few other minor changes were made. The following resolutions were passed at this meeting: Whereas, Eleven district agricultural schools are soon to be organized in the state of Georgia; therefore be it resolved : 1. That the course of study presented by Professor Stewart be adopted. 2. That for the first year* it is deemed inadvisable for the schools to be overcrowded with too large a group of students; that it would probably be wise for the board of trustees to limit the attendance at first in order that confusion and mistakes may be avoided and that time may be given the principals and teachers to perfect the organization of the schools. 3. That for the first year it is recommended that the work of the schools be restricted to the courses of study outlined for the first and second years, except that more advanced work be given in the practical subjects where possible. 4. That while it should be the primary aim of the agricultural schools to train students to an appreciation of the farm and to develop in them a love for farm life, yet it should also be the aim of the schools to train students to become useful citizens as well as good farmers and housewives. The home life of the students should be carefully super- vised by the principals and members of the faculty, who should provide such interests outside the regular school work as will assist in rounding out the characters of the young men and women. At all times the principal of each school should consider it one of his primary duties to maintain a high standard of character and of conduct among the student body. 5. That the requirements for graduation may be strict, but that the requirements for entrance should not be difficult, especially for older students, who need the practical work and yet may be unable to stand a difficult examination. 6. That libraries be established, and reading rooms arranged as soon as possible, and that special efforts be made to secure books and periodicals relating to agriculture, literature, history, biography, and books by Georgians and about Georgia's history and resources; and further that special efforts be made to secure and classify and keep in durable form the pamphlets and books on agriculture printed for free distribution by the United States government, by the various state experiment stations, and by the imiversity and agricultural colleges. 7. That the following persons. Dr. Soule, Professor Crosby, Professor Stewart, Professor Coon, and Professor Parks, be requested to arrange and submit a list of books suitable for the libraries of the agricultural schools. 8. That the following persons. Dr. Soule, Professor Crosby, Professor W. D. Smith, Professor Stewart, and Dr. Hardman, be requested to serve as an advisory committee to Councill INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 437 he various boards of trustees for the purpose of recommending suitable equipment for laboratories. In addition to the above, the following resolution was passed at the request of R. F. Duckworth, president of the Farmers' Union: "We recommend that the law be strictly enforced which requires the teaching of the elements of agriculture in the common schools, and that this teaching be done in connection with school gardens, and further that the normal schools of the state be encouraged in their efforts to increase their facilities for instruction in elementary agriculture to those who are preparing to teach." On the 23rd the presidents of all the district boards of trustees, the principals that had been elected, the governor-elect, the state school commissioner, the commissioner of agriculture, and a committee from the Farmers' Union met with your commiteee to hear the proposed curriculum, and if need be to offer suggestions before its final adoption as the report of your committee. After a full and careful discussion, morning and afternoon, of every phase of the report, the joint body unanimously adopted the tentative curriculum herewith submitted. We recommended that $75.00 be appropriated for the immediate publication in bulletin form of the report of your committee together with other information relating to said schools as will be of value in their organization. We trust that the board will see fit to recommend the report of your committee for adoption by the several boards of trustees of the district agricultural schools. L. G. BAKDMAN, Chairman M. M. F ARKS, Secretary J. M. TERRELL D. M. HUGHES A. J. McMULLAN J. S. STEWART A. M. SOULE J. S. COON Adopted by the Board of Trustees June 19, 1907. CONDENSED STATEMENT OF TENTATIVE COURSE OF STUDY FOR DISTRICT AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS OF GEORGIA The work is arranged by terms as well as years so that a young farmer may enter at the time when the particular subjects desired are being taught, and stay as long as he may wish. The principal should allow such academic work for these special students as will meet their needs, allowing as much time as deemed necessary for the intensive work in agricultural subjects selected. In this way the school and curriculum can be made to fit the boy desiring three months, one year, or four years. No one will be allowed to enter who does not take the required practical work. If only literary work is desired, they should go elsewhere. First Year— Fall Term classroom instruction (Numerals refer to number of recitations a week.) English — Grammar (3), Composition (i) — all. Mathematics — Arithmetic (4) — all. U. S. History — The period of discovery (3) — all. Geography — Political Geography (3) — all. Penmanship and Spelling (2) — all. The Plant — Composition, structure, physiology (3) — all. 438 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION (Under the immediate instruction of teachers.) Plant Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Study of a number of plants. Plat Work — 3 hours a week. Practice with small gardens — Elective for girls — boys. Farm Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Free Hand and Elementary Drawing — boys and girls. Sewing — 3 hours a week. Stitches, Plain Sewing — girls. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK (Under the general supervision of teachers concerned.) Farm — 9 hours — boys. Home — 9 hours — girls. Note. — Assignments of all farm and home work vAW be made under direction of the principal so as to cover all kinds of duties, varying with season, weather, location, etc., to be changed from time to time, so that every pupil will become familiar with all the farm operations. The instruction of any term is applied and inforced throughout the course. First Year — ^Winter Term English — Grammar (3), Composition (i) — all. Mathematics — Arithmetic (4) — all. U. S. History— The National Period (3)— all. Geography — From Physical Geography standpoint (3) — all. Spelling and Penmanship (2) — all. The Plant — Reproduction, environment (3) — all. PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION (Under immediate instruction of teachers.) Plant Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Work in plants continued — all. Plat Work — 3 hours a week. Continue garden work — boys. Farm Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Drawing, bench work, farm carpqptry — boys. Cooking — 3 hours a week. Plain and fancy cooking, care of dining-room — girls. minimum REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week — boys. Home Work — 9 hours a week — girls. Work assigned as in Fall Term. For full details of course see accompanying report of work. First Year — Spring Term CLASSROOM instruction English — Grammar (2), Composition (2) — ^all. Mathematics — Arithmetic (4) — all. U. S. History — The Civil War. Reconstruction, to the present time (3)— all. Geography — Commercial (3) — all. Spelling (2)— all. Soils — ^Nature, fimction, origin, etc. (3) — boys. PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Soil Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Collect samples of soils and test, classify, and name. Plat Work — 3 hours a week. Continue garden work. Farm Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Drawing, bench work, farm carpentry. Sewing, Laimdering— 3 hours a week. Machine sewing, patching, etc. Instruction in theory and practice of laundering. Councill INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 439 MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. Work assigned as in Fall Term. Second Year — Fall Term classroom instruction English — Composition and Rhetoric (3), Classic Readings (i). Mathematics — Farm Arithmetic and Farm Accounts (4). Ancient History — The Nine Eastern Nations (3). Vegetable — Flower, Fruit Gardening, and Forestry (2). The Soils and Fertilizers — Classification of Soil and Use of Manures and Fertilizers (3). PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Soil Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Experiment with soils, study systems of farm crops. Plat Work — 3 hours a week. Garden and fruit, vegetables. Farm Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Plans of farm structures, farm carpentry. Sewing — 3 hours a week. Draughting, cutting, making garments. minimum REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. Work assigned as in first year. Second Year — ^Winter Term classroom instruction English — Composition, Rhetoric (3), Classic Readings (i). Mathematics — Algebra (3), Farm Arithmetic (i). Ancient History — Greece (3). Vegetables — Fruit Trees and Forestry (2), Home Science (2). Farm Crops — Boys (3). PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Plant Laboratory — 3 hours a week. The botany of farm crops, judging, grafting. Plat Work — 3 hours a week. Manures, winter crops, care of forests. Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Farm carpentry. Cooking — 3 hours a week. Study of dietaries, table serving, plan meals. Work assigned as in previous terms. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. Work assigned as in previous terms. Second Year — Spring Term classroom instruction English — Composition, Rhetoric (3), Classic Readings (i). Mathematics — Algebra, through Equations (3), Farm Arithmetic (i). Ancient History — Rome to Charlemagne (3). Vegetable — Flower, Fruit Gardening (2), Home Science (3). PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Plant Laboratory— 3 hours a week. Study early fruits and vegetables. Plat Work— 3 hours a week. Study of field and garden crops on farm. Spraying and other orchard and garden work. 440 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nauonal Mechanics, Iron Work — 3 hours a week. Farm blacksmithing. Household Emergencies, Invalid Cooking — 3 hours a week. Care of patient and sick j-oora. First aid to wounded, use of disinfectants, etc., drowning. MINIMUM REQXnRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. Work assigned as in previous year. Third Year — Fall Term classroom instruction English Composition (3), Classic Readings (i). Mathematics — ^Algebra (4). English History — ^To end of Middle Ages (2). Physics — (3) Properties of matter, Mechanics of solids, apply to farm life. Animal Husbandry — (3) Study of horses, cattle, sheep, swine, poultry, Home Science (3). PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Laboratory, Agricultural Physics — 3 hours a week. Experiments with soils, ma- chinery, other farm equipment to illustrate laws of physics. Plat, Field-Work — 3 hours a week. Farm crops, stock judging. Mechanics — Blacksmithing, plumbing, steam fitting as applied to farm and home. 3 hours a week. Sewing, Millinery — Previous work continued, making hats. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours. Home Work — 9 hours. Work assigned as in previous years. Third Year — ^Winter Term CLASSROOM instruction English — Rhetoric, Composition (3), Classic Readings (i). English History — ^Through Cromwell (2). Physics — (3) Mechanics of fluids, soimd, light; apply to farm life. Animal Husbandry — (3), Home Science (3), Girls. PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Agricultural Physics. Special attention to farm and dairy equipment. Field Exercises — Care of stock, study of breeds, equipment. Mechanics — Farm machinery. Cooking — 3 hours. Previous work continued. minimum REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours. Home Work — 9 hours a week. Include poultry, bees, pigeons. Work as assigned in previous years. Third Year— Spring Term classroom instruction English — Composition, Rhetoric (3), Classic Readings (i). Rural Law — (3). English History — (2) To Present Time. Physics — Heat, Electricity. Apply to Farm Life. Dairying — (3) Home Science. Council! INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 441 PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTIOK Laboratory — Agricultural Physics. Especially as related to dairying. Field -Work. — Study of farm buildings in neighborhood, planning and care of same. Mechanics — Designing farmhouses, farm constructions, concrete work. Sewing, Hygiene — 3 hours. Use of patterns, making simple shirt-waists, skirts. Hygiene of the home. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours. Home Work — 9 hours, including dairying. Fourth Year— Fall Term classroom instruction English — History, English, Literature (2), Theme Work (2). Mathematics — Geometry (4). Civics — (3). Chemistry — (3). Rural Engineering (3), Home Science. PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Laboratory — 3 hours a week. Chemistry of foods, feed-stuffs, fertilizers, animal products. Field Exercises — Surveying, laying out groimds, fields, drains, etc. Mechanics — Draw farm plans. Continue previous work. Household Economics — Home sanitation. Assigned work for this year should give as much practice as possible in farm man- agement. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours. Home Work — 9 hours. Fourth Year — ^Winter Term classroom instruction English — History, English, Literature (2), Theme work (2). Mathematics — Geometry (4). Civics (2). Chemistry (3). Farm Management and Sanitation, Systems of Farming (3), Home Science. PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Laboratory — Chemistry of foods, feed-stuffs, fertilizers, animal products. 3 hours a week. Field Exercises — Continue work of previous term. Mechanics — 3 hours a week. Topographical drawing, construction of roads. Home Management — 3 hours a week. Household decoration. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. (See farm work under fall term.) Fourth Year— Spring Term classroom instruction English— Preparation of Essays (2), Classic Readings (i). Mathematics — Geometry (4). Rural Economics (3). Chemistry (3). Economic Biology (i). 442 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National PRACTICUMS, OR LABORATORY, FIELD, AND SHOP INSTRUCTION Laboratory — Chemistry continued. Bacteriology. 3 hours a week. Library Reading — 3 hours a week. Household Management — 3 hours a week. Planning a home. MINIMUM REQUIRED WORK Farm Work — 9 hours a week. Home Work — 9 hours a week. (See farm work under fall term.) FIFTH DISTRICT SCHOOL AT MONROE, GEORGIA The school building is located on a farm of 250 acres three miles north of Monroe. The Gainsville Midland railroad passes through the farm. The students living in the city of Monroe are thus enabled to go back and forth on this railroad, boarding at home, while students from other places board in the dormitories or in the farm homes near the school. The school is in a good environment and far enough from town, it would seem. This school opened January 6, 1908, with ninety pupils but since that time the enrollment has been increased to 115. Thirty-five of them are girls and the remainder are boys. They range in age from fourteen to twenty-three years and come from every county in the congressional district. Thus far these boys and girls have done all the work, not counting of course the construction of the main buildings. The boys have put in the sewerage and waterworks, the latter being a well with a fifty-foot water tower containing a seventeen-hundred-gallon tank. The water is pumped by a gasoline engine. The boys put in most of the 2,000 feet of sewer. They also laid out and shaped up the walks and driveways on the campus; set out several hundred fruit and shade trees; dug up about a thousand stumps; built an engine-house, five henhouses; cut 25 cords of wood, and did considerable plowing. An eighteen-hundred-doUar laundry plant has also been installed by the boys under the supervision of the teachers. A blacksmith shop and manual-training house has been built by the boys and about three hundred dollars worth of equipment has been provided. For the farm work there are six large mules worth two hundred dollars each and two wagons costing eighty dollars each. A twenty-horsepower engine furnishes the power for the laundry plant which has a capacity of 100 shirts per hour. The boys and girls each do their own laundry work. There are no servants on the place. The domestic-science department has an equipment costing three hundred and fifty dollars with room for sixteen girls to do laboratory work at the same time. Three girls and one boy cook each meal, the boy firing the stoves and lifting heavy vessels, while the girls do the cooking. The same students act as waiters, the set being so changed that no student cooks more than one meal a day. Six boys wash dishes, attending at each meal, so that no boy is employed at this work more than once each day. The cooks are paid ten cents each for their work in preparing each meal. One boy is assigned to each recitation room to sweep, dust, and build fires. He is paid ten cents a day for his work. Every boy and Coundll INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 443 girl does some profitable work. Ten cents an hour is allowed for profitable work and about 15 per cent, of the boys paid their entire expenses for the month of March in this manner. All the academic classroom work is done in the forenoon, the afternoons being devoted to practice and profitable work. A walk over the fine farm showing the experimental plots started is an inspiration. This work will prove of great value if the state supports this department with money as it should. The United States Department of Agriculture has a corn experiment station on this farm where several hundred different experiments are now being carried on. The estimated revenue arising from the tax on fertilizers sold in the state amounts to about six thousand dollars — not enough to equip school and farm with necessary things and provide all the trained instructors that will be needed to realize the hopes of those who inaugurated the movement. No doubt the legislature will in due time appreciate what these schools may do for the development of agriculture and country life in general, and make generous provision for their maintenance and growth. The following is taken from their first printed announcement with reference to expenses, conveniences, etc. EXPENSES It is intended to make the cost to the student as low as possible. Tuition, furnished rooms, lights, fuel, laundry, tools, vessels and cooking utensils will be free. Students who board and live in the dormitories will be required to bring $10 at the opening of the school. They will be credited with all profitable work done during the first month, this to be deducted from $10 to ascertain the amount to be paid for the second month. Example: A student brings $10 at the opening of school for his first month's board. If he or she does $4 worth of profitable work during this month, then only $6 need be sent for the second month. If during the second month he or she does $5.50 worth of profitable work, then only $4.50 will be required for the following month, and so on. In other words, the amount for each month following the first will be $10 less whatever amount of profitable work is done during the previous month. It is believed that the total net cost of attending the school will not exceed $5 or $6 per month. Indeed some students can be used through the vacation period to finish up the farm work, look after the live stock, poultry, etc., and in this way can probably pay their entire expenses in work. WHAT STUDENTS MUST BRING Each student must bring with him or her when he enters the school complete bed furnishings, including one pillow, two pillow slips, two sheets, one pair of blankets, one or more heavy quilts or comforts, four towels and a laundry bag. In addition to the above articles, each student should come provided with working clothes, overshoes, umbrella, hair-brush, comb, tooth-brush, soap and any other article which he or she might wish for personal use or comfort. Every article which goes to the laundry must be plainly marked with indelible ink. Nunnally Bros. & McCrea, of Atlanta, have generously agreed to donate to each boy who enters the school a pair of their engineer overalls. The girls will also be pro- vided with work aprons of some value. These will be given the students as soon as they shall have matriculated. CONVENIENCES Every room in every building will be furnished with free electric lights. Plenty of baths and toilets will be provided in the buildings for convenience of students. 444 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Each dormitory room will be provided with a double bedstead, spring and cotton mattress free to boarding students. Each room will also contain a small linen closet, a dresser and a washstand. These rooms will accommodate two students. The rooms will be heated with indi- vidual wood-burning heaters. The wood will be furnished free, the boys being required to saw and carry it in the rooms. INSTRUCTION The teachers are men and women who have had special training in their several lines of work. While literary instruction shall have careful attention, yet the prime object aimed at in this school will be to train boys and girls in agriculture and the useful arts. The whole student shall be trained, head, heart and hands. All students under eighteen years of age will be required to take the full course prescribed. Farmers or others who are over eighteen years of age may attend the school and take any special course offered, such as farm accounts, farm carpentry, grafting, budding, dairy- ing, poultry business, laundering, soils, fertilizers, gardening, sewing, cookery, millinery, etc. THIRD DISTRICT SCHOOL AT AMERICUS, GEORGIA. The school building is located on a fine farm of three hundred acres adjoin- ing the corporate limits of the city of Americus with about 15,000 population. The school opened January 6, 1908, with an enrollment of fifteen girls and ninety-five boys, from all the fifteen counties of this congressional district. Seventy per cent, of those entering came from farm homes. The faculty and students are hard at work getting things in shape to do good work. All the outside work is being done by the boys. An old cabin has been fitted up for a small blacksmith shop and one forge installed. Manual training has been started in a small way, the boys making the work benches. The school must have larger equipment for laboratory, shop, and farm if it is to meet the expectations of those interested in this type of schools. This the people under- stand. Experiments have been started on the farm for the improvement of cotton and com. A farm superintendent is employed and plans are being matured to carry on work in dairying, poultry, fruit, and general farm opi^ra- tions. When these schools opened in January everything was new both to students and teachers. Much work remained to be done upon the buildings, equip- ment, and grounds. As the plan of the school contemplated the doing of this work, as largely as possible, by students under the direction of the teachers, their energies were expended chiefly, during the first three months of the year, in improving external and material conditions, getting things in order so as to be able to take up and carry out the regular course of study. At the time of my visit, the recitations and classroom work observed were still largely devoted to finding out the qualifications and attainments of the students, and was purely academic, little being attempted with agricultural subjects. The work on the farm showed that much outside work had been accomplished, and excellent beginnings had been made in the instruction neces- sary for this work. Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 445 At Americus the manual-training work was largely devoted to the making of library shelves and some of the simpler furnishings and equipment for the laboratories. Not knowing the conditions under which these schools had been organized, I had expected to find more of the systematic instruction which should char- acterize an agricultural school than was in evidence. A few hours' observa- tion, however, made clear the reasons why this work had been delayed, and justified the wisdom of the authorities in such delay. In short, the schools were simply finding themselves during those first months, in the hope that by the opening of the school year in September, 1908, they would be ready for systematic and regular work in accordance with the course of study. The teachers in these schools impress one as being an earnest body of men and women conscious of their opportunity, and also sensible of the limitations of the situation. One must remember that the boys and girls entering the schools came from the various counties of the districts, the majority from farms, having had limited advantages in the country schools maintained but three or four months of the year, taught by teachers who themselves had no other training than that received in these same schools. Some idea is thus obtained of the necessity for the preliminary work necessary in these agricul- tural schools. The conclusion forces itself upon the observer that the next year will be an important one in the history and development of this type of schools. If they are supported in a financial way so that the necessary equipment can be pro- vided and instructors furnished to meet the growth of the student body, then these schools will come up to the expectation of the founders. If, however, their growth is to be stunted because of inadequate financial support, then they will become simply standard high schools, with the farms being worked by the boys as a means of paying their schooling and with little relation to education. Simply to spend the afternoon on the farm and the morning in the classroom does not mean a course in agricultural education. CONCLUSIONS OF THE COMMITTEE The results of the investigations made by your committee seem to warrant the following conclusions : 1. That the conclusions formulated by the committee in its first report are fully justified by the existing condition of industrial education in schools for rural communities throughout the country, as determined by the further investigations of the committee and by the investigations of others. 2. That the development of industrial education in types of schools adapted to rural communities has thus far been confined almost wholly to instruction in agriculture, except in the secondary schools distinctively industrial in character, and which have been authorized by special legislation. 3. That is it desirable to extend the work so as to provide for training for 446 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National the boys in the use of farm tools and machinery and for the girls in the house- hold arts. 4. That facilities for appropriate types of industrial education may be provided in the consolidated rural school carrying two or more years of high- school work, provided the interest, public spirit, and liberality of the people of the district are such as to secure adequate funds for the maintenance of the schools through local taxation; or provided legislation can be secured that will furnish state aid which, together with the amount the district is able and willing to furnish, will be adequate for the proper support of the schools. 5. That such schools will necessarily be expensive, and that unless the necessary funds are available to meet this expense, the desired results cannot be secured. 6. That the same relations between proper maintenance and adequate results exist in the rural high schools attempting to provide for industrial edu- cation as obtain in the consolidated school. 7. That apart from the question of expense, the most serious difficulty in the way of introducing industrial phases of education in the consolidated and rural high schools is in the tendency of teachers and school authorities unduly to magnify the importance of the traditional courses of study and an unwilling- ness to modify them except by adding new subjects. Elimination of some traditional subjects, or of phases of these subjects, must be provided for in order to give place for the new lines of work without overtaxing the energies of the students. 8. That the existence in different parts of the country of state, congressional district, and county schools of secondary type, industrial in character, and the introduction of industrial phases of education into the various kinds of second- ary schools previously existing as a part of our public-school system indicate a healthy development of sentiment on this subject and a recognition of the fact that different types of schools are needed in different parts of the country to adapt the educational effort in this field to local conditions; that any action providing national aid, which would operate through the influence of such aid to fix a single type of industrial school for rural communities for all parts of the country, would be unfortunate; but that aid from the national government for industrial education in rural communities would give a great impetus to this phase of educational work and would result in enormous increase in the pro- ductive capacity of the country, provided it be given under such limitations as will leave each state free to work out its system of industrial education in rural schools, in such a manner as to adapt it best to local conditions. 9. That the supply of properly trained teachers for carrying on this work is totally inadequate to meet even the present demand, and that the increase in the demand for such teachers in the near future requires a very large increase in the facilities for their preparation, and that to supply these facilities special training schools should be established thruout the country for the prepara- tion of elementary rural-school teachers; that the normal schools whose grad- Council] INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION FOR RURAL COMMUNITIES 447 uates find positions in rural schools should broaden and strengthen in every way their courses of instruction along industrial lines adapted to the needs of rural schools; that the agricultural colleges favorably situated for such work should undertake to organize special courses for the purpose of training teachers for the secondary schools, capable of giving instruction in agriculture and re- lated subjects. 10. That in the growth of public sentiment, in the development of ideals, in the preparation of courses of study, and in the facilities for the training of teachers for industrial work in rural schools, decided progress has been made during recent years; but that much yet remains to be done before the impor- tance and value of this kind of industrial education shall be fully appreciated by all concerned, and before it shall receive its appropriate recognition and find its proper place in our educational system. Lorenzo D. Harvey Elmer Ellsworth Brown O. J. Kern Committee DISCUSSION David B. Johnson, president, Winthrop Normal and Industrial College, Rock Hill, S. C. — In the South, before the war, the aim of all education for men was to prepare for one of the professions — law, medicine, or the ministry — and for women to prepare them to shine in society. And this was the aim there, I regret to say, long after the war. It is true that in South Carolina, the state I represent, a philanthropic citizen with prophetic vision, Dr. John De La Howe, founded an agricultural school on his farm in Abbeville District in 1796, but this school, though still in existence, never flourished on account of the conditions of admission to it and a lack of appreciation and encouragement. The planter, with his many acres and slaves, was forced to gain by experience expert knowledge of the soil and skill in management, and the planter's wife to become learned and skillful in home economics; but they constituted a small part of the population and had no help whatever in preparation for their difficult and important life work from the schools. The negroes on the plantation received from thesQ two — the experienced planter and his wife — the industrial training which is now seen to be such an essential part of the education of all. The negroes were the blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, shoe- makers, housekeepers, raisers of live stock, poultry, etc. And thus industrial education for the whites was placed under a ban. The war broke up the plantation industrial train- ing of the negro and emancipated the white man rather than the black man and has opened the way for the industrial training of all the people. The South has not been alone in its thralldom to classical learning in the schools, but it has been slower than the rest of the country in escaping from it, because, mainly, of its conservatism, its impoverishment by the war, and its peculiar social, industrial, and economic conditions. I rejoice that there is now a very general awakening. North and South, to the need and importance of industrial training in the city and the country. The president of the United States, in a noted address to leading educators of the country, takes industrial education as his theme, holding that industrial training, the train- ing which fits a man for the shop and the farm, is one of the most potent factors in national development and that real protection to American labor is to be secured not by the tariff and the immigration laws but by industrial training of the masses. Great capitalists and manufacturers organize the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, 448 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National The state of Massachusetts appoints a commission for the study of industrial education, whose reports are in general demand. Bills are introduced in the Congress of the United States for the encouragement of industrial education throughout the country — the Burkett and the Davis Bills — and this Committee on Industrial Education is appointed by authority of the National Council of Education. Industrial training is nowhere more needed than with the rural population, on account of the great interests at stake, the general ignorance of the country people of the best methods of conducting their business — farming — and the great number of people engaged in this business. According to the last census, we have engaged in agricultural pursuits more people than in any other pursuit, the number being 10,381,765. The next highest number, 7,085,309, is engaged in manufacturing, mechanical arts, and mining. I believe we are all agreed now that education must prepare for life's duties, whatever they may be. If the child is to spend his life in the country, he must receive the training that will fit him to be an efficient economic unit there. The waste on the farm on account of ignorance is appalling. From authoritative reports by government officials we learn that 2,678,021 cattle die in the United States annually from exposure and preventable disease. Imperfect and unscientific cultivation is a source of great waste. Millions of farmers persist in half cultivation of large areas, when they would make more by proper tillage of fewer acres, and then ruin the land by a disregard of a proper rotation of crops. The agricultural South feels keenly the necessity for industrial education for the rural population and is feeling its way toward the best methods of supplying it. South Caro- lina holds the world's record for the growing of corn per acre, but it is far from being a great corn-producing state. The district agricultural schools of Georgia, established by the legislature of that state, have been in existence over a year now and are meeting with great public favor. Each school has a farm, and the boys and girls, who all live in dormitories at the school, do all the farm labor in addition to the academic work required. This unique experiment by the state of Georgia is being watched with great interest by the other southern states. The normal schools of the South are giving industrial training along many lines, includ- ing agriculture, to prepare teachers for such work. The institution I represent, besides providing for training in domestic arts and sciences, housekeeping, care of school grounds and buildings, manual training, and the other usual industrial arts, gives instruction in elementary agriculture in connection with school gardens and a farm of 144 acres, where there is a dairy, an orchard, an apiary, etc. I agree with the final concllision of the committee " that much progress has been made during recent years, but that much yet remains to be done before the importance and value of industrial education for rural schools shall be fully appreciated by all concerned and before it shall receive its appropriate recognition and find its proper place in our educational system." PRELIMINARY REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS A. THE PROBLEM STATED MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, PHILADELPHIA, PA. I. THE SCOPE. — ^To determine the limits of the problem. I. Related essentials. To furnish the soul with the elements of the problem. a) The virtue of civilization, which is politeness or courtesy. CouncO] MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 449 The problem of civilization is to secure conduct on the plane of social demand. b) The virtue of morality, which is conscientiousness or dependableness. The problem of morality is to secure conduct on the plane of thought, whence arises the function of conscience. 2. Religious education proper. a) The virtue of religion, which is humility. The problem of religion is to secure a recognition of the inadequacy of human guidance for conduct and to follow implicitly the guidance of the divine. b) Its aspects. 1. The theoretical training in the religious life. (a) Nutrition of feeling — Problem of elementary education. (b) Nutrition of definition — Problem of secondary education. (c) Nutrition of insight — Problem of higher education. 2. The practical training. (a) Consecration of self to our ideals. (b) Reconciliation of the individual with his lot. (c) Selection of a viewpoint in life. 3. The absolute training. (a) Conformity to law. (b) Investigation of the activities of the race in its effort to achieve the higher life. (c) Selection of a creed or confession of faith. II. THE METHOD. — ^To determine the process of instruction. 1. Tell it — to solicit thought — Intellectual phase. 2. Rhyme it — to solicit feeling — Emotional phase. 3. Formulate it — to solicit guidance — ^Volitional phase. The question or problem is: How much of all this may be taught in the public schools? B. THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS J. W. CARR, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, DAYTON, OHIO The future greatness of this nation will depend more upon the care and training of its children than aught else. It is not enough to teach children the rudiments of knowledge. They must be protected against vice, and receive that kind of moral training that will develop in them the right sort of moral fiber. If we as a people fail, it will not be for lack of wealth, or opportunity, or knowledge, or skill, but it will be on account of low ideals and the failure to i develop proper standards of moral character among the children. So the problem of problems, not only of the schools but of the nation, is not financial, or commercial, or political, or social, but moral— the problem of developing IP 45© NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National It is too much to expect the public schools to develop the highest types of moral character among children, just as it is too much to expect the schools to develop the highest types of scholarship or the best examples of skill. These higher forms of excellency can only be attained by mature persons after years of training in the school of experience and under the exigencies of real life- The public school will do all that can reasonably be expected of it, if it aids the pupil to lay a broad foundation for the development of moral character in after life. This is done in two ways: 1. By aiding him to form lofty ideals of honor, truth, justice, duty, and the like. 2. By training him in the formation of certain moral habits, such as habits of self- control, cleanliness, obedience, honesty, justice, industry, fairness, considerateness, patience, perseverance, self-respect, respect for others, loyalty, reverence, and love. Now, in order that moral habits may be formed by pupils most readily and certainly, several things are necessary, such as a definite understanding of the habits to be acquired, wholesome environments, competent and sym- pathetic teachers, kind and just treatment, proper stimuli for developing the sensibilities and the will, and frequent opportunities for the performance of moral acts until they become habits. An adequate discussion of any one of these would transcend the limits of this paper; hence, the briefest outline only can be given. In order that anything may be done properly, it is first necessary for us to have a clear conception of just what that thing is. If we want to build a house, we first decide what kind of a house it is to be, and then we make a definite plan of every "part of it, having due consideration for the use to which it is to be put, the amount of money to be expended, the material available, and so on. We then proceed to build the house ourselves or have someone to build it for us. In a similar way we must decide what traits of character we wish to develop in the pupils in the public schools, and then we must know how to go about it in order to develop those traits most surely and in the best way. We decide definitely that every child needs to acquire certain personal habits such as honor, self-control, and the like, and then we use the means available to aid him in acquiring these habits. Having decided on some of the moral habits we wish them to acquire, we should then provide an environment for the school where it will be easiest for pupils to form these habits. Hence, the necessity of locating the school in a place where pupils will seldom come into contact with vicious people, and where they will be contaminated least by the evil influences of the community. The people of one of our great cities were indignant and shocked when an official report revealed the fact that 384 of their public schools was each located in the same square with a saloon. Many of these saloons had gambling dens and brothels connected with them. As a natural consequence, the children attending these schools came into daily contact with drunken men and drunken women, heard profane and coarse language, and were constantly exposed to dangers that are as deadly to the moral life as the miasma of the Congo is to the Councilj MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 451 physical life. No wonder mothers prayed for the deliverance of their children, and fathers resolved that these things should not be. If dens of iniquity must exist, they at least should not be allowed in immediate proximity to our public schools. There should be a healthy moral atmosphere pervading every school. The administration of school affairs should be clean and wholesome. Mem- bers of the board of education, officers of the board, superintendents, principals, and teachers should all be persons of high moral character. They should be such persons as command the universal respect and confidence of the people of the community and the admiration and love of the pupils. Children may be brought up amid evil influences at home, they may be exposed to contami- nation from bad associates, they may be neglected and buffeted by society in general, but it should be the heritage of every child to have the opportunity of spending at least a part of" his youth in a public school, every part of which is pervaded by the most wholesome moral atmosphere. Teachers must not only be competent but they must have an unselfish interest in the children and be able to sympathize with them in all their activi- ties. I have never known a teacher to have a strong and abiding influence over their lives unless the children were first convinced that their teacher had a genuine interest in them. "What is the first requisite for reclaiming and transforming these children ?" I once asked the principal of a great truant school on the East Side in New York City. ''We must first convince them that we have an unselfish interest in their welfare," was the prompt response. "At first, they resent everything that we attempt to do for them or have them do for themselves," she continued, "because they think that we are trying >*to work them' as the boys say. But as soon as they realize that the teachers really have a genuine interest in them, their whole attitude changes and they ; begin to improve." The same thing is true with all children in all schools. Teachers must be able to sympathize with pupils in all conditions and [under all circumstances — sympathize with them in their work and in their jplay — sympathize with them in their difficulties — sympathize with them in [their joys and sorrows. The Great Teacher is touched by our infirmities, ;he sympathizes with us. It is by the mystic bond of sympathy that the virtue, •the healing and transforming power of one soul is transferred to another. As oxygen is to the body, so is sympathy to the moral life of the child. Kind and just treatment of children is a prime requisite for their moral development. In the modern school, kindness has almost entirely supplanted the rod as a means of discipline. The results, on the whole, have been good. The best traits of moral character are developed by the repression of the evil and the cultivation of the good. By treating children kindly, they are not so apt to give way to passion and it is easy for them to be obedient, cheerful, and happy themselves and kind to others. In the atmosphere of kindness, every virtue blossoms and bears fruit. But children should be treated justly as well as kindly. It is very easy 452 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National for kindness to degenerate into mere indulgence. It is not kindness, but quite the opposite, when we tolerate in children idleness, falsehood, disobedience, dishonesty, and the like. Justice demands that these and similar things be corrected. Children as a rule appreciate correction and even punishment, so long as it is not unjust, but any form of injustice, or the failure to mete out justice to all alike, is quickly felt and always resented. Justice, as well as kindness, must be enthroned in the school if the moral life of the children is to be properly developed. Every form of school activity should contribute an important part to the moral development of the pupils. In fact it is the chief purpose of the school not to impart knowledge but to develop character and it is indeed fortunate that when a school is so conducted as to do most for the intellectual develop- ment of the children, it, at the same time, may do the most for their moral growth. It all depends upon the way in which it is done; the spirit which pervades the school. The routine work of the school; the discipline of the school; the incidental and minor exercises of the school; the recess periods; the friendly intercourses of pupils with one another and with their teacher; the study period; the recitation; the course of study; and especially the example of the teacher — these must all be utilized in training pupils in the formation of correct moral habits. It is this training, the daily practice in these simple elemental virtues, that enable pupils to form habits of uprightness, which finally develop into moral character. It will be one of the most important parts of this report when finally presented to show how these different school activities may be utilized to aid in the formation of moral habits and lofty moral ideals. C. THE HOME AND SCHOOL LIFE J. M. GREENWOOD, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, KANSAS CITY, MO. [ylw Abstract] a) Obedience. — In the moral sphere the child at first has no intuitions of the abstract principles of right and wrong. Behind every act there should be clear knowledge and a definite purpose, and the more complete the knowl- edge, the stronger is the tendency to act up to the fullest measure of light one has. The entire training of a child begins with the observance of certain rules, and this leads the way to obedience and self-control — the object of all training. b) The home. — Whatever is good and pure and clean, or whatever is bad and impure and vile in the inner life of the individual, has its rise in the home life. c) The relation oj parent and child. — Honesty with children always counts. The parent who practices deception, either covertly or openly, or"'plays sharp tricks, or induces his child to engage in practices that will not bear the closest scrutiny, is false to the sacred trust committed to his care. CouiicUl MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 453 d) Habits that should he taught to children. — (i) Doing honest work; (2) Shouldering responsibility; (3) Gaining ends by honest means, etc. e) Making children over. — Each case requires special treatment since there is no universal science of human nature. To substitute higher motives for lower motives. Ideals are higher than ideas. /) The school life. — ^Teachers cannot have direct physical and spiritual control over pupils to exceed eight hours each school day, and not to exceed two hundred days out of the three hundred and sixty-five days of each year. g) Children's school habits. — ^The school is the pupil's place of business, and while there he should attend to his business promptly and cheerfully, and do everything required of him in the best manner possible. h) Moral training in school. — ^The theory of all moral training is based on two simple principles: judgment and feeling combined, jollowed by doing. The reading lessons will usually furnish sufficient material for the inculca- tion of good habits and their opposites. Self-help is the mainspring of all genuine worth. 1. How to train pupils incidentally. 2. How to train pupils formally. 3. Illustrations contrasting virtues and their opposites — ^vices — in short, teaching by contrast. D. RELATION OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING CLIFFORD W. BARNES, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE ON MORAL TRAINING, CHICAGO, ILL. The discussion of this subject invites us to sweep the whole gamut of philosophical thought, both ancient and modern, to discourse wisely on natural and revealed religion, and to enlarge upon the meaning of the categorical imperative, in a manner that would delight the soul of Immanuel Kant. But let it suffice for our purpose to say that, judged from the standpoint of abstract philosophy, the relation between morals and religion is very close, and whether we arrive at our knowledge of God through a recognition of duty or recognize duty through a knowledge of God, there is something in the moral imperative that links the human with the divine, something in religion which must find expression in moral action, and in moral action which finds its chief dynamic in religion. Passing from the academic to the practical discussion of the problem, especially as it pertains to education, we find that the closest relation has always existed between moral and religious training. In the early days of our own country the summun bonum of education was a course in biblical literature and theology that would do credit to a modern church seminary; the spelling book, the reader, and even the arithmetic obtaining the substance of their content from the sacred Scriptures. Moral training was not intentionally neglected, but it was considered such a natural and inevitable resultant of religion that it received little attention. 454 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Nationa Our own system of education was but the counterpart of that which existed in Europe at that time, and which, indeed, had existed in much the same form for many generations. Speaking in general, it may be said that all civilized and even the so-called barbarous nations have always made religion the rock foundation and the most pervasive force in education, while moral action has ever been considered its true expression in the lives of good citizens. Of recent years, in the more progressive of European countries, there has been a steadily growing feeling of dissatisfaction with the results of religious training. Somehow the Bible stories have not always been transmuted into ethical principles, active in the lives of pupils, and there has seemed to be a dangerous gap between precept and practice in the routine of daily affairs. During the past year, in many of the schools of England the Scripture lessons have been so arranged as to constitute a systematic course of moral instruction; and in Germany a league has been formed to make religious teaching more ethical. But, however you look at the problem, in the abstract or the concrete, through the eyes of philosophy or the records of history, moral and religious training have ever gone hand in hand, maintaining the closest relation to each other, finding strength in union and weakness in separation. It is unnecessary to recall to your minds those changing events in our national life which have gradually eliminated all religious instruction from the public schools, and made our system of education nominally secular. That system is here to stay, and it is our duty to accept it gladly as a part of God's wise providence, and do our level best to make it most effective in the training of the young. There is, of course, no question as to the propriety or desirability of so arranging this system of education as to give the first place to moral training, for in the very nature of things all else should be secondary. But, in the light of that which has gone before, how are we going to have a vital morality without the introduction of that religious instruction which is forbidden ? or, stated somewhat differently, what relation can be established, in the public schools of America, between these two essentially complimentary factors — ^religion and morality ? Briefly answering this question, I would say: First, In teaching morals one should yield to the philosophical requirement of the situation and acknowledge the religious basis on which morality rests. Surely we may be permitted in this country to speak with greater freedom concerning the general subject of religion than they who live in that land of religious controversy, sometimes called "Godless France," and yet that govern- ment, in its official program, urges upon its teachers to show the relation between the moral and divine law, to inculcate in their pupils a reverence for God and religion, and to be attentively respectful at any service of the church. Second, As one makes use of that best medium for the teaching of a moral lesson, i. e., the biography of a good man, it can properly be shown how large a part religion playedln the development of character and in the winning CouncUl MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS 455 of success. There need be nothing here of dogmatism or theology, but a simple recognition of the historical fact that one of the mighty influences in the life of any man is his religion, be he Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. Third, Formal worship once a day should be the universal practice in th e schools of America. If at the basis of all moral teaching we come in touch with the divine, and if the chief aim of education is to promote moral training , surely we are illogical and foolish beyond measure to prohibit the recognition in some formal way of that first great underlying Cause, whom some call ''Lord," '' Our God," and "Heavenly Father." When the juror, and the wit- ness, and the client before a notary are no longer asked to swear their affirma- tion in God's name; when our judges, and our congressmen, and other public servants are permitted to assume their solemn obligations without taking oath of office on the word of God; when the President of the United States refuses to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation, in acknowledgment of the blessings of Almighty God; when Congress, by deliberate choice, refuses to elect a chaplain, or be led in prayer, and strikes from our coin "in God we trust;" and when the laws of the land so change their character as to give no recognition to God's Holy Day, and divine authority, then, and not till then, will the public schools of America be justified in omitting all forms of daily worship. It is needless to enter here upon the discussion of this much mooted question, but I cannot refrain from saying how monstrously absurd and sinfully dangerous I consider it to be for any organization controlling the educational force of a great sin-burdened city deliberately to refuse to give official recognition to the greatest power which makes for righteousness in all the world. Fourth, The atmosphere of the school may be a medium for the intro- duction of religion. This will require no stating of creed, no expression of belief, nothing that might be called pietistic or sanctimonious, but only a pervasive spirit of light and joy and happiness, a sort of general understanding that life is a great and beautiful gift of God, not to be used for sordid purposes, but rather as a means of serving others to the limit of one's ability. This will be religion, pure and undefiled, admitting of no sectarian controversy, but exerting a tremendously vitalizing influence on every effort at moral train- ing. The source of this religious atmosphere is not the school in which we find it, but the church and the homes of the neighborhood. A score or more of antagonistic denominations will help to make it, a thousand different faiths will enter into it, the Bible story, the pastor's prayer, the mother's counsel, the father's command, these aU will do their part, while underneath these runs a steady current of religious conviction, sweeping down from the days of our ancestors to keep the hearts of the children strong and true. This is not some strange illusion of an idle dreamer, for here and there one finds a school whose life and spirit answer well to this description, and the religious element which pervades it in this atmospheric manner is a powerful reality working mightily for good. The church and the home may well feel a new 456 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [i?Jational sense of responsibility as it thus becomes clear that the correlation of religion and morality in our system of education is so largly dependent upon them. Religion in the individual is good; but it becomes a better and greater thing when, multiplied a thousand fold, it gives the spirit of religion to the town, the school, and the nation. Fifth, The teacher, through his personality, should bring religion to the aid of morality. Considering my words very carefully, I have no hesitation in saying that an irreligious person has no right to teach in a public school. Do not understand me to mean by "irreligious" a person who lacks member- ship is some one of our many churches. I mean by ''irreligious" a person who fails to perceive any relation between the finite and the infinite, who recognizes no supreme good in the universe, who has no consciousness of a "power not himself that makes for righteousness." Such men are often caught up by the tide of wholesome life which surrounds them on every side and are carried on to the achievement of a noble career. But as teachers of the young they lack in the spirit of reverence, in the discernment of true values, in the power to quicken high ideals, and in that love for self-sacrifice which the Great Teacher taught his disciples. I know there are some whose faith has been twisted and dwarfed by the blows of misfortune until its form is strange beyond words to describe; and there are some who by nature or training can only bow the knee, like the Greeks of old, before an altar inscribed "Agnosto Theo" (to the Unknown God); but such men are not irreligious, for with patient hope they look forward to a day of clearer vision, and with glad self-sacrifice they lend a helping hand to others as they walk the road toward the better life. Religion, even such religion, expressing itself in the person of one who is honored and loved, is worth ten thousand homilies on theology, or as many chapters learned by rote from the Holy Book. Summing it all up, then, very briefly, we are agreed that moral training should be increasingly emphasized in our system of education. To be most effective it should never be divorced from the element of religion with which it has always been closely related by the theories of philosophy and the history of events. Under the conditions which exist in our country today, it lies within the power of our educational authorities to develop an increasingly strong and vital connection between these two important agencies, by a clear statement of their mutual dependence, a fair portrayal of their joint influence on the lives of men, the observance each day of some form of public worship, the wise use of a potential and pervasive religious atmosphere, and last, but not least, by the life and character of the honored teacher, who himself is sincerely religious. DISCUSSION Miss Nebraska Cropsey, Indianapolis, Ind. — It is very evident, from the able reports presented this morning, that moral development cannot be secured by any kind of early specialization (not even by manual training), nor apart from personal guidance. The studies of the elementary school, reading, writing, arithmetic, manual training, CouncUl THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS 457 art, will not' of themselves secure moral development though they are the opportum'ty for growth by means of self -activity, and also the means by which the child is related to the great world, of which the school is a part. The training of the intellect must be considered in training for moral development. The important and difficult work of the school is to furnish such conditions, by asso- ciation and work, as will develop the rational will. To make the will pure and strong, as Froebel tells us, is the object of education; to place the action of the will beyond the power of accident, and, in our time especially, to make a man capable of dominating the machinery which he himself has invented. We are constantly endeavoring to adjust our conduct to the standards of our civiliza- tion. Imitation as a process should not be underestimated in education. "How can I listen to what you say when what you do is thundering in my ears ?" The personality of the teacher is the great factor in moral education. Children must be considered as indi- viduals, and must be directed by individual intelligence and sympathy. The organization of the school community is most important, but all machinery should be considered sub- ordinate to human growth. It is impossible to give adequate moral training in the present crowded condition of the schools. The reform most needed is not a reduction of the number of studies, but a reduction of the number of pupils assigned to each teacher. The studies in the curriculum represent only the opportunities which a child might have in a cultivated family. Much attention has been given to literature for children, and no instrumentality is more effective in creating the ideals which must influence and direct the will. The theory of life, the theory of conduct is expressed in the art form and applied to life, before the child is capable of understanding philosophy or religious creeds. Our literature and art should explain the child to himself in his own civilization. The life of the primitive man has its place, no doubt. The myths of earlier civilizations have much value, in a scheme of education, if they are well chosen. The method of indirect teaching has great value, but not to the exclusion of direct teaching. Children are con- stantly asking the meaning of the life around them and are placing their interpretation upon it. The old-time stories endeavored to explain, in a very simple way, the consequence of the deed, and the relative values of actions. It is true that an arrest of development may take place in an effort to bring the moral powers to early maturity, but it is equally true that development may be arrested by teaching below the level of the child's power to comprehend. DISTINCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE, AND NORMAL SCHOOL IN THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION WASHINGTON, D. C. It is, I believe, my function at this time merely to start the discussion of this topic, a topic that has been much discussed in the past, and sometimes with the warmth of opposing convictions. The points in which there has appeared to be irreconcilable opposition of view have now been so far talked out and studied out, that it will be possible, I am sure, for us here to consider without irritation the difi&culties with which the question is necessarily attended. And we may be able to go a little way forward toward a solution of those difficulties. What I have to present may be summed up as follows : The chief difficulty of adjustment from the side of the normal school arises from the fact that the normal school seems to be out of the main current of our scholastic life, which 458 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION INational flows from the elementary school through the high school directly into the university or, the other way round, from the university to the secondary and elementary school. The chief difficulty of adjustment from the side of the university arises from the fact that it has been found impossible as yet to organize in the university any system of training in the actual practice of teaching that can be compared in efficiency with that to be found in our best normal schools. I am taking the question as it was assigned to me with this exception, that I do not undertake to discuss the function of the college as apart from that of the university. What I have to say concerning the university will apply only in part to an institution having a fully developed school of education or teachers' college. What is said of the lack of adequate practice teaching of secondary grade is, I think, of universal application. With reference to both of the difl&culties mentioned above I shall have some mild suggestions toward im- provement to offer before I close. We are now well accustomed to the idea that all grades of education in this country are to be closely bound together, from the lowest to the highest. Our fidelity to the spirit of democracy requires this of us, and we are convinced that it is best in the long run both for science and for the national life. Con- tinuity and coherence are watchwords of our educational organization. But just because the higher grades of instruction are bound fast to the lower, we see the need of especial care that a steady progression shall be main- tained in both the method and the content of our teaching. No grade of instruction shall be allowed to lay a detaining hand of scholastic custom and inertia upon the grade above it. At no stage of our scholastic ascent shall we tarry for more than two years with instruction of essentially the same type or the same grade of difi&culty. Furthermore, we cannot be content with the standards of the past. Not only our own national development, but, more particularly, our closer touch with the rest of the world, has shown us that our standards have been pitched too low. This is true both on the side of knowledge and on the side of skill in teaching. In our new position in the world, it is not enough that we win patronizing approval of our science and of our school instruction from the older culture nations. That new position requires of us that we do our full part in determining what the world-standard shall be, both in pure science and in pedagogic practice. This is particularly difficult when half our teaching force is a rope of sand and when the profitable pursuits of applied science are luring our scientists away from their laboratories. But these unfavorable circumstances cannot relieve us of our responsibility; and a consideration of the higher attainments which the present times demand, as regards both knowledge and teaching skill, has an important bearing on the distribution of function between normal schools and universities. We are pretty well agreed that the knowledge of subject-matter and skill in presentation are both requisite in all grades of teaching, and that, broadly Coundll THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS 459 speaking, the skill is of greater relative importance in the earlier grades and the knowledge in the later years of schooling. A general recognition of this fact works automatically in the distribution of teachers, tending to place the graduates of colleges and universities in high-school positions and the graduates of normal schools in elementary grades, with a fair mingling of the two in the principalships and teaching positions of grammar schools. Making allowance for many exceptions, I think we should be agreed that the public good is fairly well served by such a distribution. We must recognize the fact that high schools, of the type and standing now expected in our high schools, must be mainly taught by those who have had collegiate or university training. The same should be said of the seventh and eighth grades of our grammar schools when they are taught on the department plan or offer studies of second- ary grade. We need to get special knowledge and special skill into their right relations to each other, and a third element must be added, namely, special inborn fitness for teaching. The considerations which we have before us, then, range themselves about as follows: It is of first importance that we attract into the business of teaching and into our training schools for teachers those who have the right stuff in them, the right kind of manhood and womanhood for such work. It is next in importance that these persons shall be well educated, as regards both general culture and special knowledge of some one subject or group of subjects. Close after these requirements comes the requirement of technical training for the processes of teaching. President Alderman remarked in his recent paper on "The Growing South": The ability of this generation to recognize education as something larger than mere learning or even discipline, to perceive it as a great force molding national character, has caused the enlistment into this field of work of young men and young women of creative capacity and exalted character, who, under other conditions in Southern history, would have instinctively turned to political and social fields of distinction and service. Such a condition is of the utmost importance for the teaching profession and for teachers' training schools of every kind. It can be brought about only through the concurrence of the whole set of conditions surrounding our educational system. All that can be done, by co-operative action of all persons concerned, will be needed to turn toward education in the country at large those who can best do the work of education. The second requirement, that the teacher be well educated, is emphasized here for two reasons: First, because a teacher needs such a grade of education as will give him an assured place with the best educated people in the com- munity, and so give to his influence in the schoolroom the added weight of the respect of the community; second, because the teacher needs such a standing with his pupils that his influence upon them will outlive their days of schooling. There is a kind of skill in teaching, adequate and successful 460 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National according to the standard of immediate requirements, sometimes markedly successful, which nevertheless is without depth and so falls flat when it comes to the need of a lasting influence in the grown-up lives of those on whom it has been exercised. It is particularly unfortunate when it happens, as some- times it does happen, that the most distinct and conscious moral impression is made by a teacher whose skill in teaching is not balanced by impressive and substantial scholastic attainments, a teacher who has become a pathetic memory and nothing more when his pupils have reached their maturity. The third requirement, that the teacher shall have mastered the art of teaching, is likewise emphasized here for two reasons *. First, that his lack of skill may not come between him and his pupils, or indeed come between his pupils and their rightful education. The apostle Paul, you remember, boasted that he did not frustrate the grace of God. And second, that the young teacher, particularly, shall be able to go into team-work with the rest of the teaching force. There is something pitifully lonesome for himself and hampering to his fellows in the position of a highly-educated teacher who has not enough of pedagogic interest and teacher-training to enable him to join hands with others in making the school a school. Now let us come back to the actual diflSculties of present adjustment. A normal-school president said to me not long ago, "If you want to do anything for the normal schools, help them to get out of the blind alley in which they find themselves." It was only another way of stating the diflGiculty which was mentioned at the outset of this paper. Another, a teacher in a normal school, put it in this way: "Personal relations within the school are good, but intel- lectually we are starving." I am well aware of another side to the case. Individual presidents and teachers of normal schools have made their institu- tions fairly a-tingle with intellectual and aesthetic interest. Strong teachers continue to go into the normal schools, many of them bearing the higher degrees of the most advanced universities. But the blind alley exists, not as a fault but as a situation. It appears in other unattached professional schools, in schools of medicine, of law, and of theology. It may be doubted whether an adequate remedy is to be found in empowering normal schools to offer collegiate courses and give collegiate degrees, though that plan may be justified where a full course of collegiate grade can be provided without detriment to the wider work of the institution. The obvious remedy is to bring the normal school into more intimate relations with the institutions in which the highest scientific work is done, to give it an appropriate place in the university system of its state. Just how this is to be done in any given case, I am not prepared to say. The cases are extremely various. The present disposition on the part of our universities to break the undergraduate course in two at the close of the sophomore year suggests that in some instances the normal schools might profitably offer, along with their other courses, the first two years of the college course. One incidental adjustment which seems worthy of consideration is a regular and systematic exchange of instructors between Councfl) THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS 461 the normal school and a university or certain universities. Such an exchange, when it settled into an accepted routine, would, I believe, have advantages for both of the sides concerned. The second difficulty of which I spoke, that on the side of the university, is the difficulty of providing suitable practice teaching, particularly in schools of secondary grade. This difficulty has been partially met, in a variety of ways, at the universities of Harvard, Brown, Chicago, and California, at Teachers College, and other institutions. It does not seem to me that it has anywhere been fully met. It is comparatively easy to provide practice teaching of a grammar grade or in laboratory courses in the high school, but for high- school class work, outside of the laboratory, it is more difficult. The normal schools, by their successful organization of practice teaching of an elementary grade, have set a standard of practical training. And strong city superin- tendents and high-school principals are demanding, with good show of reason, that they shall not be required to do the breaking-in of high-school teachers when' the normal school does successfully the breaking-in of teachers for elementary schools. In the main it seems to me that university authorities have not yet taken this problem seriously. Yet it is, I am persuaded, a problem which will have to be taken seriously. It is to be hoped that closer relations between normal schools and universities may lead to wider experimentation in this field. I do not look for an altogether satisfactory outcome, however, till the matter has been taken in hand by some of our state legislatures. In a serious way, as part of the educational system of the state, the professional courses of our universities will have to be supplemented, as it seems to me, by regular pro- vision for special high schools organized expressly as schools for practice teach- ing; or by apprentice teaching in designated high schoolS; after the manner of the German Prohejahr; or by both of these provisions with others added thereto. These few suggestions are offered with the greatest diffidence, for I well know the difficulty of the subject. I am convinced, however, that it is a field in which we must have courageous discussion and careful experimentation. And it would seem that a time has come when this Council may lead the way to some constructive advance and improvement. DISCUSSION John W. Cook, president of Northern Illinois State Normal School, De Kalb, 111. — It is difficult to treat, with any degree of satisfaction, the function of the normal school as distinguished from that of the college and university within the limits of a thousand words. Nothing can be more obvious than that the elementary school must depend quite exclusively for trained teachers upon the normal school. An occasional university woman will seek employment in the grades but, like the rest, she needs the normal-school discipline unless she has had special advantages in pedagogical training in the university. In such an event she will seek the high school rather than the grades because of a higher salary 462 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Natioiai and of the richness of the subject-matter. The elementary school will be taught for years to come by young women who enter and leave the calling with a degree of freedom not discoverable in any other vocation that aspires to be called a profession. In the large cities there is already a fair degree of permanency of tenure and it is steadily increasing, for, in the great centers of population, young women are more and more abandoning the idea of marriage and are seeking occupations that will furnish them subsistence and at the same time will supply a fairly satisfactory social standing. It is an encouraging sign to note that salaries are moving along toward a living wage so that young women who are contented to Uve modestly will accept the situation and will enter the schoolroom to remain there for the working period of their lives. The compensation attaching to these positions, however, will not attract women of university training. In consequence we may expect to see few of them there unless they enter the grades for the purpose of securing that indispensable experience which will fit them for higher and more lucrative places in the educational system. They will look toward supervisorships and principalships and if they intelligently persist they will receive their reward. The old disparity of salaries is fast disappearing and in the great cities the women principals and supervisors are on a par with the men in the matter of compensation. There is no further occasion for the old lament that women must accept smaller salaries than men, simply because they are women, in these positions of grave responsibility. Away from the larger cities the fluid character in the teaching force is its striking characteristic. The average tenure will barely exceed four years, I suspect, although I am not fortified with statistics to establish this statement. Here the work of the normal school assumes even greater importance, if possible, for without its assistance the majority of the schools will be in the hands of teachers who are in the apprentice stage and who will retire from the school about the time that they have acquired a fair degree of efiiciency. Good normal schools are supplied with training schools which furnish to their graduates such an experience in theory, and in the actual teaching work, under normal conditions, as will equip them for excellent service upon their graduation. They will not only have the theory which broadly underlies elementary education but they will also be supplied with the material of instruction adapted to the various grades, and will have sufl&cient practice in class teaching and in room management to render them fairly good teachers from the first day of their service in the public school. It is not practicable for any other institution to attempt this work. The university cannot do it for its students are rarely so much interested in elementary education as to engage in this practice work for a sufficient length of time to acquire the requisite skill. Furthermore, the universities are not supplied with training schools which would furnish such an opportunity if the students were disposed to avail themselves of it. There is another class of positions which the normal school is most admirably adapted to fill. The villages and towns, and their name is legion, usually employ a principal who supervises the work of the elementary grades, oversees the high school, at least, and does some of the work of instruction. These positions pay but moderate salaries, yet they attract good talent and furnish a preparation for service in the larger towns and cities. These capable young men from the normal school are an unqualified godsend to the com- munities in which they are employed. They are full of the spirit of the teacher and are devoted to the work of the elementary school. They have learned to regard it as not only highly honorable but as extremely interesting and improving, and with their fine idealism they give themselves to their tasks with great enthusiasm and earnestness. If they are prepared to enter the university whei> they go to the normal school they realize that their discipUnes there will receive full credit at the higher institutions, hence they find their way sooner or later to those great well-springs of culture where they con- stitute a most admirable element in the student body. The school has caught their atten- tion and interest and when they come back with their superior learning they make the ideal managers of educational systems. Coundll THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS 463 A third group that the normal school can admirably prepare consists of principals and special teachers in village high schools where the compensation will not attract the highly-trained specialists that the cities can afford. It is an unfortunate fact that many of the teachers in secondary schools have more knowledge than skill. They come from the university with a sense of superiority and are often disposed to think slightingly of teaching as an art. The university method quite occasionally finds its way into the second- ary school and invariably to its detriment. When these young women and young men have added to their normal-school training the wider culture already referred, they are extremely desirable. There is a fourth class that the normal school is peculiarly well fitted to prepare. Critic teachers for city systems and for normal schools should themselves be imbued with the normal-school spirit. Equipped with a normal-school and college training they may return to the normal school and connect themselves with its training department with very great profit to themselves. Two years of such experience furnish an admirable prepara- tion for such positions. A well-equipped training school can take care of two or three such pupils and do most excellently for them. The question of the preparation of secondary teachers is still open for discussion. It is still my conviction that the normal school as at present organized is not an ideal agency for the preparation of teachers for secondary schools. Many of the normal schools, however, have extended their courses of instruction until they have become really colleges. It may be that these institutions will solve the secondary-school problem. It is my fear, however, that in their attempt to do so they will neglect the elementary school. Those aspiring to this wider development seem unwilling to accord to the elementary school the dignity that belongs to it. There is an ill-concealed dissatisfaction with the thought of limiting one's fife-work to the training of young children. We shall soon see, however, the effect of this disposition and then we can talk more wisely about it. James E. Russell, dean of Teachers College, Columbia University. — The training of teachers, like other educational work, is a matter chiefly of teachers and students. The right kind of teachers brought into the right kind of relations with the right kind of students should produce the right kind of results. The trouble with most of our institutions is that we lack somewhat either in the abifity of our teaching staff, or in the quality of our students, or in the equipment essential to a training school. It is clear that most colleges are defective in that they supply inadequate facifities for observation and practice in teaching; some of them are not disposed, possibly unwilling, to give that kind of academic instruction which is required by teachers of high- school subjects, not to mention teachers of lower grades; few colleges or universities have as yet put the professional training of teachers on the same plane as the training of engineers, or lawyers, or physicians. No first-class medical school, no, not even a second- or third- class medical school, would today think of graduating physicians without clinical demon- stration and hospital practice. In the training of teachers the practice school is the hospital and good teaching in the presence of observers is clinical demonstration. Moreover, young college graduates are nowadays pseudo-specialists in some one of the collegiate studies. What is taught in the average college course is not suited to the needs even of secondary teachers. Perhaps if it were entirely suited to such a purpose it would not be a proper college course. The college course I consider an essential pre- requisite to the professional training of teachers for secondary schools, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the cultural discipline of the college course is no substitute for the technical equipment in the particular subject which every teacher must acquire either by experience in the classroom or by professional training. No professional school tries to equip its students with all they may need in professional life, but it should strive to systematize the body of knowledge employed in professional service in accordance with the highest professional ideals and the best scientific principles, to the end that the period of 464 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION LNatioml irresponsible practice may be reduced to a minimum. What is needed in each collegiite department that offers instruction for teachers is at least one course which shall unify the student's knowledge of the subject acquired in preparatory school and college and assist him in supplementing and organizing his material in such a way as to be of greatest service to him in his future professional work. Such a course may be truly academic, but it is also professional in that it selects and organizes its materials for practical purposes. It is the connecting link between the cultural discipline of the college and the technical training of the professional school. The college professes to give cultural discipline. If it will train teachers effectively it must also give technical instruction of the character I have just specified, instruction in ways and means of selecting, arranging, and presenting school subjects, and finally observa- tion and practice in teaching sufficient to make intending teachers conscious of their per- sonal faults if not skilled in the methods of their art. All this requires money — money for more teachers, more equipment, and more technical facilities than most colleges possess. It means, too, more money than most colleges and universities are as yet able or willing to expend. Until the means are forthcoming the professional training of teachers by colleges and universities will be abortive. The aim of normal schools is avowedly the professional training of teachers. Social and political considerations demand that the great public-school system below the grade of high school have particular care; economic considerations make impossible the require- ment of a college course as a prerequisite to teaching in an elementary school. Hence the limitation of cultural discipline in most normal schools to that offered by high-school and rural-school graduates. It is highly desirable that some elementary teachers have more academic training than the high school can give, and I see no inherent reason w^hy such advanced academic instruction cannot be given in a normal school as well as in a college. In fact I see no inherent reason why collegiate instruction, or even university training in methods of research, cannot be given in a normal school. It is, as I have already said, a matter chiefly of teachers and students and equipment. But the right kind of teachers and equipment means the expenditure of money — far more money than most normal schools can get or perhaps should have. But the normal school that can get the money by public grant or private gift and knows how to use it properly is surely in a position to train teachers efifectively, and teachers of any grade and of any subject. The question before us, therefore, is, in my opinion, largely a theoretic one; it is prac- tical only in so far as prevailing conditions suggest future possibilities. Theoretically, we should have schools for the training of rural teachers, elementary teachers, high-school teachers, teachers of special branches and teachers in special schools, college teachers and university teachers. In, my opinion the graduate faculties of our universities should care for the college and university instructors; they are really professional schools for training in pure scholarship. For other grades of teachers we also need professional schools, not subordinate and suspected departments of another type of institution. The normal school that confines itself to the elementary field is on sure ground, but the average normal school gives little heed to the needs of rural education and is not equipped to train teachers for high schools. Granting that professional training is desirable for high-school teachers and for specialists and administrative officers of the entire public-school system, I think that professional schools for these purposes can be maintained more economically in connection with an established college or university than independently. The independent normal school that would do this work well must maintain most of the departments of a good college and give instruction of collegiate rank. To do this in some localities or in some states may not be a duplication of existing opportunities; in other localities it would certainly seem both unwise and wasteful. I doubt whether we shall ultimately develop in this country many professional schools thoroly equipped to train teachers for rural schools, elementary schools, and high schools, Council] THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS 465 and administrative officers and educational experts for our school system — or, indeed, • for any two of these classes, in one and the same institution. The difference in the students who offer themselves for training in these respective fields, differences in home environ- ment, personal tastes, scholarly ability, and future aims, are in themselves quite sufl&cient to warrant separate and distinct training schools. But we shall not develop an ideal system in a day; we may never do so. What we are likely to do is to work out a scheme that shall be economically satisfactory and fairly responsive to our needs. We are sure one day to have training schools chiefly devoted to rural education — for the simple reason that rural education is today the most neglected part of our school system and the most in need of expert guidance. We are also sure to have teachers' professional schools in all of our great universities — for the reason that the sole function of a university is to train leaders in every art and science of value to humanity. When the eyes of university officers are finally opened to what observers in the market- place now plainly see and when they come to hear what the public is saying about their shortcomings, I have no doubt that public service in education will be rated in importance with engineering and law and medicine. The university professional school will concern itself chiefly with the training of high-school teachers, specialists, and administrative officers. It can do this work economically and it should be able to do it as well as any independent institution. This analysis leaves to the normal school the training chiefly of elementary and gram- mar-school teachers and certain kinds of special teachers and school officers. It is the field historically reserved for such schools and it is the field in which they have given best returns. There is no other field of greater importance, none that justifies better support or offers greater inducements to devoted service. I have no sympathy with the normal school that envies the college as something better or higher or worthier than itself, and apes collegiate ways for fear of the criticism of so-called learned men. On the other hand, I have only contempt for those scholars who will not grant honorable recognition to men abler than themselves in making learning of use in the world. We have need of both types of workers and I have faith in the university's ultimate conversion to the position that is obviously just and right. The progress of the past decade is an earnest of the future. The history of professional training in no other field, so far as I am aware, shows such sur- prising advance as has been made by the universities of this country since 1898. In my judgment the greatest obstacle to future advance is the lack of men qualified to do work of university grade. They are not to be had in sufficient numbers and it is to the credit of the universities that they will not put inferior men in superior places. As soon as the men are available, I think we shall find the means for supporting university schools for the pro- fessional training of teachers and I am sure the universities will be ready to accord such schools proper recognition. Without the men not even a normal school can perform the task. Meanwhile I rejoice that some universities are putting forth honest efforts to solve this problem, and I am by no means averse to having some good normal schools point out the way. Overlapping and competition may be necessary evils designed by a guiding provi- dence to hasten that educational millennium when all teachers shall be fitted for their work and take honest pride in giving professional service. John R. Kirk, president, State Normal School, Kirksville, Mo. — The university represents academic freedom. All agree that it may have any kind of school or college that its means will support. Hence, the university has no distinctive function in the prep- aration of teachers. Its sphere is unlimited. The University of Missouri has a Teachers College, with an elementary school and a large high school for purposes of exemplifying all phases of public-school education. This is a genuine pedagogical laboratory, useful in preparing teachers of all kinds from kindergarten to high-school seniors inclusive. Normal- 466 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National school men in Missouri encouraged and urged the university to establish the Teachers College. They welcome such competition. It is conceded that the college may have any subordinate college, sub-college, or depart- ment which its funds will support. So the college too represents academic freedom; and surely no sane man would seek to restrict any college to any alleged distinctive function in the preparation of teachers, especially while the typical college in our country is growing into a university and may become a university. For too long a time the normal school has represented a journey into a bUnd alley, but sound education of every kind demands academic freedom. The normal school demands freedom. There is no restricted sphere which the normal school is destined to fill. There is no exclusive field in education. Restriction means educational cramp and narrowness and lack of initiative and lack of outlook. Overlapping is healthy and invigorating. Restrictions upon a normal school are no more sane than restrictions upon a university or a college. The normal school demands liberty to give academic courses, paralleling the best of college work. Pedagogy itself is not in pedagogical form. Pedagogy as a subject to be taught does not now give and for a long time cannot give the mental virility which other subjects, such as languages, sciences, etc., give. But the normal school should exemplify the best of teaching. The normal-school student should become habituated to the best kind of work in academic and pedagogic subjects. Hence, the best results in the preparation of teachers are produced by having pedagogical and academic subjects taught side by side, interacting upon one another. It must be evident that a normal school without facilities for preparing high-school teachers cannot by any possibility prepare good elementary teachers. The products of such a normal school are handicapped in the outset. They lack knowledge. They lack experience in handling the keys to knowledge. They lack skill in using the instrumentali- ties of instruction. They are likely to lack constructive ingenuity. The philosophy is unsound which would allow half-educated or poorly educated teachers in schools up to and including the last day in the elementary school, while demanding fully educated persons the next day the children are in school, i.e., the first day in the high school. The elementary school needs scholarly teachers; indeed, it seems self-evident now that if any teacher in the world needs a college education, it is the grammar-school teacher, and I think no one in the world should be marked or honored with the stamp of profes- sional teacher who has not the equivalent of a college education along with adequate pro- fessional preparation. Ideal teachers cannot be produced or grow up in a restricted atmos- phere. The university and the college and the normal school should each prepare teachers of all kinds. It is only in the atmosphere of freedom that a really good teacher can be produced. Several normal schools in the middle west conduct pedagogical courses and college courses side by side. Their graduates by natural processes differentiate into teachers of various kinds. Much human energy is economized and incomparably better results are secured. PRELIMINARY REPORT ON NEED OF INVESTIGATION OF THE CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME IN EDUCATION JAMES H. BAKER, PRESIDENT, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER, COLO. In 1903 at the Boston vmeeting of the National Educational Association a committee was appointed in the Council of Education to report upon the desira- bility of an investigation of "The Culture Element and Economy of Time in Education." This committee, as a committee, has never reported beyond Councill CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 467 suggesting two or three topics for investigation. The subject was revived at the 1907 meeting of the Council and the writer was asked by the president to make a preliminary report upon it. It is to be remembered that this is not even a preliniinary report of an investigation, but a preliminary report upon its desirabihty — an examination of the field to see if treasure is contained within its limits. I am aware of the limitations to the value of the questionnaire as well as of its proper uses, and it has its uses. When such an investigation as this is proposed, the first step is to seek experiences, facts, opinions, and tendencies, as concerns the subject, and I believe unusually rich returns have been secured in this instance. I sent out several hundred copies of a circular inquiry to men carefully selected among the following: presidents of universities; professors of educa- tion; superintendents of schools and principals of high schools; sociologists and business men. Eighty replies were returned. The number of replies from each group is in the order of the groups named, few being received from sociolo- gists and business men, although a second special inquiry was sent them. The questions, a summary of the opinions, classified extracts, references to articles, experiments, and investigations, and a valuable additional bibli- ography, furnished for this report by the National Bureau of Education, are submitted as an Appendix. Also, as a part of the report itself, is a condensed and reclassified list of characteristic quotations, showing the tendency of thought upon the various topics. The questions were made as searching as possible for the general view to be obtained. The replies as a whole show exceptional knowledge, conscientiousness, and interest on the part of the writers, and very little perfunctory work or mere disposition to find fault appear- ing. I think I may here present a general impression of the whole, before calling attention to the questions and summaries. The first impression is that there is real and widespread dissatisfaction with the results of education, especially as related to the time expended ; that there is a growing consciousness of the need of adjustment to new ideals; that there is a demand for reinvestigation and reorganization. The people are ready for the leadership of any representative body that will attempt to reduce to some degree of order educational theories, methods, and standards. It is a surprise to me to learn that two thirds of the correspondents believe the period of formal education should be shortened and that very many would place the age limit at twenty-four or earlier. All ask for a shorter limit, or better results for the time, or both. They recognize that since the early New Eng- land college, education has added eight years, the high school has taken the place of the college, four years have been set apart for the higher degrees; that the college today occupies an anomalous position without a well-defined function; that each unit of the system is yearly increasing its demands; that quantity is the ideal rather than quality. There is a disposition to call a halt 468 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National along all the line and have an inspection. There is also a strong sentiment that culture must be redefined, that it covers much of the field which formerly was regarded as exclusively practical. The waste of time in elementary education, the need of reforms in secondary education, the need of definition of the college and of its relation to the professional school are emphasized with substantial reasons assigned. I was doubtful about the value of the question relating educational aims to social needs, but much wisdom is shown in the replies and a majority claim that real culture will not suffer if we pay reasonable attention to efficiency and economy of time. The last question asking for summary views upon the whole problem of the organization of education in this country brings out many valuable suggestions. There is nearly unanimity of opinion that much time is wasted in ele- mentary education, and a large majority claim that the time should be short- ened. That there are too many odds and ends, topics and subjects, is a com- mon criticism, the teaching and the lack of knowledge of ends aimed at having their share. Time can be saved by making a distinction between first-rate and tenth-rate facts; not trying to teach everything that is good; limiting the work to the tools of education; teaching content studies differently from the method in formal subjects; keeping educational aims in view. Upon the whole, the judgment regarding vocation studies in the elementary schools is conserv^a- tive and good. A striking suggestion is to provide studies which take the place of the work children formerly did with their parents in the home, on the farm, or in the shop. A majority favor a change of the high-school period, the preference being for twelve to eighteen. Some advocate two divisions only for the dominantly cultural education, since a distinction between the aims of the high school and of liberal college does not exist. Important reforms in the high school are freely proposed by nearly all. Amongst these are simplifying the courses, efficiency in character-making, directing the work toward well-defined ends, improving the teaching. I believe that, as noted under elementary education, some subjects should be presented in a way to invite and inspire and not for formal discipline, and that they should require little preparation. No greater mistake has been made in recent years than using the same rigid method for all studies. This practice is based on an exploded doctrine that attained great dignity a few years ago. Many people thank their stars that they did not get their literature and history in the modem elementary and secondary school. Vocational needs are generally recognized, and various schemes are offered for providing practical courses. A typical scheme is: grouped elect- ives leading in practical directions, and offered in connection with the regular high school. The length of the college course is put by the most at four years, but this is done by those who believe college entrance should be much earlier, and by those who would begin university work with the junior year, as well as by those who would preserve the college intact. Evidently they would first make a CouncOJ CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 469 readjustment of the college and the professional school in accord with present tendencies, and leave for a later solution the less important problem of require- ments for the A.B. degree. And here is the most significant fact of the whole report: one-half of the correspondents would have university work begin at the junior year — work that gives scientific power — with groups leading to the vari- ous professional degrees or the Ph.D. degree, the last two years counting toward those degrees; and would complete the professional work or Ph.D. work in two years more, or six years after college entrance. One great university has already advertised substantially such a plan. In the independent recommenda- tions for reorganizing the college are some interesting plans; this voices the sentiment of many: ** I would thoroly reconstruct the American college from top to bottom, for it retains its name having lost its character." They do not shrink from specifying the kinds of reform. One would adapt the college to the years sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen. A few point out what business men really appreciatein the college graduate: the subjects of study, activities, moral and physico-moral qualities, practical traits, and show wherein the college as now organized fails to meet the demand. The logical order of this inquiry may not appear at a glance: the time element is related to the culture element, and the culture element in turn is related to the needs and ideals of society today. At different times many educators have expressed to me the belief that relating the inquiry as above is a hopeless and profitless undertaking. However, I am unable to see how a thorough investigation of American education could fail to connect aims with needs. The history of education can be understood only in connection with the history of civilization: the conditions, needs, and dominant thought of different eras. We cannot understand our problem unless we study our educational aims as related to our civic needs — the time, means, and methods in view of results. Germany has had the wisdom to do this and aims its instruction toward service to state and society. I wonder whether we shall not yet re-examine Persian, Spartan, and Roman, as well as Athenian, educa- tion, and learn many things to our advantage. I wish to add here that, to the end proposed above, educators must throw light on their problem from public opinion when formulated and expressed by inteUigent representatives. What are the needs of society today ? If one may believe the "crowd of witnesses" they are, in plain terms, efficiency ^ real culture, and responsible character — nothing new, but peculiarly our needs at the present time, and the schools are not giving the people satisfactory results. These three demands of real life suggest the weakness of our education and the ideals to be emphasized. Noth- ing is changing so radically as the definition of culture, and this is shown in the replies to the fifth topic on the relation of the subject to the demands of busi- ness and society and the ideals of our civiHzation. All agree- that smattering however extended is nc)t culture, and that one may possibly cover the eight years of high school and college and not get an atom of culture. Culture, in my mind, is the insight and inspiration from knowledge; it is closely related 470 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National to efficiency and character. People are demanding that young men be made ready for Hfe, and that they be trained in a character that will stand modern tests, and that they shall gain real culture and not the mere show of it. I refer to the extended extracts in the Appendix upon this subject as well worth reading. The topic, asking for summary views on the organization of education in the United States, gives much freedom and scope, and the answers are sug- gestive in many directions. The replies may be summed up under the heads: Modifications of the School System; Organization of the System; Vocation Element in Education; Preparation of Teachers; Educational Aims, Means of Educational Progress, etc. Some believe we are now nearly ready for the German plan. The need of eUminating comparatively valueless material thruout is emphasized. Great stress is placed upon organization, national and state, and the need of some central power or representative body that shall unify and standardize, and shall make use of discovery and the various means of progress. There is a general recognition of the need of practical studies throughout the school system, "branching off at different points from the central line of general culture." I have never seen more strongly empha- sized the demand for forceful, wise, inspiring teaching — and this is not the only recent powerful expression of the same idea. The connection between means and the ends to be reached are duly discussed. The faults of election, the superficial quaUty of our education, the need of solidarity in our system, an interesting paragraph from Professor James on ** Motor Education," the importance of recording school experiences and providing means of inter- pretation in a central bureau, are found in the list. We are slow to adopt new ideas, and the views here represented will not be welcome to all teachers and professors. But I see nothing in all the tend- encies noted which will not strengthen education, and dignify the position and work of the teacher and the professor. In a scheme of readjustment most college departments in universities (which now in spirit and in method are largely high-school departments) would become of university grade. More- over, the scheme would include the ways and means to develop productive scholarship in this country. I recommend strongly a careful reading of the entire Appendix, for it is a compilation of up-to-date material of rich value upon the greatest present problems of education. It must be understood that this is not a report — this is not the stage for it, and I have not presented many of my own views. I have given a summary of the returns to an inquiry. I am convinced that the conditions warrant an investigation, and under auspices of this body. The work should relate the time element to culture, and culture to social needs. • Vocational training should be a part of the investigation, and also the question of organization of the educational system — indeed these are now a necessary part of the original subject. As to the things to be investigated, there is enough wisdom in the views already compiled; as to the methods of investigation, a properly Council] CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 471 selected committee will find its own ways. If this work is to be pursued by this Council a committee should be appointed ably representing elementary education, the secondary, the collegiate and university, the field of social science and of the science of education. Such a committee should enter upon a thoro investigation along the lines already marked out, co-operate with other national organizations that may be pursuing similar inquiries, formu- late results, and unite in a final report with practical recommendations. This report with the Appendix is so much material for the work of such a committee. CONDENSED SUMMARY {Taken from the Appendix to this Report) 1. a. At what age should formal general and special education end, as normally marked out for attaining a professional degree or the Ph.D. degree ? h. If the entire period of general and special education should be shortened, where should time be saved ? I. a. Two-thirds would shorten the period of formal general and special education, and nearly half of all the replies name the age limit as twenty-four years or earlier. 1. b. If the time is to be shortened, the order of preference is as follows: "All along;" in the elementary school and the high school; in the elementary school and the college; in the elementary school; in the college; in the high school and the college; in the college and the professional school. More than half of these preferences include the elementary period, and more than half include the college. I. a Most of the schemes for modification come under subsequent heads. "The medium age of graduation from American colleges is twenty-two years and ten months." 1. h "It is a pity that A.B. has been advanced two years in quantity since 1880, rather than in quality." "Sacrifice the length of the college course rather than that of the professional course." "The purely preparation stage is too long extended. " "Time should be saved by rapid promotions throughout the elementary school system, and by flexibility in the high-school and in the college course." 2. a. Is there important waste of time in elementary education ? h. Should the period of elementary education be shortened ? Where and how ? c. What provision should be made in this period for "vocation" schools or studies? How? d. Please refer to experiments in this country or elsewhere to shorten the period of elementary education; to articles, papers, etc., bearing upon the subject, or organi- zations that are investigating any phase of it 2. a. Five-sixths say time is wasted. 2. h. Two-thirds think time should be shortened. 2. c. Less than one-third favor vocation studies in the grades. 2. a "I suspect present results could be had in half the time now taken. " Time is wasted by — "Lack of medical inspection of school children." "Unmotivated and inefifective reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography." "Covering unimportant and unpractical topics." "Needless multiplication of the subjects taught." "Hopelessly expending energies upon non-essentials." 472 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National " Scattering of pupil resources. " "Routine practice, odds and ends, 'fads and frills' generally." "Lack of great, strong, enthusiastic, educated teachers." "Lack of enlightenment regarding the ideals at which education aims." 2. & Time can be shortened by — "More careful pruning of the elementary program of study." "Making distinction between first-rate facts and principles and tenth-rate." " Casting out worthless rubbish. " • "Not trying to teach everything that is good. " "Sticking to the elements of the subject." " Pruning and vitalizing subject-matter. " "Confining period of elementary education to mastering the tools of education," "Not overemphasizing military and political details in history." "Putting less time on formal reviews." "Not teaching content studies with the method suitable to the formal subjects." "Fitting the course of study to the individual." "Following social and concrete interests." "Using industrial or manual training to vitalize academic instruction." "Teaching children relations of what they are doing to ends that they desire to reach. " "Separating the brighter pupils destined to a profession and securing concentration and continuous progress. " "Introducing secondary school work in the higher grades." "Beginning the study of foreign language, elementary algebra, constructive geometry, and elementary science, thus saving one or two years of the high school. " Provision for vocational schools or studies: "Providing studies which take the place of the work children formerly did with their parents in the home, or on the farm, or in the shop." "Placing greater emphasis on the practical aspects of nearly all the subjects." "Setting apart from one-sixth to one-fourth of the time for some elective interest." "Putting in manual training, elements of commercial practice, etc." "Providing vocational training for defective and irregular pupils, who for these and other causes are over age." " Converting first our legislatures and our boards of education, and next our teachers. (Within one year I have visited the schools in twenty-three of our largest cities, and I confess complete disheartenment in respect to further development in many of them.) " "Employing for vocational work one who is a teacher as well as cook, plumber or dressmaker. (There are almost no such persons at present alive in America). " 3. a. Should the high-school period be shortened or should it be extended in either direction ? b. Should it be six years — ^from twelve to eighteen, or fourteen to twenty ? c. Are important reforms needed in high-school education ? What ? d. Should provision be made in this period for "vocation" schools or studies ? How ? e. Please refer to important experiments in this country or elsewhere, and to articles or papers bearing upon the subject, and investigations now being made. 3. a. A majority favor a change of the high-school period. 3. 6. A majority of these choose the period 12-16, a less number 14-20, and a few 12-16. 3. c. Nearly all think important reforms are needed. 3. d. The replies are practically unanimous in favor of vocation schools or studies. Councfll CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 473 3. & "Six years, 12-18; for the first two years simply diflferentiating the work of the ele- mentary school. " "At twelve specialization should begin either for vocation or college." " Only two divisions of education that is dominantly cultural should exist, elementary and higher. At present the distinction between the aims of the high school and liberal college does not exist. The student at twenty should be ready to enter a professional course. " 3- <^ Reforms of high school are — "Simplify course of instruction; it is not necessary to take all the sciences in a high school. " "Adapt subject-matter to the pupils' interests, capacity, and mental development," "Concentrate on a few valuable studies. Cease multiplying subjects." "Have less educational padding." "Make college-entrance requirements reasonable." "Emphasize, like the Greeks, the value of continuous and systematic attentioVi to the development of the human body. " "Banish from the high school elementary attitudes and relationships." "Emphasize elementary ethics." "Emphasize character elements." "More training for character; less of the purely bookish elements." "More thoroness, initiative, and moral emphasis." "Emphasize history, civil government, and economics for citizenship." "Make more real; less formal. " "More vocational; less textbook work." "More training for Ufe, citizenship, vocation, and service." "Organize courses on basis of general vocational activities, with so-called culture coming from the wisdom of knowing what the world is like, what it wants, and what one can do about it." "Correlate industrial studies with what is known as purely academic studies." "Recognize the differing cultural, vocational, and social ends of various groups and prepare for these. " "Provide for a classical, a general-scientific, a commercial, a domestic-economy, a manual-training, or a technical course. " "Provide continuation or night schools for special cases." "Improve quaUty of teaching." Provision for vocation schools or studies: " Adding hours for industrial work without loss to regular high-school work. " "In connection with high schools." "Vocation studies as electives." "In the surroundings of the school, rather than under the conditions of apprentice- ship." "Spending one-fourth to one-half the time in vocation work." "Manual training branching into trade activities, or commercial training, definite, thoro, practical. In some cases part time might be spent in actual shop or factory. " "By grouping electives, by providing in connection with the regular high-school work facilities for training in simple business methods, wood- and iron-working, use of tools and simple construction of buildings, elementary principles of gardening and farming, sewing and cooking, stenography, etc. " 474 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National 4. a. What should be the length of the college course ? b. Would you advocate the following scheme ? (i) To end college work with the sophomore year but allow four years as now for the A.B. degree. (2) To let university work begin at the junior year — work that gives scientific power — with groups leading to the various professional degrees or the Ph.D. degree, the last two years of college counting toward those degrees. (3) To require two years of college for admission to all professional schools. (4) To complete the professional work or Ph.D. work in two years more or six years after college entrance. (5) To let the college do the first two years of the professional work instead of allow- ing the professional school, as now in many cases, to do the last two years of college work. (6) To consider the possibility of advantageously building the engineering school upon the first two years of college. c. If not in accord with the above, please describe your own view. d. From the standpoint of business men, so far as you can judge, what is the value of a college training for young men who are going into business ? e. Please describe devices now in use to shorten the college course; refer to any articles or papers upon the subject and any investigations now being conducted. 4. a. Nearly all favor four years, though a few advocate three years or dividing the college between the high school and the university. 4. 6. It will be seen from the summary which follows that fully half favor this scheme in general — to begin university work with the junior year. 4. h. (i) One-half favor ending the college work with the sophomore year, but allow- ing four years for the A.B. degree. 4. h. (2) One-half would begin university work with the junior year, and count the last two years of college toward higher degrees. 4. h. (3) Most of the replies would require two years of college for entrance to the professional schools. 4. &. (4) One-half would give professional degree or Ph.D. degree in two years after the B.A. degree. 4. b. (5) Two-thirds would have the college do the first years of the professional work. 4. b. (6) A large majority would build engineering on two years of college. 4. d. Two-thirds think college preparation is valued by business men, tho the opinion is usually personal. 4. a Length of college course: "The German Gymnasium and university plan is more rational than our high school, college, and university or professional school. Annex the first two years of the college to the secondary school and allow the students to enter the graduate or professional school of the university at once. " "Professional work -should undoubtedly begin at twenty in the majority of cases." 4. & Beginning university at junior year: "I have recommended (2), and have made a report to our Board of Trustees urging its adoption here in 1913, the freshman and sophomore years to be required for entrance." "Keep four years for those not aiming at professional degree, but have last two years for the others count for professional degree. " "In professional and technical schools I believe that the best of general culture will yet be found in the biographies of leaders in the lines studied, and in a history of the develop- ment of the occupation and the sciences and social life related to it." "The chances are in favor of the work being better done if the college course should take on two years of basic science training for medicine, rather than that the medical school should pretend to do the scientific work which is almost certain to be done better in a uni- versity laboratory. " Councill CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 475 "The colleges and universities (so called), especially in the east, but also elsewhere* have deteriorated, if we measure their standards by their educative value. I am only voicing the judgment of the most experienced and thoughtful when I say that fully one-half of all the courses offered, and the work done, is of almost no educative value whatever. I would, therefore, thoroly reconstruct the American college from top to bottom; for it retains its name having lost its character, (i) I would reduce the number, and increase the thoroness, in the subjects required for admission; (2) reduce the time to three years, from seventeen to twenty; (3) reduce the foolish and expensive and needless exhibition of courses offered, making them much fewer, and much more thoro; (4) make two- thirds or three-quarters of the curriculum required — compelling such studies in language and literature, mathematics and physical science, and in the psychological sciences, as are preparatory to and introductory to professional and Ph.D. studies; (5) clean out the whole hotch-potch of courses which have the name, but can never have the substance of true professional studies. Business demands trained and disciplined men; if the colleges would do this of course their graduates would be in demand in business circles." 4. c ' ^ Other views of organization of college and university: "I would save the two years needed for the college course by simplifying the grade work and shortening the time these two years. " "I would suggest the following scheme: Elementary school, years of child's life; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. High school, years of child's life, 12, 13, 14, 15. College, years of child's life, 16, 17, 18, 19. Professional, Ph.D., years of child's life, 20, 21, 22." "The University of North Dakota gives additional credits for superior work, thereby shortening the time for excellent students. " "Group subjects as minor electives or minor requirements about a major core of sub- jects in which advanced work must be done, and which may even make the group pre- legal, pre-medical, etc." "It is easily possible to make the college course so easy by elective courses and avoid- ance of advanced work that it never forces the choices which should be made; say even for, or against, future study and a learned profession. " "The graduate school loses educational perspective when it assumes to influence the college course." 4. d Value of college for business: "None. I refer to the typical business man, and not to the great business man. The latter unusual person is in favor of a sane college course in history, languages, sciences> history courses, economics, English, very thoro; German, biology, physics, chemistry, history of philosophy, algebra and geometry with trigonometry. This course is to be taken by a youth who takes part in the social and athletic life as a doer of things. Business men as I know them — manufacturers, wholesalers, railroad men — desire in the young man certain moral qualities — obeying rules and instructions implicitly, promptness and punc- tuality, arithmetical perfection, rapid and legible handwriting, faciUty and accuracy in English. I call these "moral" qualities and so they seem to me; and they are glad to get also the young man who knows a great deal of geography, of civil government and of general information. They desire also certain physico-moral qualities, such as cleanliness, neatness, and orderliness. This is to say, they desire health, strength and discipline. They like frankness, openness, courage toward themselves and discretion toward all others. Our school courses cannot develop these qualities for two reasons: our teachers do not themselves manifest them, and our courses are not designed to produce them. " "Let the college course be sincerely and seriously a part of vocation, too definite to attract the "elective" students; too hard to attract the man who is too lazy to go to work 476 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National at a serious business; too exacting to be satisfactorily done by the unmotivated trifler who goes to college, kindheartedly acquiescing in his parents' fond wishes, with a superior indul- gence of their ambition. " "They (collegemen) think, few people (or educated people for that matter) do. They are systematic. They have many bits of knowledge that are useful sometimes when least expected." "So far as I can judge business men value highly the training which young men who are going into business get in college. " "Without question the men with college education who have gone into business have soon forged to the front. I have been teaching for a number of years in manufacturing centers and I know that this condition is true in great manufacturing plants. " 5. How does the whole problem of culture and time elements in education relate itself to the demands of business and society today or to the ideals of our civilization ? " Culture should relate to fundamentals in society, business, civilization. " "The problem is one that affects and is affected by social and business conditions." "A certain amount of conformity to standards set by modern social forces is necessary, else the young graduate will find himself in a world for which he is unprepared." "That subject is most cultural which is most serviceable to humanity from a dynamic standpoint. All industrial, vocational, and other subjects, when studied and realized in life for a richer life and deeper civilization are cultural and at the same time meet the busi- ness interests of life. The business interests think too much is consumed by education without equivalent results. It is very natural for us to interpret with our experiences which are those of the educational cloister. " "The practical demands of life and the interests of culture are congruent in this, that nothing which is valuable merely for the training it gives is worth pursuing. The instru- ments of culture are practical means to a large, rich life. Sixteen years of school work preliminary to professional study is unnecessary and hostile to the time interests of culture. " "For the sake of business I would lay far more stress than is now put on the studies that deal with man and history, what man has done — on literature, what man has thought and felt. The best way to adjust students to the intelligent demands of business is to adjust them to the interests of society, and, so far as may be, to the ideals of our civilization. " "Give up archaic ideas regarding a distinction between culture and utility. The university should be a place where everything useful under the sun is taught, and every- thing useful has a place in the university, and anything useless has no place in it. " "The drift is away from alleged disciplinary effects to studies that combine both discipline and useful information." "Culture will come best by an enrichment of vocational life. This is real culture. Culture has been a borrowed thing since the Romans began aping the Greeks. Vocational preparation is entirely in harmony with culture in the best sense, and there is doubtless plenty of time for each. " "Business, society, civilization, demand of the world's workers a certain minimum of equipment and maximum of achievement. Society is the loser if academic requirements carry a man past the time of his greatest energy, efficiency, and adaptability. " "There is evidently a need of squeezing a lot of water out of our curriculum. " "The modern demand is for young men and women to get into things while plastic and full of the sense of adaptation. " "It is desirable that the time element should not seem too extended, in order that we may persuade our youth not to yield to the temptation of neglecting education, particularly so-called cultural education." "Make the training ever richer, better, more effective, rather than shorter." "I think that the true ideals of our civilization demand high culture and an abundance of time in our education schemes. One great need of our country now is men who can think straight." Council] CULTURE ELEMENT AND ECONOMY OF TIME 477 6. Please give your views briefly on the whole subject of the organization of education in the United States. Modification of school system. "If it were possible to reorganize the whole of education in the United States now, I believe that we are more nearly prepared for the German system than we ever would have been before now. " "We have shoved elementary education too far, and crowded our universities to the wall." "There are four units in our educational system; each element magnifies its own functions; and each unit seeks to control the units below itself, and to increase still further the burdens they are carrying." "I think it desirable that a professional direction be given to the upper half of the four-year college course, or that specialized studies leading toward original research begin in the junior year." "One correspondent gives instances of students, prepared privately, non-essentials being omitted, who recently entered college at fourteen and fifteen and graduated success- fully." "I would advocate considerable diminution of the quantity element in college-entrance requirements. " "We must eliminate unnecessary subject-matter in elementary subjects; must have different kinds of high schools to meet the needs of different kinds of pupils. " "We are trying to do too much in our colleges, secondary schools, and in our grammar schools. " "I believe the greatest waste is in the dilettante attack on the elementary subjects in the late primary and the secondary schools. A differentiation in the middle of the high school which shall give an optional trend similar to the Gymnasium and Real Schools in Germany might be desirable. " ORGANIZATION OF THE SYSTEM "Education today from the kindergarten to the university is lacking in effective organi- zation. " "I would have the Commissioner of Education a member of the President's cabinet; would establish a great national university at Washington; would have a state university in every commonwealth except New England, and the incorporated colleges and uni- versities associated with it in the closest relations that can be secured; would have the superintendent of public instruction the head of the state system. " "The educational system in a state should be recognized as a department of state government. State systems should have some sort of federal co-ordination in a bureau of education at Washington. " "We should have a strong, central (representative) national body whose duty it should be to unify standards for primary, secondary, academic, and professional education. " " Colleges and universities need to be defined by law. It should be possible, as in Germany, for a student to go from any secondary school in any state, to any college in the land without loss of time." VOCATION ELEMENT IN EDUCATION "The tendency is to get away more and more from the monastic system and to educate men and women more in real life, for real work. The greatest defect of our educational system is this neglect of those who have to go to work at about fourteen years. " "Dropping out of school is because of the violation of the natural impulse to do, keep- ing it repressed. " "Some way should be found of getting part of one's education while engaged in pro- ductive work." "I would have vocational courses of various kinds branch off at different points from the central line of general culture. " 478 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National "I would make it possible for a B.A. graduate to go from the Greek recitation room to the blacksmith shop or carpenter shop, and have the one line of work count equally with the other toward the B.A. degree." " People think a trade school a very good thing for their neighbor's sons. " BETTER TEACHING "One deplorable defect in our system is the lack of scholarship, breadth, and training on the part of the elementary school teacher, and to a large extent on the part of the high- school teacher. " "We need more men in the schoolrooms of the upper elementary and high schools. We need better and many more professional schools for teachers. " "The lack in education is rationality. Instructors have not much to build on. Hence in taking a boy in charge it is a matter of memory. " "Teachers of the rural schools of the nation are not as good as a class as they were twenty-five or thirty-five years ago." EDUCATIONAL AIMS "We might express our educational aims in the four specific fields of physical, voca- tional, social, and cultural ends^ and then make our adjustments to the needs of varying groups with which society and education must deal." "No school that is regarded as primarily preparatory to some other school has yet achieved a real educational reason for being. I should like to see the college allowed its place as a divergent limb of higher education whose integrity is to be tested by itself." ELECTIVE SYSTEM Education Superficial "In our overemphasis at times upon the rights of the individual, we are making serious mistakes in our elective system." "In general I think education as it is generally pursued in the United States is inclined to be superficial." Solidarity of System "I believe in the unity and solidarity of our educational system. Professional, tech- nical, trade, and continuation schools should be as closely co-ordinated with the elementary schools, high schools, and colleges as possible, " MOTOR EDUCATION "I have a suspicion strong enough almost to amount to a conviction that book work up to the age of thirteen or fourteen ought to be almost abolished, and that the basis of education up to that age should be almost exclusively motor — dancing, games, music, drawing, manual training of every sort, with reading and writing, taught early of course, and ciphering, but very little methodical instruction out of books. " MEANS OF INVESTIGATION OF PROBLEMS "Questionnaires will never settle great educational problems in controversy. Every school should be a laboratory, or should at least be preparing materials for educational research. Every county, city, and state superintendent of education should be in position to tell truthfully and legibly the experience of the pupils and teachers under his supervision. The national commissioner of education should be able to collect and to interpret facts as to methods and results in all parts of the United States." "I urge strongly more attention to current-school records, so devised as to make pos- sible an analysis of experience. " Council] CO-OPERATION WITH EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 479 REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON CO-OPERATION WITH EDUCA- TIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN OTHER COUNTRIES W. T. HARRIS, CHAIRMAN Your committee, appointed at the last session of this Council to consider and report what steps may be possible toward securing co-operation with the various civilized nations of the world for the promotion of education, would hereby respectfully offer the following general report together with supple- mentary reports, setting forth, briefly, a preliminary survey of the conditions of our inquiry, together with reflections and suggestions from different mem- bers of the committee, separately added to the general report, with a view to broaden the scope of the inquiry, and secure fuller expression of what may be called the prevailing public opinion among our teachers as to the profit to be gained by a closer knowledge of foreign schools. Your committee assumes in advance that there are three classes of things in our school system, and in any national system, which must be discriminated and kept distinct thruout our investigation. These three classes of things are graded according to the degrees of community or divergence to be found in the constitutions, governmental policies, and industrial necessities of the nations in question. 1. It is obvious that the first class of things in our school system to be considered will include what represents the purposes that all civilized nations have at heart and can teach as well or better than we do. 2. This leads next to a further discrimination, within the first class, of a twofold list of educational subjects and disciplines: (a) What things do we of the United States teach better than other nations and with such excellence of method that they could profitably learn from us ? and {b) (What is more important for us to know) the methods better than ours which we may learn from other nations. 3. There is a class of subjects and disciplines that we teach in our schools which cannot on any account be permitted in foreign nations by reason of different national purposes from ours. This is a comparatively small class of things for nations of Anglo-Saxons, kindred as they are by blood, but it is a larger class with Romanic nations of Europe; and a still larger class with Slavonic nations; and these forbidden lessons and disciplines amount with some Asiatic nations to a class so large as to contain an all-inclusive inventory of what we teach as to nature and man, and of what we insist upon as to school discipline and rules of behavior. In China and in any nation with what we call a patriarchal form of govern- ment, so much stress is laid upon obedience to parents, jto elder brothers, ^to petty officials, and to the princes of the empire, that American parental ^authority and our slight ceremonial respect to our government officials seem altogether shocking, and indeed fatal, if adopted in place of the strict family 48o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National etiquette which takes the place in that country of moral conscience, statute laws, and religious ceremonial. What we easily recognize as pestilent and destructive in our own code of family and school discipline, should it be transplanted to any part of China or India, is less and less pestilent if transplanted to western Asia and Europe. And yet, even in Russia, as Mackenzie Wallace tells us, there is so much patri- archal etiquette left, that the surviving grandparent receives the wages or other income of any son or grandson, and distributes it to the entire family without reference to the actual earners of the wealth or wages. Who has not observed survivals of patriarchalism in the parental ties which fix the succession of both nobility and royalty in the monarchies of western Europe ? The laws of suc- cession and primogeniture are rigidly taught from the nursery thru all grades of schools up to the entering upon a vocation in life, and even in the ceremonials of religion. American family and school education would in a brief time destroy the very foundations of the English caste system upon which is built the threefold royal and noble and ecclesiastical structure of the governing power of that country. Commencing our studies with the far East, it is not so difficult to trace out a progress in branches of the course of study in school from a rigid prescription of sacred formulae (which must be lodged in the memory of the school pupil) onward and upward until something of the rationale is permitted to be learned, and more self-activity is expected of the pupil. In Europe Christianity has caused to prevail as a fundamental dogma the equality of all human beings before God. Doubtless this idea has shown its most important result in undeifying nature and making the work of a scientific inventory possible. A progressive emancipation follows from mere tradition and from superstition; but, for fifteen centuries, inventories made by Greeks were memorized and repeated like the texts of Confucius in the far East without attempt at verifica- tion. In fact, for nearly all of Asia, scientific method was profane and sacrilegious; and even the Mohammedan church of today believes that western European science is accursed of God tho it possesses some magic power of victory against Allah, and his faithful Moslems. Even in Russia, with Greek Christianity, labor-saving machines, that modern natural science has invented to conquer nature and provide food, clothing, and shelter without drudgery, are of ten want onlydestroyed by peasants who see only loss of employment in store for mere hands if machinery shall come into use. Turning to the great powers of western Europe, Germany, France, and Great Britain, we come to peoples in the van of civilization and with national purposes more in accord with our own. Caste exists there, to be sure, but side by side with caste there is provided a ladder of merit whose rounds are services to the state — industrial, civil, and military services — ^which can be climbed by the brave, the industrious, or the talented individual tho born at the very bottom of the ladder, and he may lift up his family with him into Council! CO-OPERATION WITH EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 481 a higher caste that will give permanence to his achievement. But it is his good will and his industry alone that furnish the ladder. The castes which have been founded long ago are now rewarded by preferment that comes by ordi- nance and statute, and by the will of the monarch, but is frequently a reward not earned. There are obstacles thrown in the way of the lowest peasant, by the accident of birth, which prevent him, unless exceptional in his will power, from changing his caste by climbing to a higher round. Here in America it is so easy to gain wealth, and so easy to serve one's social community by a substantial service, that we have come to a public opinion which makes us critics, and sometimes caviling critics, of our western European friends and neighbors; and the consequence is not favorable to our profitable co-operation in educational studies. This hurts us because it veils from us the true power of the three giant nations with whom we have to co-operate in supporting civilized public opinion around the globe, and in arriving at a joint public opinion which contains the most humane elements. It is not possible for us to co-operate with Germany, France, and England in our educational interpretation of history. The German boy's mind is full of history antago- nistic to France, and the French boy cannot read history as the German and English see it ; and we all know what our Fourth of July orators have to say of our mother country, England, and its king, George the Third. So of literature, each nation has its own poetic works of art which express its completest view of human nature, and the barrier of an alien tongue prevents German, French, and English from getting a co-operating literature from one another. But fortunately, for the United States, it makes English literature the staple of its education in the school and the home, and there is an ever-increasing participa- tion of Great Britain in the educative influence of the literature of British colonies. In science there is a great common field of intellect and insight, open alike to Germans, French, British, and Americans; and this, more than anything else, is making our co-operation in the education systems of our European congeners more and more effective. Organization of people's schools with us uniting the rich and the poor in one school coming from all rounds of the ladder, this, and our coeducation of the sexes are not subjects on which we can expect the entire sympathy of the governing classes of Germany or France or Great Britain, altho w^e may receive a very polite hearing. That our people's schools have not grown more and more to show a cleavage from the schools of wealth and official position surprises our European educators, and furnishes them a warning against our entire educational organization. Your committee believe that it is not profitable for us, in reaching out, to take the hand of a foreign educator, to give foremost place to such items of our inventors as imply a national convulsion — a revolution, in short — if established over there in the foreigner's land. It is better for us to see clearly the real foundations of strength in Europe — the foundation which implies a competitive struggle to lift up the lower classes 482 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [NationaJ along the ladder of the creation of wealth, and the performance of exceptional public service. All of which is respectfully submitted, W. T. Harris, Chairman J. M. Greenwood Elmer Ellsworth Brown Joseph Swain Committee POSSIBLE CO-OPERATION BETWEEN THE EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION WASHINGTON, D. C. The suggestion which I made to this Council one year ago, that steps be taken to bring the National Education Association into closer co-operation with similar bodies in other lands, was offered in the conviction that the greater part of the work of education in all lands is one work, and that all teachers among civilized peoples have a common cause. There is abundant ground for this belief. The legislative bodies of many nations have found enough of common interest to make possible an Interparliamentary Union, and that international body has profoundly influenced the course of recent history. Yet parliaments are the centers of positive nationalism. We may fairly expect to find more elements of unity in the schools of different nations than in their legislatures. And such undoubtedly is now the case. The world-relationships of universities have been recognized, with varying clearness, for seven or eight centuries. The earlier development of schools for the people was more closely connected with the rise of modern nationalism. This gave us higher schools which emphasized unity, alongside of lower schools which emphasized difference. Such a distinction of course goes down to the fundamental constitution of society. It cannot be maintained, as a principle of sharp separation, where the distinctions between social classes have been smoothed out or are in the way of disappearing. Nations which have a traditional enmity to keep alive toward some of their neighbors — a memory of ancient quarrels which colors all their history — are at a disadvantage in this regard. In so far as class distinctions persist in such societies, with something of the finality of caste distinctions, a lower class will be taught to hate another people while the highest class is learning to understand other peoples. But this condition can hardly continue, unmodified, in our modern world. The many care to learn what the few have known. The scientific spirit for- bids us to teach in the lower schools what is untrue from the standpoint of the higher schools. Then, there is a New Humanism in the world, which is surely spreading abroad. This new humanism recognizes the fact that to know and understand living men, both individuals and nations, is a great part of any complete education. This humanism tinges all of the social and Council] CO-OPERATION BETWEEN EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS 483 the international striving of our time. It tinges our education. I have had occasion before to speak of one little symptom of it — a straw on the waters of our primary schools — in the wide popularity of that children's book, the Seven Little Sisters, by Miss Andrews. And for more pretentious indications of the same current, you would not have far to seek. We live already in a world in which men are trying to understand one another. Men are trying to understand their neighbors, and that is the better part of democracy. Men are trying to understand other peoples and nations, and that is the foundation of our new world-politics. The reason why we may hope to understand the rest of the world, the reason why we even care to understand the rest of the world, is that our differences stand out from a back- ground of agreement, a substratum of ultimate unity. The differences are picturesque and interesting, and at times they command the whole field of attention. Without national peculiarities and even oppositions, our world- unity would be a poor thing, a dull and insipid uniformity. But we must not forget that, after all, the differences get their life and worth from that underlying unity. The time has come when men can give attention to the common human purposes of all the tribes of men without suspicion of treason against their own government. In our own land this is pre-eminently true. As Mr. Stead has said of us, "America is the one great international country of the world." When Professor Payne of the University of Virginia a few years ago made his comparative study of the public elementary school curricula of the leading culture nations, he found an approximate agreement in the subjects of instruc- tion and in the relative amount of time devoted to different subjects in the schools of representative cities. Aside from differences as to the inclusion or exclusion of religious doctrine, the most important variations were those relating to the language employed and studied and the content of instruction in the national history and literature. Even here the instruction in the schools under consideration might readily be compared with reference to its form and the principles guiding the choice of materials in those subjects. So striking, indeed, was the agreement which his study revealed that Professor Payne was led to make the following remarks: It is to be feared that our educational theorists have sometimes excused themselves from making a comparative study of these different curricula by an exaggeration of the supposed disparity of aim and the consequent improbability of gaining suggestions of worth. The tables .... show such a slight difference of curricula in the elementary schools of the several countries, that it makes one suspect either that the aim of education does not determine what shall be studied, or that the aims of the several countries do not differ as much as has been supposed. i No one can fail to be impressed with the fact that the general principles which govern the selection and arrangement of the subject matter of the elementary curriculum are practically the same in the four educational systems here studied, a » Bruce Rybum Payne, Public Elementary School Curricula. Silver, Burdett and Co. (1905). PP- iS- 16. ' Ibid., p. 182. The four educational systems studied were those of the United States, England. Germany. *ad France 484 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Without doubt, national differences must still be more influential in deter- mining the teaching of the lower schools than in that of the universities. In some degree this difference must, I think, be regarded as permanent. A strong nationalism and even a certain wholesome provincialism are to be cherished in those schools. But it is quite as important, and is in truth essential, in this modern age^ that the lower schools preserve their continuity with the teaching of the universities and their loyalty to those common aspirations in which the nations of the world shall be able to understand one another. I hope that our great National Education Association, in its unquestioned loyalty to our national ideals, may take steps which shall promote the good understanding now gaining ground among the nations of the earth. Let us send our emissaries to confer with similar bodies in other civilized lands, as we have so often welcomed foreign teachers in our great annual gatherings. Let us take our part in setting up world-standards in the domain of culture and education. Such a movement, I believe, will make for peace; but if so, it will accomplish that end by promoting one of the best tendencies in modern education, a humane tendency, which may be summed up in the saying, Let us see if we cannot understand one another. DISCUSSION Anna Tolman Smith, National Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C. — What is in my mind to say is in the nature of reflections excited by the subject under consideration rather than a discussion of the views already unfolded. In my studies of education I have been deeply impressed with the differences in the administration of this interest in the lead- ing nations. France, for instance, presents an example of extreme centralization; our own country, the extreme of local independence; while England, at this moment, offers an example of a happy medium between the two. Now, these differences have grown out of historic conditions and that indefinable something that we call national genius or tempera- ment. They are fundamental, and they affect the teachings of a whole group of subjects, ethics, civics, history and literature, and — in nations where church and state are one — the teaching of religion. The national mode of dealing with these subjects cannot be changed nor transplanted; neither is it possible to overcome that national sentiment which is the all- pervading essence of these differences. You cannot fight a sentiment because you cannot set it up as a target and shoot at it. We have a national school sentiment, sometimes jocosely called a P'ourth of July sentiment. The genesis of this sentiment was revealed to us in the address of our English visitor, Mr. Brereton, on vocational aims in education. In a striking passage he pointed out that the "technical end" of the education of the directive classes in England was the "knowledge of men and mancraft." That is, knowledge of the motives which move men as set forth in their self -revealing literatures, and of the social orders and institutions out of which states are formed. No other nation so perfectly imparts this knowledge as England. Now, this underlying idea, the idea of "mancraft" as the aim of education for the directive classes, was brought to this country by our English ancestors and in the spirit of sound democracy we have adopted it for all the people, since all are admitted into the directive class. This is our heritage, a precious, a sacred heritage, and we feel an instinctive fear; our national consciousness is alarmed at the thought of change in this vital matter; at the bare suggestion that any American child shall be deprived of his share in the training that makes for directive power. CovinciW CO-OPERATION BETWEEN EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS 485 There is, however, a deep significance in the recent common impulse of the principal nations, that is those in the current of our own civilization, to turn their administrative forces to new educational ends; to new, but common, ends, resulting in part from economic pressure and in part, let us believe, from the irresistible growth of humane ideals. The purpose that is at present uppermost in our thoughts is that of industrial, or vocational, aims in a system of public education. The problem is becoming acute in some parts of our country and we are interested to see what other nations offer in the way of solution. Germany has a settled policy in this respect, but we cannot assimilate the type to our freer life. France has an elaborate graded system of technical schools, but as yet we follow France only in matters of fashion. This very word emphasizes a deep distinction between us. We have^ craze for fashions, but fashion is not a principle in our national life, a part of our consciousness of power as it is of that of France; hence a large part of French technical training has motives impossible to us. In respect to this problem of vocational training, England is nearer to us at this moment than any other nation, and by reasons of the prevailing social distinctions the problem presents a simpler form in that country than in our own. The English system of public, or popular, education is based upon the idea of class, the so-called elementary-school class, definitely estimated at six-sevenths of the population* three to fourteen years of age. It is proposed to separate these children at about twelve years of age as follows: drawing off into secondary schools those whom it appears may readily be raised to the higher social and industrial plane; transferring to higher grade elementary schools the brighter pupils of the elementary schools who can continue their training up to sixteen years of age; and leaving the remainder in the ordinary elmentary schools. We should not tolerate such a separation of our child population at the early age of twelve years, but this proposed segregation, in no way disturbing to English opinion, has served to fix the attention of some of her ablest men, educators, administrators, and business men, upon "the higher elementary schools," with a view to determine the kind of education that shall orient these schools, as it were, toward vocational ends. The discussion of the problem, thus narrowed down and unclouded by sentiment, is equally illuminating whether the line of separation is placed at twelve years of age, as proposed in England, or at fourteen, as it probably will be with us. We see at once what is implied, a school linked at every point with the grades, offering two years' specialized training, less bookish than our classical high schools, and more craftsmanlike than our manual training high schools. Is not this after all a municipal, rather than a national, problem ? But the directive class in England is constantly increasing with a proportionate increase in the number of those who, like ourselves, demand training in "mancraft" for their chil- dren, and oppose early specialization. Hence, the English discussion of vocational train- ing faces both ways and becomes, therefore, doubly significant to us. In the moment that remains, let me allude to a common movement toward social serv- ices auxiliary to the schools. Here also England has a lesson for us in the after-care committees, such as have been formed in Birmingham and London, to look after children who go out from the schools for the mentally defective. In London, also, employment committees of trade representatives are co-operating with school managers in the effort to find work for ordinary children. As one authority well remarked, "the extraordinary will be amply able to place themselves." Here, I believe, is a practical suggestion for our women's club. 486 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National HOME ECONOMICS IN ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION ELLEN H. RICHARDS, INSTRUCTOR IN SANITARY CHEMISTRY, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, BOSTON, MASS. The ideal American home to which preachers, moralists, and most ethical writers are attempting to confine the labors and interests of women w^as a place of busy industry with occupation for the dozen children, and all the helpers to be gathered within its precincts — a miniature community. The children in it learned by doing. The interest of one was the interest of all. In the ideal home children are taught morals, manners, and habits by the loving care of father and mother and the somewhat less gentle means of elder brothers and sisters — all done in that privacy which the very word home signifies. They were not shamed by rebuke in a public hotel or on a street car. The parents felt a responsibility — too heavy, the children often thought— for all that the ''nursery of good citizens" meant to them. When we women are told that the place for us is the home it is this picture that the advocate has in mind. But in its entirety the reality no longer exists — gone out of it are the industries, gone out of it are ten of the children, gone out of it in a large measure that sense of moral and religious responsibility which was the keystone. Home ideals, as developed in Americaby the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth century, are certainly fading away and are not, as yet, replaced by a definite national purpose. Luxury, carelessness, idleness, and a pursuit of ready- made pleasure have taken the place of thrift and responsibility. Today, as a rule, neither morals, manners, nor good habits are taught in the home, when it exists and certainly not in the hotel and railroad train. The methods of work prevalent in the home environment are mediaevally wasteful of time, energy, and money, and because this is blindly realized the people are restive. Intelligent and thoughtful observers admit the conditions; disagreement comes with a discussion of remedies. The first and most obvious course is a blue-law compelling parents to train their children according to the accepted ideals of the nineteenth century. The second is for the school to take the place of the negligent home. The third alternative toward which the country is fast drifting is for all education and training of children to be assumed by the State for its own protection. If the state is to have good citizens, it must provide for the teaching of the essentials to a generation that will become the wiser mothers and fathers of the next. Therefore, even if we regard this as only a temporary expedient, we must begin to teach the children in our schools, and begin at once, that which we see they are no longer learning in the home. Morals, niannersj and habits may be most easily, naturally, and effectively Council] HOME ECONOMICS 487 taught by the very means used in earlier days through domestic science courses, if they are properly planned and intelligently carried out. No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of health, bodily energy, time, and brain power, any more than a nation may prosper which wastes its natural resources. America today is wasting its human possibilities even more prodigally than its material wealth. The latter deficiency is being brought to a halt. Shall the human side receive less attention ? A sharply divided line between home and school is no longer clearly drawn. Parents' associations are being formed' everywhere and co-operating with the school teacher. To what end? To the better moral and intellectual atmosphere of the home. Physical education has had its vogue, but too much as an endeavor apart, not as a necessary element in the whole. The pedagogical world is now becoming convinced that physical defects are more often than not the basis of mental incompetence and this leads logically to the teaching of the laws of right living in a practical way, not merely as lessons from books but as daily practice. This must also go into the home where the most of the child's hours are spent. It is as useless to expect good health from unsanitary houses as goo'd English from two hours' school train- ing diluted by twelve hours of slovenly language. Hence the imperative need of such teaching and example as can be put into practice and since house-to- house renovation and change of view is impossible, the school must provide for teaching to live wisely and sanely as well as for clear thinking and aesthetic appreciation. Practical hygiene, food, cleanliness, sanitation, all must eventu- ally be exemplified by the schoolhouse and taught as a part of a general education to all pupils, boys and girls.- If this sounds like socialism, let us not be afraid but educate for five or ten years all children, so that homes may be better managed and then it is to be hoped there will be no need for such school training. To live economically in the broad sense of wise use of time and money as well as of bodily strength is the great need of the twentieth century. This is practical economics. This is something which cannot today, except in rare instances, be learned at home for conditions change so rapidly that grown people may not keep up with them. Mothers' ways are superseded before the childern are grown. The school if it is maintained as a progressive institution and a defense against predatory ideas is the people's safeguard from being crushed by the irresistible car of progress. I repeat, standards may be set by the school which will reach and influence the community in a few months. Such standards should be a means of safeguarding the people from panic as to their own health or wages and this leads to the most important service which a teaching of domestic economy can render to the people in giving them a sense of control over their environment, than which nothing is so conducive to stability of ideas. To feel oneself in command of a situation robs it of its terror. A great danger in America today is the loss of this feeling of self-confidence with 488 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION iNational which the pioneer was abundantly furnished. A certain helpless dependence is creeping over the land, because of the peculiar development of resources, which must be replaced by a sense of power over one's environment. This power has its limits, but they are wider than the people in school today realize. The teaching of this control over living conditions costs, and efficiency is at the root of all social progress today. Shall it be shirked because it does not conform to older academic ideals ? Will not the college and university come to the rescue by accepting for entrance certain fundamental knowledge which cannot but make brain power? Will our higher schools take the risk of retarding not only the country's development but of limiting the character and force of its people ? I come before you, Gentlemen of the Council, as the chairman of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, in support of our various requests, covering a space of ten years, that your attention be given to the suitable and effective method and content of courses in domestic economy for the elementary school; domestic or household science for the high and normal schools; home economics or euthenics for the college and university. Courses under these and other names are being wedged into the curriculum in an increasing number of schools in every state in the Union, for the most part as sporadic and uncorrected efforts often by irresponsible persons, I mean not responsible to the same extent as the teacher of subjects -regularly recognized in the curriculum. The result may be excellent, or it may be demoralizing. In any case, it is not as yet recognized as legitimate and a necessary part of an American education. The advocates of the kind of training comprised under the general head of home economics feel that this great body of educators must take a controlling interest in the subject-matter and in the various forms under which this may best be utilized as educative, and therefore they have petitioned you (see last year's report) to appoint a committee of five or seven to study the matter and report a workable outline. Miss Thomas acknowledges the trend of the times when she says most western universities and many eastern ones are boring through their academic college course at a hundred places with professional courses. It is true the road through the curriculum is being built, the tunnel is bored, the temporary tracks are laid, construction trains carrying passengers at their own risk are now running .... soon it will be too late to change the road-bed without violence, but now is a time when wise counsel will tell. Suppression will not be tolerated. There is a deeply rooted conviction that the times are out of joint, that the bounty of this productive country is being wasted, not only its fuel and forests but its men and women and especially its children. The economics of consumption, including as it does the ethics of spending, must have a place in our higher education, preceded by manual dexterity and scientific information, which will lead to true economy in the use of time, energy, and money in the home life of the land. Just what that place is Council) HOME ECONOMICS 489 to be, how its various phases are to be presented is for your committee to de- cide. I venture to present, as aids or as foundation; first, a statement of suggestions given to the Society for Scientific Study of Education in 1904; second, an outline prepared by the holder of a scholarship of the Woman's Education Association, of Boston, as a result of her year of study of the question, carried on in schools east of the Mississippi; third, a report on survey courses This report shows that a large proportion of educators (men, of course, I mean) really believe in something of the sort now being taught under domestic science, household arts, or home economics, but they are nqt yet pushed hard enough from their customary ways to take the matter up — most heads of schools are well content to let private parties do the experimenting. Today the ideas are so far developed that there is something tangible to combat ; there is fire enough to be reckoned with and it behooves the leaders to take a hand in shaping the future course of a group of subjects bound to outgrow control unless trimmed into harmony. Several questions are even now clearly defined. What hand training shall take the place of the home industries now gone into factories ? What teaching in economics is legitimate in view of the fact that buying and not rnaking is the province of women ? How^ much science is essential to enable a buyer and a household to live safely in a time of uncleanly manufacturing and handling ? How shall sanitation in all directions be firmly impressed on the habits of all citizens ? Safe food and clean food, how shall it be assured ? How shall that degree of good taste and those desirable standards of living be ingrained in the people for their best development ? How shall morality in daily life reach to the details of living ? The municipality is made up of individuals and cannot rise above the level of the average. The sanitary research worker in laboratory and field has gone nearly to the limit of his value. He will soon be smothered in his own work if no one takes advantage of it. The law has made as many regulations as it is wise to have unenforced on the statute books. The board of health inspector leaves his orders on all the households he considers may be scared by his badge. Societies, with long names and many ofl&cials, meet and tell each other of the great things they might accomplish. Meanwhile children die by the thousands; contagious disease takes toll of hundreds, back alleys remain foul and the streets are unswept; school houses are unwashed, and danger lurks in drinking cups and about the towels. Dust is stirred up each morning with the feather duster, by the inefficient worker, to greet the warm moist noses and throats of the children. To the watchful expert it seems like the old cities dancing and making merry on the eve of a volcanic outbreak. There is ready to hand the field to till by the home economics teacher. Is she ready for it ? A' few years ago the whole atmosphere was so unsympathetic to science that only a pretty thoro course was weighty enough to convince the student. He could not grasp it and he could not be trusted to represent it. 49© NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National Today, though it is not very profound and is not always sound, science pervades the air to such an extent that the resistance is much less. Science, too, is much surer of its ground so that it is possible to give the public a talk and have a great deal of it understood by the audience. It is possible for the home-economics teacher to give much hygienic instruction under the topics now down, and in the course of her teaching to change the attitude of the whole section. Here is our opportunity to teach the art of right living. Never mind the name by which it is designated; it is the result which we are offer- ing. It is not temperance nor mere hygiene, but the whole round of abundant physical life. Give the child a chance. Use knowledge, so far as we have it. The home-economics teacher has a better chance to interest her pupils than any one else, if she will fit herself to do it. It is not cooking alone, nor sewing alone, but psychology, pedagogy, and ethics that come into this home teaching. Who can doubt that by whatever means it came to be, the domestic science course offers the best means to influence the lives of the people and influence them quickly ? Coming as it does, or should, in the grammar schools, it may touch every scholar and in five years re-make health ideals in every home in the land. In that time it can change the environment in the worst and enable the others to mitigate the evils in their homes. At the end of that time the whole country will have sufficiently aroused to carry it on. For five years turn all investigation of all the research laboratories tow^ard better living conditions. I hear you say, "Where are the teachers ?" Did we fold our hands in Pan- ama or in Cuba and say, "Where are the experts ?" Our schools are turning out hundreds of young men who have been trained to hunt bad conditions; put a few of them at work alongside the young women from our state universities and let them both take counsel with the few faithful teachers who have been years ahead of the times, making a halo of light in a few dark places. In England, in 1884, 1 saw a young man from the university in the board schools giving instruction as to the baby's milk. In America we have allowed the newspapers and magazines to do the public instruction which belongs to the universities. For a practical people we have been most impractical in our methods of reaching the people. Industrial education, unless carefully considered, may make matters worse, for it takes more and more the interest from home life, which I must reiterate has been robbed by taking away the creative side. You cannot make women contented with cooking and cleaning and you need not try. The care of the children fully occupies only five or ten years of the seventy. What is she to do with the rest ? The movement for industrial education is doomed to fail of its great purpose unless you take account of the girls. You cannot put them where their great grandmothers were and yet take to yourselves the spinning and weaving and Council) HOME ECONOMICS 491 soap making. There was always sornething to do, now there is only something to he done. We ask for this committee with appropriation because in our sporadic efforts to ascertain what is being done we found it required personal corre- spondence and a following up of trails like a study of family history. No one of those interested could undertake the task — much less were we qualified to make the necessary computations and desired deductions as guide to further development. We hope to convince you, if you are not already aware of the extent to which those subjects have already crept, often unauthorized, into the curriculum of the public schools of all grades, and no one knows better than this body of men how inspiring an unauthorized subject may be or how far from correct pedagogical lines — all depending upon the individuals presenting it. flDemorial" a5&re06e6 H)r, if* Xouis Solban BEN BLEWETT, SUPERINTENDENT OF INSTRUCTION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, ST. LOUIS, MO. F. Louis Soldan was born in Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1842, was trained in the schools of his native land, and came to America in 1863, without fortune and without friends in the new world. After a brief stay' in New York, he went to St. Louis and established a private school which he conducted till 1868, when he became an instructor in modern languages in the St. Louis High School. In 1870, he was appointed assistant superintendent in charge of the instruction in German, and in 1871 was made principal of the normal school. This position he held till the high and normal schools were united under his principalship in 1887, where he continued until 1895. At the close of that year he was elected superintendent of instruction in the St. Louis schools and held this position till his sudden death on March 27, 1908. In 1880, he organized the first normal institute for teachers held in South Carolina and for his distinguished services in this work he received from the revived university of that state the degree of LL.D. In 1877, he became an active member of the National Educational Association, and in 1885 was elected its president. He served on the Board of Trustees from 1897 to 1905. He was without interruption a member of the National Council from 1880 to the time of his death — a period of twenty-eight years. In 1881, he was made its first secretary, and in 1890, its president. Such is the index record of the successive steps of a great hfe in the history of education in this country and its limits in time. Who can adequately set forth the significance of this life in the great push of its influence during the long years of its continuance; or presume to comprehend by his imagination the expanding sweep of this influence as perpetuated in the lives and institutions it has stimulated and shaped? The morning of March 27 was a beautiful morning in St. Louis, a morning when hope was buoyant, when life was in the spring. At one o'clock in the afternoon the assistant superintendents had assembled for the usual weekly conference with Superintendent Soldan. A message came from him that he was not well and must visit his physician, but expected to be at the meeting later. In a few minutes a telephone message from one of the papers told that Superintendent Soldan had fallen dead on the street. Our hearts stood still; we were dumb; our superintendent, our leader, our friend, was dead. Within two hours the Board of Education had met and appointed a committee that drafted this among other resolutions : 492 d Council] IN MEMORIAM F. LOUIS SOI.DAN 493 Resolved^ That in the loss of its superintendent, F. Louis Soldan, the Board of Educa- tion feels itself deprived of its ablest officer, of a friend to whom every one of its members was warmly attached and who was a guide and inspiration to the whole corps of our teachers. On the following day the supervisors, principals, and teachers assembled, and in the profoundest sorrow deplored the irreparable loss to themselves, the city, and the nation. Through the morning of Monday, March 30, the body lay in state in the corridor of the Central High School and thousands of pupils and their parents passed in solemn procession to pay their loving tribute. In the afternoon, the funeral services were held in the auditorium where citizens of all walks of life, with municipal and state oflScials, crowded every inch of space within, while hundreds, unable to gain admission, stood outside in a pouring rain. The eulogiums pronounced on this occasion are published in a memorial volume where they may be read at length. Yet I think it proper to repeat here selections from them that the records of the National Council of Education may treasure these estimates of the worth of him we mourn. I quote from Dr. Magoon, president of the board: The Board of Education of the City of St. Louis desires to put on record its expression of deep sorrow at the loss of this remarkable man, and its feeling of indebtedness to him for the great services which he has rendered as Superintendent of our Public Schools. Our high appreciation of the great share which he had in the upbuilding and uplifting of our educational system and our deep regret that not only this community but the cause of education should have been so suddenly deprived of the great and beneficent work which this able, scholarly, and enthusiastic educator might still have accomplished, can be but feebly expressed. Dr. Soldan was the type of a true scholar whose aim and ideals embraced the perfec- tion of hunianity through educational methods. Professor Woodward, a member of the board, said: The Board of Education, for whom it is my privilege to speak today, feels and will feel profoundly its loss, now that those lips are closed and that large heart beats no more. For twelve years, the board as now constituted has enjoyed and profited by his tireless energy and his splendid abilities. But the splendor of his service makes our misfortune only the harder to bear. It is needless for me to say we loved him, for all who knew him loved him, from the children and teachers in the grades to the cabinet of assistants whom he had gathered around him. To know him was to love, honor and trust him. I remember that the great Swiss-American biologist, Louis Agassiz, asked that his epitaph should be the single word "Teacher." If I were to write an epitaph today I would ask that these words be engraved on the tomb which is to hold this casket: "Frank Louis Soldan, Teacher, Friend, and Guide of Teachers." Mr. E. C. Eliot, formerly member of the board, and as chairman of the \ Committee on Instruction, given the most favorable opportunity of estimating superintendent Soldan's w^orth, paid this tribute: This man thruout a long life of educational service poured his soul and intel- [ligence into the hearts and minds of the people and leavened them all to higher and better life. For not alone those who received instruction from him, but the many more who received help from those he instructed, the hundreds of the good and faithful who have spent their lives in the inspiration of his words — ^yes — and the thousands, who, without knowing when or how, have breathed the spirit of his life: these are his beneficiaries and 494 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National he is their benefactor. How poor and meager seems the opportunity of him, who, out of the selfishness of his Ufe, can give only money to the uses of a community, compared with the one who has given himself I We bore the body away and as we closed the portals of the tomb, above our sobs arose this song, sung by his companions of the Liederkranz Society: Stumm schlaft der Sanger, dessen Ohr Gelauschet hat an andrer Welten Thor. Ein naher Waldstrom, brauste sein Gesang, Und sauselt auch wie ferner Quellen Klang. Du schlummerst stille, schlummerst leicht, Weil uber dir der Sturm and Zephyr streicht, Der Sturm der dir den Schlachtgesang durchdrohnt, Der Hauch der sanft im Lied der Liebe tdnt. The morrow placed us face to face with the work to be carried on and our leader was gone. Then came the most marvelous demonstration of what he had been to us all. Staggered by the awful blow, the Board of Education and corps of teachers had been dazed for the moment and apparently helpless. Yet with the need for action came the calm of returned courage thru the conscious and certain reliance upon the efficiency of those plans of organization and principles of co-operative responsibility on which he had constructed and by which he had animated the life of the schools. No longer in our midst, he was now more than ever present in each of us and seemed to dominate us .the more completely thru his disembodied spirit. And making what he would wish us to do, our criterion, all, members of the board, officers, and teachers, stood to their work with confidence in each other, without a waver. Saul was dead but Saul still lived. Crush that life and behold its wine running. Each deed thou hast done Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the sun Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests eflFace, Can find nothing his own deeds produced not, must everywhere trace The results of his past summer prime — so, each ray of thy will, Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over shall thrill Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth A cheer to their sons; who in turn, fill the south and the north With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Probably no superintendent of schools ever commanded more completely the respect and confidence of his colaborers and of the community in which he worked. The fundamental causes of this condition were: (i) the evident singleness of his purpose; (2) the thoroness of his preparation for his task; (3) his enormous and untiring capacity for detailed work, and (4) his very human sympathy. He desired with all his heart to make the schools the best possible instru- mentality for the development of the powers of the child that it might accomplish its own happiness in the highest degree, and contribute most efficiently to the world in which it lived and was to live as a man. X I Council) IN MEMORIAM h. LOUIS SOLDAN 495 He bent all his ability to the accomplishment of this aim, and no suggestion of personal gain could turn him from it. As was natural with one of his acknowledged insight and practical experience, he was constantly urged to reach a larger audience through the lecture platform or through the literary and educational press, but he never yielded to the temptation that might dissi- pate his strength or that might place him in a position where his judgment would be biased on questions affecting the immediate interests of the schools. Problems of administration that have proven impossible of reasonable solution by weaker men were seemingly easy to him, because his only policy was direct action where right could be determined and the test for right in any line of conduct was its adaption to the general interests of the schools. His decision of questions was always so clearly based upon this principle that those who were disappointed when their pleas could not be granted, with rare exceptions, recognized the justice of his decisions and were won by the impartial and sympathetic ear he gave to the presentation of their case. In one of the sacred moments of intimate friendship, he disclosed to me that his highest hope was to be remembered as one who had devoted his life to the children. This lofty purpose was his pole star, and we, his fellows, have seen how steadily the helm was held toward it, and today recall a verse of one of his favorite poems — ''Columbus," by Joaquin Miller: They sailed. They sailed. Then spoke the mate; "This mad sea shows its teeth tonight. He curls his lip, he lies in wait, With lifted teeth, as if to bite ! Brave Admiral, say but one good word: What shall we do when hope is gone ?" The words leapt as a leaping sword : " Sail on ! sail on ! sail on ! and on ! " His preparation for his work began in the dawning of his life, where those silent influences of inheritance were molding the physical instrument which should express the spirit that with developing strength smote upon its chords. He was born with the disposition to do what was to be done and the conditions of his home and the traditions of his country laid upon him the training that familiarized him with the history and literature through which the classic civilizations had expressed themselves, and with the methods of scientific investigation and the attitude of philosophic insight. The influence of this training showed itself both in the thoroness that characterized every portion of his subsequent work, and in the poetic enthusi- asm that idealized the whole path of duty and glorified it with light of eternal truth and beauty. The scope of his interests may be crudely shown by the turning lathe in his workshop, his unexcelled private photographic apparatus, his minutely annotated library of philosophy, and the little pocket volume of Horace which was his vade mecum. With the natural tendencies of character thus developed he came to the 496 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National United States at a time when the ferment of hostile poHtical beliefs was threat- ening the very existence of the nation, and located in St. Louis where those of his own nationality were to play so large a part in determining the future of American institutions. The young German soon found his new home a better field than his old for the development and expression of that individual freedom of thought and life which is a natural impulse of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, and of that consequent respect for the opinion of one's fellow-man. In such a congenial atmosphere, men of high purpose were attracted to each other and drew together in groups for the discussion of questions of large human interests, and to such association F. Louis Soldan, a young man not yet thirty years old, was drawn. Already a scholar, with other master-minds he became a close student of sociological movements as determined by man's spiritual nature, and with the insight that came from such study, he added wisdom to his scholarship. The effect of this intellectual companionship was shown during the years he was principal of the normal and high schools, in his sound judgment, his knowledge of human nature, and the motives that controlled it, and his ready tact in meeting new situations. When, at the age of fifty-three, he was called to the office of superintendent, every necessary element for success had entered into his training for the work. Scholarship, intellectual companionship, struggle with material things, keen observation of stupendous social movements, and practical experience with every phase of elementary and secondary education — all these things were in his preparation. When he entered upon this crowning epoch of his woi-k, the organization of the schools in St. Louis differed little in principle from the organization of a country district. The board was elected partly by wards and partly by the city at large. All the business, including that requiring expert knowledge, was undertaken by committees of the board and responsibility could not be traced directly to any individual member or officer. This type of organization performs without marked disaster the work of a small district, but it is hope- lessly inadequate for the administration of the complex system of schools in a large city. This statement may seem an unnecessary repetition of a truism to the men and women before me. Yet its truth was not recognized in St. Louis thirteen years ago, and there is some good ground for the belief that it is not universally accepted in practice throughout the United States today. In spite of the presence in the board of many intelligent, virtuous, and patriotic men, abuses that hindered the development of the schools and threatened to destroy completely their usefulness grew out of the crudeness of the institution that had not developed the proper organs for the increasing and specialized work. Our experienced and philosophic superintendent soon saw that the only satisfactory way to be rid of the evils that beset his work was to attack directly their cause. Within a year, modestly keeping himself in the background, he had summoned to his aid the awakened conscience and intelligence of his Council) IN MEMORIAM F. LOUIS SOLDAN 497 city and thru them had secured the passing of a law that gave to the Board of Education a charter that has become distinguished as a pioneer movement in the betterment of city-school organization. Its fundamental principles are sharp definition and location of responsibiHty and bestowal of authority to meet it. Authority rightly used he knew would bring success; authority abused, misused, or left idle would bring reproach upon the law and all for which it stood. Opportunity had been won, opportunity must be used, and, in the largeness of his plans, this meant untiring zeal, a great comprehension of problems, and a policy that would merge tact and firmness into actions that should clearly have regard for the feelings and interests of the individual while protecting the schools. Some feared the misuse of the power that gave to the superintendent com- plete initiative in the selection of textbooks and supplies, the shaping of the course of study, and the nomination of teachers. He was called dictator and czar. But so great was his discretion in the exercise of his authority that all interests, except those of the most viciously selfish kind, soon found the assur- ance and comfort that result from reliance upon the decisions of one who is a competent and just judge in affairs where his training has made him an expert. The energies of the board which, under the incompetence of the old law, had been dissipated in the worries of detail, in the handling of which it was not experienced, and had been distracted by the multitude of warring interests which it did not know how to reconcile or defeat, were now concentrated upon the consideration of the large question of policy in the administration of the schools. Fornierly money could not be found even for housing of the schools, and thousands of children were at school only on half-day time. Poor textbooks were in use, school appliances or apparatus were meagerly supplied, and supplementary books for reading as literature or information subjects were regarded as the wild dreams of the enthusiast. As if by magic, under the new conditions, it became possible to obtain all that was needed for the main- tenance and development of the work. What seemed magic, however, was most intensely matter-of-fact. The recommendations of the superintendent carried because the committees of the board were convinced that his conclusions had been reached after the most unremitting scrutiny of all that bore upon the subject under consideration, and that they were made with their value to the schools as the supreme test of their merit. His singleness of purpose, his many-sided training, and his tireless attention would alone have made Doctor Soldan a great superintendent; but added to these qualities, dominating them, or better still coloring and vitalizing them, was his superabundant s)mipathy with man and child. Many of you were present at the recent meeting of the Department of Superintendence in Wash- ington where Doctor Soldan replied to the addresses of welcome. The chair- man in introducing him expressed his pleasure that a man who for over a third 498 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National of a century had been mo^ active in the work of the association was still alive and could be called upon to respond. You will remember how, with glowing face and the vigor of youth, he rushed to the platform and gave vent to expres- sions of joy that he was still alive, alive in these times of stirring thought when men were aglow with the fervor of their desire to meet and solve the questions that bore upon the improvement of human hfe. You will remember how his enthusiasm kindled us all with its magnetic radiation. Take up any journal you please in which the profession, after his death, recorded its estimate of him. Underlying all that is said in praise of his scholarship, his skill as an instructor, his executive force, his influence as a debater, there runs the note which sings of his friendship. Other men used other words, but the sentiment was the same as that so delicately expressed by Aaron Gove: His coming brought to me an atmosphere saturated with such cordial friendship, gladsome welcoming, and unbounded confidence as did that of no other man. His framed likeness has been the only one in my room for three years; as it hangs above my desk his genial recognition is apparent as I look up. Each of us knows what loss he has suffered in this death, each of us knows what precious heritage in this memory is his. How shall I now reckon the indebtedness of this association of teachers to one who, with no regard for personal comfort but with the enthusiasm of personal interest, devoted his talents and time without stint to its work, as member, committee-man, trustee, and oj05cer ? The history of his service is set down in the records of this institu- tion, it is impressed upon men's hearts, it will live in the expanding influence of lofty example. IRutus IHenrp Ibalsei? JOHN A. H. KEITH, PRESIDENT, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, OSHKOSH, WIS. A little less than a year ago, in the northern Wisconsin woods, whither he had gone for needed rest and recreation, the fruitful life of Rufus Henry Halsey was ended by the accidental discharge of a revolver in the hands of one of his sons. Born at Blooming Grove, N. Y., in 1856, he removed in 1858 with his parents to Brooklyn. In the public schools of Brooklyn, and Adelphi Academy of the same city he received his early education and preparation for college. He was graduated from Williams College with the class of 1877. The six following years were spent in teaching in New York state, one year at Newton- ville, and five years in Adelphi Academy. From 1883 to 1896 Mr. Halsey was principal of the Oshkosh High School and for the last five years of that time, city superintendent as well, being the first professional superintendent that Oshkosh had employed. In 1896 Mr. Halsey was called to the superin- tendency of the Binghampton, N. Y., city schools. Upon the death of Mr. Albee, who had been president of the Oshkosh Normal School from its founda- Council] IN MEMORIAM RUFUS HENRY HALSEY 499 tion in 187 1, the faculty of the normal school and the leading citizens of Oshkosh felt that Mr. Halsey was most capable of managing the great school which the genius and life of President Albee had built up. The Board of Normal School Regents concurred in this feeling and Mr. Halsey became president of the Oshkosh State Normal School, January, 1899, in which office he served until his death. What manner of man he was and in what estimate he was held by the leaders in educational thought and activity is best shown by the fact that he was twice elected to membership in this distinguished body and was a frequent contributor to its programs. In whatever relation to life he found himself, Mr. Halsey conceived his fundamental duty to be service. In this fact is found the source of his wide-ranged interests, his devotion to all that he attempted, his power of co-ordinating details effectively, and his power over people. Mr. Halsey has been characterized by one of his college-mates as '*an incur- able boy." He never lost the enthusiasm and buoyancy of youth, nor his early love for games and sports, as is shown by the fact that in the hour preceding his tragic death, he had engaged in target practice with his sons. These interests kept him youthful and gave him power over youth. Along with this buoyancy and power, however, was an abiding devotion to his work, and he conceived his work to be the organization of upward-tend- ing, life-giving experience for the youth with whom he dealt. A distinguished superintendent recently said to me, ''Mr. Halsey had intuitively that rare educational insight which only few men can acquire after long study." Such a man is public-spirited without reflectively framing a code of public ethics. In the literary, social, business, and civic life of Oshkosh he was an active factor, and it is indeed a suitable tribute to his work that the alumni of the schools and the citizens of Oshkosh have raised a fund to provide Halsey Memorial Lectures so that the knowledge, good-sense, and ideals which he stood for in community life may be brought in perpetuity to the community and the school. While a man may be drawn unreflectively into matters of public concern, he must become conscious of ends and ways and means when he assumes leadership. That Mr. Halsey added practical insight to his natural social sympathy is clearly proved by the organization of faculty and students which I found existing at Oshkosh. The faculty committees Which he organized are working committees, and the student organizations, without exception, are related to each other through their relations to the welfare of the school. This ability to see the practical outcome from the beginning was one of Mr. Halsey's most serviceable traits. In addition to all this, Mr. Halsey had a rare power of detecting funda- mentals. I do not mean that he had a formulated set of fundamentals to which he logically adhered. Instead, his sure-footed mind took in all the relations of a tangled problem and, with difficulty, but also with clarity, he 500 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [National brought order out of seeming chaos. He not only saw — he did; and what he wrought needed never to be untangled. A man with such qualities and exempt from such negations as they imply is, in simple truth, "the salt of the earth;" and the earth which he served loved him devotedly. I cannot more fittingly close this tribute to the memory of Mr. Halsey than to quote the last paragraph of his baccalaureate address of 1903: "Enter upon your work with a spirit and determination that shall enable men to say of you when you have put the harness off: He was One who never turned his back but marched breastforward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph; Held we fall to rise, are baflSed to fight better, Sleep to wake!" I DEPARTMENT OF KINDERGARTEN EDUCATION SECRETARY'S MINUTES OFFICERS President — Miss Bertha Payne, kindergarten director, School of Education, Chicago, 111. Vice-President — Miss Barbara Greenwood, supervisor of kindergartens, Pomona, Cal. Secretary — Miss Harriet Rockwell, director of kindergartens, Cleveland, Ohio FIRST SESSION.— Tuesday Morning, June 30, 1908 The Kindergarten Department of the National Education association met in the First Methodist Church. Bertha Payne, School of Education, the University of Chicago, president of the department, presided. The session was opened with songs by a chorus of students from the Cleveland Kindergarten Training School, under the leadership of Miss Anna Goedhardt. Patty S. Hill, president of the International Kindergarten Union, gave greetings from that society, expressing the hope that the two associations might become more closely allied. Earl Barnes, lecturer for the American Society for the Extension of University Teach- ing, Philadelphia, Pa., gave an address on "Fundamental Factors in the Making of a Kinder- garten Curriculum." Alice Temple, of the Kindergarten Institute of Chicago, read the next paper, her subject being "The Factor of Environment." A paper on "The Relation between the Ideal and the Practical" was presented bj Luella A. Palmer, kindergarten critic teacher, Speyer School, New York. These papers were discussed by Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, Chicago, III., Patty S. Hill, New York City, Mina B. Colburn, Cincinnati, Ohio. Committees were appointed by the president as follows : COMMITTEE ON NOMINATIONS Netta Faris, Cleveland, Ohio Winifred Smith, Detroit, Mich. COMMITTEE ON RESOLUTIONS Alma L. Binzell, Menomonie, Wis. Elizabeth Harrison, Chicago, 111. Ella C. Elder, Buffalo, N. Y Anna Littell, Dayton, Ohio SECOND SESSION.— Wednesday Morning, July i A joint session of the departments of Kindergarten, Elementary, and Art Education was held in the First Methodist Church, Bertha Payne, president of the Kindergarten Department, presiding. The nominating committee of the Kindergarten Department recommended the fol- owing for officers: For President, Mabel A. McKinney, Cleveland, Ohio. For Vice-President, Luella A. Palmer, New York, N. Y. For Secretary, Caroline Sewell, Denver, Colo. The report was on motion accepted and the secretary was directed to cast the ballot for the election of the nominees. The ballot was so cast and the nominees were declared elected for the ensuing year. The topic for the session was "Art in the Kindergarten and Primary Grades." 501 502 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten "The Art Impulse; Its Early Forms and Relation to Mental Development" was the subject of a paper given by Lillian S. Cushman, instructor in art, School of Education, the University of Chicago. Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, superintendent of the Chicago Froebel Association, read a paper on "Drawing in the Kindergarten." This was followed by a paper on " The Use and Abuse of Design " by Mae B. Higgons, kindergartner. Public Schools, New York City. A paper treating of the "Motive and Methods in Primary Art Work" was read by Beatrice Weller, institute instructor and supervisor, New York City, and afterward illus- strated by her. A general discussion followed, participated in by Elizabeth Harrison, Chicago, 111., William N. Hailmann, LaPorte, Ind., and George W. Eggers, Chicago, 111. ROUND-TABLE SESSION.— Thursday Morning, July 2 A meeting with the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education was held in the First Methodist Church, for the discussion of the topic: "The Co-ordination of the Kindergarten and the Elementary School," as presented in Part II of the Seventh Yearbook of that society. Charles McKenny, Milwaukee, Wis., president of the National Society for the Scientific study of Education, presided. President McKenny gave an outline of the presentation in the Yearbook. Patty S. Hill, of New York City, gave a resume of her article in the Sixth Yearbook on "Some Conservative and Progressive Phases of Kindergarten Education." The following took part in the discussion: Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, Elizabeth Harrison, and Bertha Payne, Chicago, 111.; Lida B. Earhart, New York, N. Y.; Emma C. Davis, Cleveland, Ohio; Luella A. Palmer, New York, N. Y.; Mina B. Colbum, Cincinnati, Ohio; H. E. Kratz, Calumet, Mich.; Robert I. Hamilton, Vincennes, Ind.; Alma L. Binzel, Menomonie, Wis. The president of the Kindergarten Department, Miss Bertha Payne, then took the chair. The Committee on Resolutions presented its report thanking the Day-nursery and Free Kindergarten Association, and the Kindergarten Union of Clevefcind and those individuals who had contributed to the entertainment and comfort of the visiting kinder- gartners. The report was accepted and adopted. After the introduction of the president-elect, Mabel McKinney, Cleveland, Ohio, the department adjourned. Harriet D. Rockwell, Secretary PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS FUNDAMENTAL FACTORS IN THE MAKING OF A KINDER- GARTEN CURRICULUM EARL BARNES, EDUCATIONAL LECTURER, PHILADELPHIA, PA. In the past most curricula have been made to fit a theology or a philosophy. Today it is almost universally recognized that a curriculum should be made to fit the children who are to be affected by it. It is the crowning glory of the kindergarten that it has generally started its theories and its practice directly with the child and has studied to understand his nature and to meet his needs. Its.successes have been based on the wisdom of its founder and on the splendid devotion of the master's followers; its mistakes have been the errors common to human nature. Department] MAKING OF A KINDERGARTEN CURRICULUM 503 During the last twenty years we have had a great deal of really scientific study devoted to the little children. On the whole, the results of this study agree with the teachings of Frederick Froebel; they re-state the earlier dis- coveries of great educational leaders, with here and there a modification or an addition. This paper seeks to state the fundamental factors in the making of a kindergarten curriculum from the point of view of modern genetic investi- gations. If a scientist were set to study a child under six years old the first thing to strike his attention would certainly be the marvelous activity of the specimen. He wriggles, squirms, gurgles, laughs, claps, creeps, walks, trots, and tumbles about. He talks, cries, shouts, and rubs himself into every object he can reach, so that a student like Professor Dresslar is able to write a long article in merely enumerating the acts of a three-year-old for a half-hour. But the scientist will hunt in vain for any steady axis of organization run- ning through the chaos of doing. This is why all records of infancy, like those of Miss Shinn or of Mrs. Moore, or even the volumes of Preyor, are such uninteresting and almost impossible reading for anyone except students of childhood. A well-organized mind moves easily along the lines of its normal action; compelled to turn hither and yon in an attempt to follow the accidental movements of a child's mind it is quickly tired out. This is also the reason why any real work with little children is so fatiguing; and it explains the constant struggle between kindergartners and boards of education over the questions of double sessions in kindergarten work. It is true that there is little difference between children in the last days of the kindergarten and the first days of the primary grades; but there is a vast difference between kinder- garten children and primary children as a whole, and this difference is mainly due to the quality of fragmentariness in the activity and in the attention of the little ones. The third quality that must strike the scientific observer of little children is their remarkable desire for and facility in social intercourse. Even in extreme infancy the baby longs to have someone near him. In his first days he prefers to lie in a lap rather than in a cushioned crib. Only with protesta- tions and cries will he break his social bonds and voyage off into the lonely land of sleep. In the first year he greets animals and babies as his peers; after the first year any child who seeks solitude is something of a monster. This intelligent interpretation of and response to the social forces about him early mark the child as the master of all living things. He learns quickly whom he can control and how to do it; whom he must obey, and why. At [three years old, he reads a face as adults read books; and at six he has passed thru, and at least partially assimilated, most of the social experiences of life. This social sensibility makes little children strangely imitative. Whatever any of us thinks that he tends to do; what we think with admiration tends doubly to pass over into action and hence into conduct. We live by our admi- rations; and what we love that we become. Later in life, fixed habits and 504 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten accepted ideas and ideals will inhibit this imitative tendency, but little children are the prey of all suggestions that play upon them. And because a little child is weak and unformed, and his ideas run always before his powers, he seeks to realize himself in imitative play. As I write these pages, three children are playing with a cart on the lawn. They have just made a Httle journey by sea and so the cart is a ship ; the child in front is the captain; the one who pushes behind says he is the sailor; the smallest one, who because he is the smallest has been crowded into the back of the cart, cries lustily because he wants to be a sailor. ''No," explain the others, "you are the passenger; here is your ticket." Already, as I write these words, they have deserted the ship and have gone to play in the garden. Here you have an epitome of young childhood with its activity, its fragmentariness, its social demands, its openness to imitation, and its attempt to realize life and prepare for it thru imaginative play. This, then, is the material we have to work upon — an undeveloped human being, active, chaotic, social and hence imitative, ineffective and so driven to imagine, invent, and play at all sorts of actuality. The curriculum must be made to fit this individual and it must also anticipate and lead toward the life that we wish the child to grow into. That life is very different for different groups of children. It depends largely upon the philosophy, theology, and social and political theories of those who are in charge of the children. A kindergarten in a convent must care most to secure success in the life that follows this one; a select kindergarten in an aristocratic neighborhood will care especially to fit the children for the walk of life to which they have been called by the parents' wealth; a slum kindergarten must always be used as an instrument for improving the slums. In this paper, we shall take it for granted that the kindergarten is secular, democratic, and American. To train a creature with the qualities we have described it is clear we must depend on its activity for our motive power. It is a sad thing when a school for children neglects to train them; it is a sadder thing when it destroys the driving desire to do things. To maintain the hunger for activity we must have a curriculum providing for pretty constant physical work or play. This can be secured in organized indoor games, in industrial exercises, in gardening, in playground exercises, or in excursions. The children's corners in the recrea- tion centers of Chicago are admirably devised to encourage activity. Wide sand piles, ample wading-pools, swings, and teeters provide a succession of activities that can be combined in endless variety. But this activity is merely opportunity for training. Play will keep activity alert, but work must organize this fragmentary activity into significant sequences. A recreation center may be merely a place for discharging unused energy; but a kindergarten must shape life, if it is to justify its existence. Here we meet the universal paradox of education. We must keep initiative unchecked and activity alert, and still shape desire and direct activity to ends that will be of deepest value in life. It is the old struggle of wind and rudder DepartmeutJ MAKING OF A KINDERGARTEN CURRICULUM 505 for the control of the ship; without wind, nothing is done; without rudder no port is gained. The directive work in the kindergarten, so far as guiding activity is con- cerned, must lie mainly in the direction of organizing the tyrannical but necessary reflexes that we call habits. Infant education should be mainly concerned with stocking and directing the subconscious nerve centers. The child should learn to walk well, to carry his head erect and his chest well for- ward, to step lightly, to run and dance, to shake hands, bow, pass articles or move a chair aside. He should learn to articulate clearly, speaking distinctly and agreeably, the pitch of his voice should be properly regulated, and harsh- ness worked out of his tone; he should learn to sing and recite little poems agreeably. Laughing, grimaces, tricks of mouth and eyes, all these should be constantly shaped towards excellence. Wearing the clothes well, eating and drinking properly should be reduced to habits, and then forgotten. Of course, if the teacher is stupid she will make the children into self-conscious prigs, into little automata. That is why the teacher of little children should be wisely and carefully trained, well bred and experienced in the usages of good society. The *w ell-to-do have always looked after these matters with great solicitude, and hence they have been able to retain social leadership for them- selves and for their children. Some day the children of the people will be trained in this early period, when life-long reflexes are being established, to act like culti- vated boys and girls, and the action will strengthen the thoughts and the feelings that make a man truly cultivated. When this time comes, America will have a cultivated and humanized democracy capable of protecting itself against all class aggression and ready to live life with the grace and dignity that human life deserves. And in the kindergarten all this training of lower nerve centers takes place in a social atmosphere to which children are fully alive and to which they freely respond. Sympathy, emulation, hope, fear, selfishness, altruism, all the passions that gather round social life and intercourse are a\railable for the teacher who knows how to use them. Hence the work and play must be directed to group activities that will give wide and ordered activity to all the feelings of social life. Just as the child is trained to walk erectly so he must be trained to play the game of life fairly and generously. As he is trained to articulate distinctly, so he must be trained to speak honestly. Most of us are good because we have been trained to be good, and we have the habit. The teacher, standing as the embodiment of authority, can and should command absolute obedience; in the various combinations of the group she .will find all the other relations that go to make up our human institutions. The lindergarten is an enlarged and self-conscious home, and a' miniature state. )0, too, in groups, the industrial games can be carried through all stages of simple production and distribution; while in dramatic combinations, they can figure forth the relations and the crises of life. Probably all sex distinctions 5o6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten had best be, as far as possible, ignored in the kindergarten period. They are far J;oo important in our adult life; they had best wait on older years. To work out these basal conceptions of industry, society, and life the teacher must depend largely upon imitation. All the surroundings of little children's lives should be simple and capable of childish imitation. The teacher should stand and walk well, she should have a cultivated voice, and should dress with taste and variety. The kindergarten should look more like a living-room than a school; and bad children should be quickly eliminated by making them good. We cannot afford to reform bad children, whether from rich homes or poor, by having them associate with good children four or five years old. The imagination, as we have said, enables the child to accompHsh thru play what his powers cannot compass in reality. Hence industrial games are very effective, but they should always be organized on the basis of some actual observation and experience. That is what imagination can do at this time; it can make observation real, through tactual and muscular experience. Nowhere else does the ordinary kindergarten curriculum lay itself open to graver criticisms than in the imaginative plays. They must be developed directly out of experience, even if they do not recapitulate the experience of the race. Dramatic activity, based on imagination, should deal also with the affairs of the home and the neighborhood. And here again they must really appeal to the children as connected with life; otherwise they are not exercises for imagination, but mere mimicry. Instead of gripping the feelings, and shaping them, they stultify them. The real life of the homes from which the children come should be represented, but lifted and glorified by the play of imaginative fancy. On the side of aesthetics we are coming to realize that little children have not the ability to grasp wholes, to feel the charm of proportions and of sug- gested associations in which all developed art rests. They like brilliant colors and strong sounds and they are especially fond of rhythmic repetition. Dress is the form in which beauty appeals to them most strongly and here it is doubt- less blended with egotism in their own case, or, when others are concerned, with admiration for the wearer. The kindergarten can do little more than give plenty of sense experiences properly related out of which the children in later years may build up forms of beauty. Institutions have all the selfishness of human beings, with few of their generous impulses. They tend to usurp the proper functions of other related institutions and to gather everything into their own hands. The church illustrated this tendency during the Middle Ages. The public school now tends to take over the functions of the home, the neighborhood, and the state itself. But the business of the school should be to supplement the home and related institutions. It is true that the teacher should have a complete philosophy of life in mind to guide her in her work, but in the country village the kindergarten curriculum should give much of what the city home naturally Department) THE FACTOR OF ENVIRONMENT 507 furnishes, while in Boston it should bring the child into contact with what the village child sees daily all about his home. There are then these two reasons why we cannot formulate a universal curriculum for kindergartners. In the first place the kindergarten must take up and use the experience the child has ahready met; and in the second place it must supplement the home. It might be possible and desirable to work out type curricula for well-to-do country village homes, for industrial centers like Manchester, for congested slum districts, and for fashionable city homes. Where life is so fluid, however, as it is with little children, it must generally be better for the teacher to be well grounded in fundamental principles and then to work out a daily course of exercises, following the seasons, knitting her work on to daily experience and filling out the acreage of interest and need, not cultivated by the home. To do this, she must be well acquainted with the development of little children, she must have a vivid and complete philosophy of life, and she must be trained to think of her institution as one of several, all working to give the children life more abundantly. THE FACTOR OF ENVIRONMENT ALICE TEMPLE, INSTRUCTOR, KINDERGARTEN INSTITUTE, CHICAGO, ILL. The education of the child during the period of infancy proceeds through the free expression of his impulses, but this free play goes on in a social organi- zation of which the child is a part, and to^which he must adjust himself. The child is, at first, absolutely dependent upon the grown people about him for the mediation of his impulses. They not only furnish the stimuli which he is unconsciously seeking, and to which his motor processes are all ready to respond, but they help him to complete the reaction. For example, the child's hand wants to grasp, but until someone puts an object into it, the grasping impulse cannot function. Later he reaches for the bright object that catches his eye, but someone must take him to it, or bring it to him, before this impulse is realized. When he is a little older, the activities and occupation of the people in his immediate social environment furnish the stimuli which he needs. He responds in what we call imitative play, and even here he depends more or less upon the members of the family for material, for sympathy, for co-opera- tion in carrying out the play activity. It is thru this free expression of impulses, free in the sense that they are not controlled by any end beyond their own realization, operating in an organized social environment which furnishes both stimuH and standards, that the child gets control of himself and enters into human life and activity. By the time the child comes into the kindergarten at the age of three or four, he is well along in the so-called play stage. He is constantly producing in various play forms what he sees going on about him, both in home and neighborhood. We need only watch his spontaneous play activities to get a very fair notion of what his experience has been and in what sort of an environ- ment, social and physical, he has lived. It gives us the key also to the phas,es 5o8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten in the life about him which make the strongest appeal to the child. This natural tendency on the part of the child to ''play at what the society in which he lives is doing" is the bond of relationship between the individual and the social whole. It is the child's mode of reconstructing experience, the process by which his education goes forward. The immediate experience then of the group for which the kindergarten program is made must very largely determine, not only the subject-matter of the program, but the particular methods and materi- als used. Environment, therefore, which determines experience, becomes a factor of prime importance in the making of the kindergarten curriculum. Having determined that the subject-matter, if it is to appeal to the child, must be selected from his particular environment, three questions present themselves: (i) What phases from the life immediately surrounding the child shall be selected? (2) Upon what principle shall the arrangement of the subject-matter be determined? (3) How shall it be presented so that the child's reaction to it shall result in his entering into the life about him and gaining control of himself and his powers through such participation ? First, then, what phases from the life immediately surrounding the child shall be selected ? It is in the concrete activities and occupations of persons in the family and immediate neighborhood that the child seems to be particu- larly interested. He is interested in the physical environment as furnishing a setting, or affording the means, for human activity. Now whatever the particular social environment may be, certain phases of its life are of more social or economic importance than others and therefore of more lasting interest to the child; the occupations in the home, for example, that are neces- sary to the physical well-being of the family, and certain industrial and civic activities that touch these closely. Around this life, therefore, the work and play of the kindergarten should largely center, if it is to be such as will give "richest meaning to the daily life of the children." But certain of the transient interests of particular groups of children deserve some recognition in the kindergarten. For example, in one of our public kindergartens in Chicago, the fathers of about two-thirds of the children spend their Sunday afternoons at the baseball game, sometimes taking the children with them. The children bring the banners of the ''Cubs" and "White Sox" to school. They talk quite a bit of the slang, and so the other day, when one child brought a bat, a game was organized during the outdoor recess period, the children against the teachers. A low stone wall about the yard served as bleachers, and the lusty fans did their duty. This was the favorite outdoor game for several days. It afforded vigorous exercise to both lungs and muscles, and this play imitation of the game certainly brought the children into sympathetic touch with one side of their fathers' lives. One of the fathers, who happened to be visiting the kindergarten, said it was the best game of baseball he had ever seen. In another kindergarten more than half of the children are negroes. They go to the theater of the neighborhood regularly with their parents. A platform Department) THE FACTOR OF ENVIRONMENT 509 in the kindergarten room suggested the idea of a performance, and these children soon worked out a sort of Buffalo Bill show. One day a week, for a few weeks, was devoted to this sort of play, and the ''company" and ''audi- ence" carried it on with perfect spontaneity and unconsciousness. The baseball play and the dramatic performance are illustrations of the recognition of the transient interests of particular groups. Neither would have place nor meaning elsewhere. The arrangement of the subject-matter is the second question to be con- sidered. A little child relates the objects and persons in his environment through the action going on among them. The whole or unity which appeals to him is what Dr. Dewey calls a "dramatic" unity. Bearing this in mind the kindergarten might begin the year with one of the very common household occupations, the preparation of food, perhaps, and then take one phase of the process after another, one object after another, as the whole large process seemed to demand it. The cooking necessitates stove and utensils, and food to be cooked. This leads quite naturally forward to the serving of the family meal, or back to the immediate source of supply, pantry, storeroom, or market as the case may be. The mother goes to market and brings back the supplies in a basket, or they are sent in a cart. The market itself now becomes a vital factor in the whole process. If it happens to be the fall season, certain special cooking may be going on, and so the fruit stalls become especially attractive and significant as containing that which may be enjoyed later in the form of jelly and preserves. As the children reproduce these experiences in play forms they \vill themselves suggest what should be done tomorrow as growing out of the play of today. They may have certain quite new experiences, as an actual trip to the market to buy fruit, which may then be preserved by the children themselves. So other household occupations may well be made the starting-point for a series of play activities, all growing naturally out of the particular occupation and related to it, as they are related in the child's actual experience, thru the action going on, the things being done. The seasons of the year will often determine the order in which such subjects are taken up. But it must be appar- ent that the way in which any one of these occupations, with its various related activities, is reproduced in the kindergarten will necessarily be determined by the particular environment of the group. This brings us to the third question, that of method. If the subject- matter selected is in direct and real relationship to the child's life and interests, his response will be immediate and spontaneous. The subject-matter itself will furnish motives and suggestions for play reproduction. The teacher's business will be to secure for the child whatever is needed in the way of further sense perception in order that his plays and constructions may be the expres- sions of his own mental images and ideas. Next she must offer those materials for expression which will help the child to realize most completely his ideas. In his effort to do this, various little problems will arise which he will need 5IO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten to solve before he can reach his end. Here again he will turn to the teacher for help and suggestion, getting the knowledge he needs to carry on his activity. But note that it is his activity, a self-activity called out in the child's effort to reach ends which are his own. A final illustration will emphasize, perhaps, the points I have been trying to make in favor of the factor of environment as fundamental in the making of the kindergarten curriculum. I visited a kindergarten this spring and found the children making dells' hats. The subject for a few weeks had been the preparation of clothing for the spring and summer. As a necessary part of the dolls' outfit the children had suggested hats. They had accordingly visited a milHner's shop the day before. Today the teacher had a very attractive little hat made of manila and tissue paper to serve as a model. The children were given the necessary materials which had been prepared to the extent of a penciled outline of a sailor hat on the manila paper. With the model before them, and directions as they were needed, the children succeeded in turning out some very creditable little hats. They immediately suggested playing store. So the blocks were used to build store windows, standards for the hats were contrived, and the play of buying and selling followed. Finally, hat boxes were made in which the hats were carried home. These various occupations and plays carried over four or five days. It seems to me we have here the conditions for really educative play. The special subject of the week is a phase of the larger one of social significance and permanent interest. It is adapted to a particular group of children in a great city. The experience which the children have already had is enlarged by the excursion to the shop. They are given opportunity to reconstruct this experience in various ways. The model of the hat supplies the needed image, so that with the partially prepared materials and tools the child can work with relative independence. As he proceeds, he becomes conscious of the need of more knowledge, which he finds the teacher ready to give. The dramatic play of buying and selling is a further mode of interpreting and getting control of the whole experience, which is completed, so far as the kindergarten is concerned, when the fittle hats are taken home in the boxes. But any such series of plays is sure to be carried further, or at least repeated in the home. And so there comes to be that relationship between home and kindergarten in which the life of one interprets and reinforces that of the other. Where the kindergarten fails to connect thus vitally with the home, there is a break in the child's development which means waste and loss. The danger of such loss is reduced to a minimum, I believe, when the program is made with careful reference to the social and physical environment of the particular group of children with whom it is to be used. Department] RELATION BETWEEN IDEAL AND PRACTICAL 5" THE RELATION BETWEEN THE IDEAL AND THE PRACTI- CAL IN THE KINDERGARTEN PROGRAM LUELLA A. PALMER, SPEYER SCHOOL, TEACHERS COLLEGE, NEW YORK Every individual is living out, each moment, his own view of the relation between the ideal and the practical, between ultimate purpose and immediate necessity. Unrest comes from the constant changing of relationship necessary to growth. A quiescent state in individuals, in groups, in institutions, would show deterioration, for the elevation of the ideal with the consequent adjust- ment of the practical is the activity which indicates the expanding of life. The relation between the ideal and the practical in the kindergarten pro- gram is, therefore, not a static condition. Yet if it is a valid relationship, it must be based upon the same principle as that relation in the world at large. In this paper, it will be assumed that the relationship is one of unity, not identity, that both are aspects necessary for reality, the ideal being the power, and the practical the means, by which the potential becomes actual. Every act which rises above the threshold of an impulsive or of an instinctive action is by its very nature ideal — practical. It implies in varying degrees that there is a purpose, that the immediate action is not left on the plane of the present but is lifted somewhat toward the possibility of the future. Except with the pessimist, it implies the attitude which learns from the past, and which interprets by faith, believing that the future will excel the past by the help of the present. In attempting to define the position held toward the relationship between the ideal and practical in the kindergarten program, it will be well to seek in the past for that which will aid in leading toward the goal mapped out by farsighted interpreters. To Froebel we will turn as it was not possible to have a kindergarten — to educate consciously a child of five years — ^until he had brought to consciousness certain educative principles. Froebel is also one of the philosophers who will point out the goal. Froebel saw all living and consequently all education as a process of inter- action. His observations led him to discern that it was carried on from the beginning of the new life to the last days. His educational aim was to bring to consciousness in the individual the idea that strength of personality was dependent upon the degree to which interaction was carried on. It was for the purpose of encouraging a child to develop this principle in his daily living and also to see it in perspective as fully as his few years made possible that the kindergarten was established. This was the step in the revelation of the principle which the five-year-old child was to take. It was Froebel who saw that interaction occurred in three different direc- tions in the universe. Between an individual and (i) a higher level, God; (2) the same level, man, and (3) a lower level, nature. It is the differing attitudes of human beings which make it possible to appreciate these different 512 SATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten levels. There are all gradations of attitudes and so there are feelings of many different levels, but these three are different enough in degree to be designated as distinct types. The attitude toward (i) a higher level is that of worship; toward (2) the same, comradeship; toward (3) a lower, control. The first attitude involves a feeling of an ideal to be copied, an end to be attained; the third, a feehng of material to be impressed, a means to be used to gain some end; the second attitude involves a feeling of the possibility of both copying and impressing, of using as means or as end. The kindergarten, as Froebel suggested it to us, was to show the principle of interaction working in the form in which it was found in the universe in its three different directions. The teacher was to stand for (i) the higher level — she was to call forth the feelings of love, faith, and obedience. The playmates were to stand for (2) the world of humanity, and the spirit of co- operation was to be cultivated; opportunities w^ere to be given for each one to lead and to be led. (3) Materials were to be used for carrying out and enlar- ging the child's expressions of his purposes, and in order that this functional use might be accompHshed in the best way, the possibilities of the materials were to be considered. These are the three factors in the kindergarten program (teacher, playmates, materials^), which are so to be used that a child shall be able to comprehend better the working of interaction in his later life. The kindergartner is the one to whom a child should look for guidance. She is the sympathetic leader who stands to the child, relatively, as the philoso- phers do to the adult. It is she who will develop his behavior toward a standard ; it is she who will give the cue as to his association with other children ; and it is she who will suggest his attitude toward materials. It is the kinder- gartner who determines what a child shall gain from all these factors. She stands to the child as an embodiment of an ideal and also provides means by which he can strive toward it. The most important connecting link, then, between the ideal and the practical in the kindergarten program is the kinder- gartner. The next point is the consideration of the motive which will determine a teacher's influence in the kindergarten. If every individual is living out each moment his own view of the relation between the world's purpose and immediate necessity, he will give back to the world what he feels the world has given him, he will give back the meaning which the world has for him. Professor James says your philosophy "is your individual way of just seeing and feeling the push and pressure of the cosmos."^ The philosophy of the kindergartner governs the program. It will indicate the goal toward which to strive and also point out the path by which this can be reached. Let us consider the attitude of the kindergartner toward a few of the philosophical problems which will most strongly affect the program. ' The word materials, as here employed, covers everything that a child uses as a means in gaining control of his experiences. Conversation, song, and story are materials for the tongue; rhythm and games for the. body; handwork of various kinds for the hands. » William James, Pragmatism, p. 4. beparttueuti RELATION BETWEEN IDEAL AND PRACTICAL 513 The attitude which the kindergartner will try to create toward herself will depend upon her own feeling toward the spirit in the universe. She could hold one of three differing views : (i) that spirit is transcendent only; (2) that it is immanent only, or (3) that it both enfolds and is in matter. If (i) God is transcendent only, the kindergartner will rule her little world with absolute authority, requiring blind obedience, probably controlling with kindness but considering no appeal possible. With this attitude there is a tendency to ignore the child's impulses and instincts, using artificial means to make growth. If (2) spirit is immanent solely, there will be no attempt to set a standard; the decision of the children will be as important as that of the teacher. Her idea will be that a child will force his best growth if allowed to follow his own wish. If (3) the same spirit is in and around all, impulses and instincts will be utilized to make toward the highest ideals known. The children will be helped to work for self-control by exercising their own power of making decisions, but these will be aided by the suggestion and example of the adult. This adult will reserve to herself the final authority where permanent injury, either physical or moral, might result. Kindergartners may have differing views concerning the relation of the past to the present. This will affect the development of the social spirit among the children. If (i) the values recognized by the best men of today are the only ones of worth, children must be made to conform to those standards. If (2) the ideals of the past are as important as those of the present, children may be allowed to form their own ideals as a group without advice or aid. But if (3) the values found by the race in its gradual development have had their share in forming the models of the present, which represent the highest aspirations of the race, the kindergartner will recognize the place which childish standards should have in the growth of the group, but by example and suggestion she will seek to elevate the ideal to what more nearly approxi- mates the best of today. There will be the gradual evolution of a society growing in a way similar to man's founded upon the desire for activity and the gregarious instinct. First, the children will all do the same thing at the same time. A little later the result of the activity will be put together to form a common product. Then will come the choice of a leader with all the children following. Next will come the planning of a purpose by contributions from many individuals, this purpose will then be carried out by each child in his own way. Finally will come the planning of a common purpose which can be accomplished only by each child perfecting the particular share which falls to his lot. The kindergartner will use these methods with all materials pro- gressing as far as she can with each, as she will realize that between four and six years of age is the period for the most rapid development of social ideals. The attitude cultivated toward materials will depend largely upon what the kindergartner considers most real in life, (i) The extremists, such as the early Christians, held that reality was spirit only; appearance was to be despised. (2) Others, as the later Greeks, believed that reality was only in what stimulated 514 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION - (Kindergarten the senses. (3) The philosophers of the present maintain that reahty is the complete union of the spiritual and the material, the latter being the form in which spirit, in order to exist in this world, must embody itself . If (i) spirit is the solely important, that time is wasted which is spent dealing with the concrete; conversations, stories, and songs which treat of virtues and other abstractions will be the only valuable parts of the program. There will be a constant play of moods, but the essence of each wuU be lost because not embodied in form. If, on the other hand, (2) the material side is solely valuable, materials will be used as ends in themselves, acquisition of facts, perfection of form, and ability to practice technique will be the aim. Each thing, even the kindergarten itself as a whole, will be so complete that it will show a finish very pleasing to the adult. If (3) reality is the unity of the spiritual and the material, the kindergartner will lead a child to feel that there should be a guiding thought which seeks expression through all the materials at his command, thru conversation, story, song, rhythm, game, and handwork. Balance will always be preserved; the creative spirit will be called forth and take form in something adequate to the significance of the moment. A child will gain a feeling of the self as an organic unity; thought and expression in perfect accord will intensify the personality. The kindergartner's yearly and even daily plans will be influenced by her view concerning the teleology of the universe. She may think that (i) God's design is static and unchangeable, in which case she can have a fixed program which will be of use everywhere. She may believe that (2) there is no pre- conceived plan ; that the purpose is gradually evolving, as the universe develops; then she will use any momentary suggestion of the children as a basis for work. But if (3) God's purpose is a living, growing one which man is helping to embody, the kindergartner will have a definite plan in mind but it will be a principle rather than a design, so flexible that it will allow for variations which would be more valuable for the children at the particular time and place than the detail she had prepared. In the kindergartner's attitude toward good and evil will be found the key to her discipline. If (i) because the body contains a soul, every human being is naturally good, mature ideals will be held up for copy in the belief that this is all that is necessary to bring a child back to rectitude. If, on the other hand, (2) being in a fleshly body means a natural inclination to sin, the evil must be driven out at all costs even by negative, compulsory methods. There may be another view (3) that goodness is a relative term, according to the standards of society, which are constantly changing. If evil is untrained impulse, the teacher will generally notice an offending action by suggesting a more virtuous way to free the energy. Lastly, the view which the kindergartner holds of the nature of unity will be at the basis of her attitude toward the principle of interaction and will determine her choice of topics and method of treatment. If (i) she leans to the ideal side, the adult will give much and the child little. Any subject which Department] THE ART IMPULSE 515 the adult feels of value will be presented, trusting that the child will gain some- thing from its consideration. If (2) emphasis is placed on the practical side, the respective shares will be reversed. Whatever interests the child will be taken up in the same way that a child uses it — for its momentary significance only. If (3) unity means the combining of two equal though unlike elements, both adult and child must have equivalent parts in carrying out the principle of interaction. It will fall to the child's lot to select the points of interest for discussion (these for a five-year-old child will be in his immediate surround- ings), and to the adult to find wherein they can be stamped with the values which will lead toward the acceptance of race judgments. In summing up, if it were possible to mention all the methods included under numeral one (i) under each point, they would be seen to carry out a very consistent philosophy. A totally opposing view, and yet consistent in itself, would be found under two (2); and the middle view under three (3). Very few people are extremists, yet there is a tendency to lean more to one side than the other. Along the middle line lies truth. Emphasis on either the ideal or the practical in the kindergarten program makes it one-sided. The true relation is the union of the two, and the degree to which this relationship is maintained depends upon one factor. That factor is a personality. The usual program states the topic chosen, the idea which the children are to gain from its consideration, and also the particular method and purpose of each part of the day. The real program can never be written, for the per- sonal touch of the kindergartner arouses the controlling ideas and is the most powerful method. DISCUSSION Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, superintendent of Chicago Froebel Association. — It is inter- esting to consider the matter of habit. We hear much about spontaneity and freedom but little about habit. I should like to ask Mr. Barnes if we are harming the child by definitely directing his acts ? Should he evolve his line of action from his own conscious- ness, or should he secure definite direction ? Mr. Barnes. — A child should yield unquestioning obedience to someone before he is a year old. He should receive definite instruction in matters relating to personal habits or social intercourse and should obey without coaxing, begging, or delay, so that gradually these acts will become subconscious, leaving the conscious mind free for more important things. This obedience should, as the child develops, be transferred from the individual to the social group and its laws and then to the divine law. At the same time we must take care not to dictate to a child with reference to religion, art, or any of the higher and unsettled problems of life. THE ART IMPULSE; ITS EARLY FORMS AND RELATION TO MENTAL DEVELOPMENT LILLIAN S. CUSHMAN, INSTRUCTOR IN ART, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL. One is tempted to believe that in the matter of art education surely the final word has been spoken. Yet to every teacher whose work is alive the old 5i6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten fundamental questions are as new, as germane, as if he were the first to ask them. How does art relate itself to the life of the child and what contributions does it make to the sum total of experience ? This query is not to be turned aside. The entire fabric of the course of study — the specific problems — the technical sequence and method are molded in accordance to the answer. To explain my meaning, we must know what kind and how well developed an interest it is which stimulates a child to express himself thru pictorial and decorative art. I am using the term interest in its largest sense. In a grou]) of thirty children, engines, boats, birds, flowers, animals, thirty individual interests may be expressed by their drawings. That the thirty children show a rather common tendency to scribble something denotes a more universal motive power back of the specific engine or bear. It is this impulse which I have in mind. It is evident that if the art work which we organise in the school is to func- tion normally in the lives of the children it must respond in the fullest degree to this genetic motive. Hence, our question — The Art Impulse, its nature and relation to mental development ? Is it play? the mere physical resultant of the contact with suggestive material — the joy of pounding — of sticking fingers into soft clay, of wielding a paint brush ? If so, then the educational attack must be planned thru mate- rials selected with reference to the nature of stimulation and response. Is it utilitarian ? Does the child picture his ideas primarily in order to communi- cate them ? When he makes things is he dominated by the desire to use them ? Why does he decorate them — is it because the decoration will enhance their significance ? Is it because he plays with material or is it that he has an innate feeling for beauty which thus finds expression ? Is this art impulse perchance wholly aesthetic ? If we answer that it is utilitarian, use becomes the point of contact. If it is aesthetic, we have but to give more and more opportunity for the exercise of those impulses which will finally lead to the consciousness of the laws of order and beauty. Doubtless we would all agree that aesthetic development is the educational function of art in the curriculum. Therefore the last plan would appear to represent the direct mode, consequently the economical method of fitting means to end. An art course which is at all points essentially aes- thetic is most attractive. But second thought is a reminder that such a plan represents economy only in case it is built on the real basic motive power. We have seen boys prepare a field for their athletic sports, or execute other projects distinctly their own. In the presence of the overwhelming momentum generated by enthusiastic desire we realize the waste that occurs in the schoolroom. Economy can be gained only by utilizing this energy. Any plan which we adopt, no matter how well organized, sinks to the level of a formal technical drill, attended Department] THE ART IMPULSE 517 by the evils of isolation, unless we make this vital contact. And so our ques- tion is still before us. The answer must be sought outside of the schoolroom in the wider fields of art itself. Not the art of the adult race with the highly specialized interest of a renaissance, but the art of a culture which corresponds most closely with the stage of consciousness of the kindergarten or primary grade. This takes us back to the first scratchings on clay and to the primitive use of the picture and decoration. We need to know how these happened to be and what values they represented, if any, in the aesthetic history of the race. From this primitive art let us ask two questions: (i) The nature of the art impulse; (2) The direction of its development and the influences which have contributed to its growth. You who are familiar with the literature of the subject know that formerly scientists assumed some one motive as the source of all these phenomena. Pictographs, personal adornment, decorative art, were all either motor, utih- tarian, or aesthetic in origin according to the point of view of the writer. More recent methods of scientific investigation have led ethnologists to a different view of the situation. Dr. Kroeber clearly states this change and so I quote: Every explanation of an origin in anthropology is based on three processes of thought which are unobjectionable logically but are contrary to evolutionary principles and the countless body of facts that support these principles. First is the assumption in the word origin that before the beginning of the phenomena explained, itself and its cause were absent; second is the belief that a suddenly arising cause singly produced the phenomenon; and third, is the idea that this cause as suddenly and completely ceased as it had before sprung up and that its product has remained unaffected by other causes unaltered but for wear and tear to the present day. The fundamental error of the common anthropological method of investigating origins is that it isolates phenomena and seeks isolated specific causes for them. In reality ethnic phenomena do not exist separately. They have their being only in culture. Much less can the causative forces of the human mind, the activi- ties or tendencies, be truly isolated. ^ In Dr. Kroeber's exposition of the matter, we have a view of the primitive consciousness in which the motives of later life exist in an embryonic and undifferentiated state. Instead of certain well-developed interests we are led to expect a composite in which are all sorts of individual variations, due to the dominance rather than the isolation of certain ones. It accounts for the fact which impresses the student of primitive art; viz., that in a way there is no such thing. That is to say, he cannot conduct his research as he would if he were studying the art of Greece or of the Renaissance. The decorative art of the Haida or of the Pueblos does not stand out by itself. There is no wide range of material in their culture of which one can say "Here they rested from their labor and said 'Let us rejoice and be glad. Let us make unto ourselves beautiful things just for the joy of the making.' " As their religious ' A. L. Kroeber, The American Anthropologist, Vol. Ill, p. 308: chapter on "Decorative Symbolism of the .Xrapahr." 5l8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten ceremonials are a part of their scheme of self-preservation so their art is insep- arably bound up in those activities which have to do with the life processes. On the ivory handle of the skin scraper, on the bird snare, and the harpoon, on the bead moccasin and the skin par-fleche, on the tepee, the blanket, and robe, on basket and bowl, on the warrior's shield and club, on the wrappings of the dead and at the altar of sacred mysteries we find their art. It is a part of the entire range of primitive culture. Evidently it was not a festal garment to be assumed and discarded at will. The fact of its universality and of its rich content of associated meaning argues that it emanated from the mainsprings of being. To the educator the significance of the discussion of primitive origins lies in the fact that these motives are so rudimentary that even experts have differed concerning their nature. It argues that if he is dealing with an equally ele- mentary mind he will not be justified in assuming a fully developed or even clearly distinct interest. That on the other hand motives will be complex. Does not this correspond to facts ? When I have tried to check up my observations by former theories I could never quite succeed. If I concluded that utility started the machinery of artistic development I found cases where there seemed to be only a play interest. In other instances there was every evidence of its being aesthetic. If I built a course of instruction, however, on the last assumption, the results were too artificial and the children were too passive to indicate its universal dominance. In fact, can you put your finger on any one genetic force which prompts a play activity ? When a group of children laboriously fashion a retreat in wide-spreading branches and become tree-dwellers can you prove that it results from the love of climbing or from the delight in building, or from the enjoy- ment of the song of birds and the lace net- work of sky and green leafage? We know that all these and something more which eludes analysis are a part of that happy playtime, a playtime which is just as real as any experience of later life. To state the conclusion concerning the nature of the art impulse as it exists in primitive consciousness let us say that it is true. It is motor activity, a response to the physical stimulus of material. It is utilitarian. It is aesthetic. There is something of all of these in every primitive art form. The dominant characteristic is determined by individual bias, by the persistence of some one of these interests. The universal fact is that whether in the race or the child these impulses are bound up in those pursuits which are centralizing and social. We come to the second question — The direction of aesthetic development and the influences which have contributed to its growth. This necessitates explanation of the term aesthetic as applied to those qualities which are visual. All of the fine arts have this in common; viz., they interpret to the same Department] THE ART IMPULSE 519 human mind. This mind is so constituted that it seeks organization of the materials with which it deals. Therefore logical arrangement or unity is the basic principle of all art. In those arts which make their appeal through the eye the unity must be visual. No matter how intricate the details, they must relate to each other in such a way as to produce a single visual impression. The visual impression is due to a more or less complicated but unconscious process. As the eye moves from one spot of attraction to another in case there is an orderly relationship of units it follows that a joint movement is established so that it is carried thru the various parts of the decorated area. The degree of resultant pleasure depends upon two things: first, the phy- sical nature of this movement, whether abrupt or smooth, whether direct and simple, or subtle and complex; second, upon the ideas associated with the spots themselves. The laws which govern such arrangements are stated in the highly special- ized terms of philosophy as rhythm, balance, and harmony. The early con- formity to those principles is evidently due to unconscious response to physical or emotional stimuli. This unconscious response has been the starting-point, and control resulting from conformity to principles has been the cHmax. Between these two points art has traced the path of evolution. In primitive culture graphic art has taken the two directions of the pic- tographic record and decoration. In the pictograph naturalistic forms abound, and in instances such as drawings of cattle by Australian bushmen, or the horses and men painted on the tepee of ihe Crow Indians, the accuracy of representation is remarkable. I trust you are all familiar with Mr. FenoUosa's lecture on the *' Structural Basis of Art " as he explains so clearly the reasons why we cannot trace any line of aesthetic growth from these beginnings which possess no other visual interest than that of the more facts of nature. The relation of the various elements of the pictograph is dependent upon the organization of the ideas which are interpreted into them by people who possess common experience. As a rule this unity is not apparent to the eye of others. Decorative art shows two well-defined tendencies: the naturalistic and the geometric. It is pretty generally understood that the naturalistic tendency is associated with those artifacts which belong to ceremonial usage. In these cases the natural object has represented associated values. Therefore its picture becomes a symbol of certain ideas. So among the Hopi, an eagle represented on an object imparts to it the strength and swiftness of the living bird. It is a sort of medicine. A picture of a buffalo or a tuft of feathers upon the raw-hide shield of the plains Indian renders it protective. So either in preserving certain myths or in imparting medicine power to ceremonial objects, all of the emphasis is placed upon the associated ideas. There is every reason for the persistence of the interest in the thing itself to 520 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergartei. the exclusion of attention to the objective result as a matter of mere pleasure. Therefore, as one would suppose, this phase of art has contributed but little to the collection of well ordered decoration. As a rule it lacks the essentials of visual art and is chiefly literary in character. Its contribution has consisted in the enrichment of the naturahstic motives but not in their structural adjustments. It has been an interest which has tended to break down rather than build up the aesthetic qualities of which we are speaking. The Eskimo finds relief from the tedium of the long Arctic night by carving on walrus tusk the creatures of his fancy. Polar bears follow each other in solemn procession along the edge of his pipe stem ; the reindeer and dog sledge, even the great sailing craft of the trader, share in his dream life. These carvings serve no practical end and express merely the joy of expression. While naturahstic, that interest is not unduly emphasized and consequently these are more developed aesthetically than the symbohc picture. The so-called geometric pattern has been used most commonly on articles of daily use as utensils and clothing. Its origins are attributed to the accidents of play with material and to the influence of technic methods. Certain abori- ginal specimens would lead one to imagine that an ecstacy of physical dehght possessed the potter as he scratched with stick or shell upon the plastic surface of the soft clay, that, surprised and pleased with the record of his play, he repeated the process with the intention of again producing the result, and, by degrees, that the undirected movement developed into a controlled effort to attain a definite standard. Other art forms show the working of the principle of expectancy. We find on an ax handle a painted pattern resembling the wrappings of leather thongs and we know that the power of habit had been at work. The eye accustomed to the ax-head tied to the handle seeks something in the place of the discarded string. Brush or knife suppHes the lack and a series of patterns are generated. Other decorative styles are due to such accidental effects as that of the different colored warp and woof in textiles. When I read Haddon's Evolution oj Artl hoped that I had found the key to the situation. It sounded so plausible that conventionaHzed decoration had resulted from the breaking down of the naturalistic symbol, a unit which owed its initial use to some peculiar set of associated values, and thru the process of much copying had degenerated into formal pattern. His sequence of exam- ples from New Guinea was so convincing that my unscientific mind "jumped" at many conclusions. It seemed quite probable that one could establish in the child's mind a logical basis for decoration by beginning at this same point, with a symbol significant to him, and thru interest in the idea to engender an interest in the effect produced by its expression. A more extended study of the question showed that while the process indicated by Haddon occurred in some regions, in others the direction was quite the opposite. The prehistoric pottery of the southwest, for instance, gives every evidence of a geometric origin and there is reason to believe that one can trace an evolution from the formal to the naturalistic. In this case Department! TEE ART IMPULSE 521 one may suppose that the conventional form suggested a certain object, the resemblance became emphasized, certain meanings were read into the design, and by degrees it ended in a naturalistic decoration. Many questions occur in relation to the subject which there is no time to mention. The point of the f)resent discussion is — first, that decoration has sprung from not one but at least three sources; viz., motor stimulation, technic habits, and naturalistic symbols. Moreover, these are correlative rather than isolated. Second, the predominance of certain kinds of stimulation has caused the varying vicissitudes which are characteristic of primitive art. The analysis of these vicissitudes leads to the conclusion that certain influences have tended to break down decorative quaU- ties while others have tended to build up standards of visual beauty. The term standard is so hackneyed that it is a question whether ordinarily any one stops to consider its genealogy. Common educational practice would indicate a presumption that the individual is a passive recipient of influences brought to bear by outside agencies, and that his standards grow by an aggrega- tion of these more or less isolated experiences. Of course, when we stop to consider the matter at all, we know that the individual is the active agent in the building up of his own standards, and that these result from a twofold mental process — abstraction and selection. When I express a preference for the colors, red and green, I have gone through the process of isolating or defining certain sensations as red, green, yellow, blue, etc. All such experiences taken together make up my idea of color. If certain of these are more agreeable than others they become the criterion. If experience is enlarged by recognition of neu- tralized hues my standard must undergo revision. If it persists it is the result of a new judgment, and has survived the ordeal of wider experience. If it is modified it is due to the enrichment of the original idea. If to bright and neutral color I add the abstraction of color combination, again my standard will undergo modification. Just as psychology no longer gives us an idea which is static, but something which is re-enacted constantly by the process of abstraction, so the standard is also a continuous act of selection. Its modifi- cations are due to the combination of new experience with that which is already familiar. I recently studied the Field Museum collection of pottery from prehistoric ruins of the Southwest. Among specimens from the same ruin the decoration ranged from crude uncontrolled markings to an application of pattern which might have done credit to a modern craftsman. The difficulties of fitting the decoration to a scheme of repetition on the curving form of a vase were most ingeniously overcome. When his pattern came out unevenly the potter modi- fied a portion of the motive and fitted it into the left-over space in a way that made detection difficult. Here there was no doubt but that attention had been centered upon the decorative problem of spacing. This specialized interest must have resulted from a process of selection. We can imagine that as the craftsman wrought at his task, no matter what his chief aim might be, the technical difficulties would serve to divert his mind 522 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten to the mere effectiveness of the result. After the task was completed he would be apt to consider it somewhat critically. Certain effects would please him more than others. He would also compare his own with his neighbor's work, and in such critical review would build up a notion of what he would produce when he made another. In the course of events those effects which seemed desirable would persist and become more emphasized, while the incentive which originated the pattern would probably be entirely forgotten. As the primitive mind seems to tend to repeat itself this process of selection must have been very slow. New ideas and variations were probably due to accidents and to the restrictions and exigencies of material rather than to direct invention. The various materials used in primitive culture, clay, textiles, wood, metal, have furnished certain common aesthetic values, but each has also made a contribution which the others did not afford. Repetition of any single unit as a line, dot, etc., is largely motor. Its many physical forms, idle drumming with fingers and feet, the dance, repeti- tion of rhyming sounds, all coexist with its graphic expression. It is the most naive manifestation of the rhythmic impulse and must have been about the first occurrence of visual order. The plastic quahty of clay afforded the best opportunity for the free play of this motor activity and was invaluable, there- fore, as a starting-point in the aesthetic development of the race. The same quality, however, admitted the indulgence in unorganized and barbaric realism. Not so with textiles. No matter how crude the realistic unit, it was neces- sarily limited by the threads of warp and woof which caused it to assume a certain relationship to the entire fabric. Modifications due to translating curves into straight lines also ensued. The necessity of counting threads led to some scheme of repetition and the resultant was not so much a picture of a thing as a well-ordered pattern built on the lines of a natural object. We see that these woven patterns exerted a reflex influence on other crafts and became perhaps the important factor in building up a notion of formal and geometric decoration. The difficulties of exact copying in wood and metal have tended to the production of a series of generalized shapes and consequently have served to eliminate trivialities of outline. Structurally, clay, metal, and wood represent a progression in the evolution of qualities which reach their climax in the development of construction that is architectonic. When this high-water mark of aesthetic consciousness is reached by the race, or an individual, we may assume that it has passed the chrysalis stage and has entered upon a more complete exercise of its manifold social functions. To summarize the conclusions, we state, as our thesis, that art must function in the life of the child as it has in the race. That the ultimate purpose of such functioning is aesthetic development. The consciousness of the child is complex and undifferentiated, and among equally undeveloped races art was bound up in the central social activities resulting from a complexity of motives. Department] DRAWING IN THE KINDERGARTEN 523 That aesthetic development began in the accidental response to this complex stimulus and progressed to the point of conscious conformity to principles. That the principle of the survival of the fittest and the restraining and modify- ing influences of material served to develop the standards of visual order. To apply this to our educational problem we would say that if we gain this normal functioning in the life of the child, the things which he makes, the decorative and pictorial activities must belong to him. They must emanate from his own center of interest. They must respond to the same rather com- plex stimulation. That is, they must give him a chance to scribble because he does like to make marks. They must give him a chance to fit out a play house because he will clothe it with reality. They must give him a chance to make things just because they are pretty. For this child of a modern hybrid civilization will be stirred not by some one but by each and all of these impulses. We are not presenting any culture-epoch theory. We do not advocate the necessity of prolonging or encouraging the state of savagery. Time is too short for such indulgence, and so, having determined the starting-point, it certainly is the duty of the educator to take the shortest road to complete control. This necessitates the most economical organization of those influ- ences which have developed social standards — opportunities for first-hand experiments, and manipulation of real and typical materials, as clay, textiles, and wood. The more specialized interest in the aesthetic elements of graphic expres- sion will emerge slowly. We shall not expect to predict with any certainty the exact time when differentiation will be complete. Signs of the interest multiply more rapidly after the tenth year, yet the freshman high-school boy says "What is the use ?" May I say in closing that it is my hope that this hasty sketch of so large a subject may serve to indicate a valuable field of study ? It is a study which would make teachers more sensitive to the signs of individual bias. It would give standards for a more accurate valuation of children's work. It would make it obvious that a course of art instruction should be elastic enough to admit of adjustments. That a deeper insight into the artistic experiences of any people would tend to do away with the evils of deadening systems I am confident. DRAWING IN THE KINDERGARTEN MRS. ALICE H. PUTNAM, SUPERINTENDENT OF CHICAGO FROEBEL ASSOCIATION Before considering the child's kindergarten drawing, I would like to speak for a few moments of that which has preceded the kindergarten stage, and also we should consider that which is to follow, for the isolation of the work of any one period is likely to result in a misinterpretation of it. In a very little child's first delight in marking on any surface — ^paper, board, damp sand or clay — the fact that he has power to change the appearance 524 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten of it — that he is doing something, appears a sufficient end in itself. But soon thru his movements, indefinite tho they are, there comes a something which has a meaning for him, and he turns to mother — or the bystander — for the sympathy and appreciation of his effort. It is thru her response that his ''muscle-minded scribbles" come to have a clearer meaning for himself. Dr. Dewey has given this thot in his Pedagogical Creed when he says: "It is thru the mother's response made to the child's instructive babblings, that the child comes to know what those babblings mean. They are trans- formed by the mother into articulate language, and thus the child is intro- duced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are summed up in language." All thru Froebel's Mother-Play Book runs the same idea; it pervades every activity which interests the child, and it is not too much to say that thru a similar response we find one of the means by which interest in the graphic arts is fostered. In passing to the thought of drawing in the kindergarten, I again quote Dr. Dewey: "Every mode of expression, no matter how mechanical, no matter how fantastic, no matter how impressionistic, has the two sides of idea and technique." Long, long before a child has any notion of technique, he revels in the use of the pencil to express an idea. At first it is vague, but it gains strength thru the act of giving form to it. Each object is isolated; but little by little they begin to appear in relation to each other — and a story, an organized thought, runs thru it all — and lo ! he has "an illustrated drawing." Mr. Bailey says of this type of drawing that "it opens the realm of pictorial art to the young child more directly than any other type of drawing yet discovered." It is closely allied to the primitive picture-writing, in that it is mainly used to give information concerning experiences w^hich have interested the child, and the pleasure he gets from it is not exactly aesthetic pleasure. I well remember that when the drawing of my own children seemed to them complete, they were generally inclosed by a frame — and this frame was highly decorated with marvelous scallops around the edge, numerous dots within the inclosing bands, etc. — and here, I think was the first sign of a desire for beauty in their produc- tions— something to please the eye, as well as the mind. A child will often take a stick and make holes at regular distances in damp sand or soft clay; when that happens, I would suggest to him that he lay the stick lengthwise above and below the holes — see if it doesn't look prettier. I cannot agree with many of my co-workers who think that a child doesn't care for symmetrical arrangements. Again and again a mere toddling baby will push the chairs back against the wall and, if one is out of line, will straighten it and express delight. True it is mainly the activity which is interesting — but the fact of arrangement is there, and we can nourish it by giving things and conditions for this instinct to work on, or let it starve itself out. It is just here that the sticks and twigs of the kindergarten are so suggestive that I think their use should be encouraged. When the child is in this stage or state is the time for Department) DRAWING IN IB E KINDERGARTEN . 525 many good outline pictures. Stencils too, should be used more in the kinder- garten than I think they are commonly used. The little old-fashioned trans- parent slate was always a delightful toy in my family, and I have used it not a little in the kindergarten. The child in tracing the pictures gets the feeling of the movement and all unconsciously the direction and relation of lines comes as a fact — as a part of the wholeness of the picture. The main good of this, at this stage, is the way it reacts on the child's imagery, but as he goes on he finds a bit of technique a help. What to draw is not now the only question, but how to draw is beginning to be of some concern to him. I used to use rightly proportioned sticks and tell the children how to make the skeleton figure of a boy — I could never succeed with animals, alas ! and then they would change the attitude themselves — make the fellow run, kneel, sit down, etc. It was always great fun, as much to me as to the kindergarten children. Later when these were wanted for the board, the children would measure the sticks, and the lines would appear in very good proportion. The children came in time to want to make theii; drawings mean something to other folks as well as themselves. While they have much time for evolving their pictures and designs from the depths of their own consciousness, it is good to direct their attention to what others have done. I'm not one bit afraid even to dictate an occasional good design now and then and let it go into their scrapbook — keeping one of these for their original designs, one for those they find elsewhere. I cannot believe Froebel's drawing is good for children at this stage, tho I believe it has a place in the plan later on. Just as a good reading teacher would know when and where she might give a child a real drill in phonics, apart from the reading in which the child gets and gives thought, so I believe a child likes a bit of technique when the right time comes. I do not think life is long enough, however, to go thru this network drawing as drawing — but for mathematics. I believe there is a great deal that can be gotten from it, but not for the kindergarten stage. And now, what of the period after the kindergarten — how can we prepare the children for that ? Mr. Bailey's definition of drawing as given in the School Arts Book for June is very serious, and ought to be considered. He says it is the "putting down with the pencil point the thoughtful, sincere, truthful facts of form." We may not be altogether satisfied with the statement, but it is surely to be considered most carefully. But has the kindergarten every- thing to do with or for such a standard ? If so, what is our relation to it ? "Thought," "sincerity," "truth," are not the product of spontaneous genera- tion, any more than any material thing — but the germs of these living principles may develop if we provide a right "culture medium" — as the bacteriologist would call it. This the kindergarten may furnish. Thru the training of the senses, "the doors," as Froebel calls them, "which swing two ways, outward to nature, inward to the soul," the child begins his thinking. In all of his handwork this thought is to be wrought out in all sincerity 5^6 NA210NAL EDVCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergartt-n and truth. This is to be the daily work of the little child. That which comes to him thru the senses is not even with us in the kindergarten, to. stop with mere present delight, but is to be used for larger and larger ends — ^growing gradually into a purer, wiser understanding of the meaning and mission of beauty. One thing more : There has been a great deal of work done in the kinder- garten under the banner of spontaneity and freedom which is positively, hide- ously ugly. Crude, a child's work may be — should be — but I do not believe it need be ugly. I do not believe even a child should continually violate the canons of art — if that happens, it is because either the conditions or the medium of expression or the general influence of the teacher have not worked together — but as has been well said: "The child's work at every step should help him to the best utterance of himself, to sincerity, genuineness, unconsciousness, and power." THE USE AND ABUSE OF DESIGN MAE B. HIGGONS, KINDERGARTNER, PUBLIC SCHOOL NO. 68, NEW YORK CITY In discussing the use and abuse of design in the kindergarten, it may be well to note that there are two phases of the subject, so distinct as to be quite separate. First, there are those productions called, in the parlance of the kinder- garten, beauty-forms or forms of symmetry. These are usually made with the blocks, tablets, rings, and parquetry papers, or, less frequently nowadays, with the Froebel system of paper-cutting. This is what the word design means to many kindergartners. To others, however, the word has a far different meaning. It means that form of artistic expression which is known as design by an artist or an art-teacher; it means the arrangement of units under the laws of repetition, balance, and harmony; it means the production of borders, ornaments, and sketches calculated to decorate definite objects; it means the appreciation of the beautiful, begun in the kindergarten and carried on thruout life. The first use of the term design is peculiar to the kindergarten, the second is familiar in all grades of the school and indeed, in life in general. The chief fault with the formal design of the kindergarten is that Froebel's tendency toward over-emphasis of geometry has been followed, while his playful spirit has been forgotten by many. Froebel gave as one of the uses of the gifts the production of symmetrical figures which he called beauty-forms. We find, however, that in his descrip- tion these beauty-forms are translated in terms of life-forms, for he says of a figure, ''It appears to us something, but we do not know what is formed by it; we call it a picture, and it will look now like a flower, now like a star." Also later, in describing the different moves in a sequence, he speaks in terms of life-activity saying, "Come child! we will dance the cubes," and he gives little rhymes for the child to sing for the dancing. Surely this playful chan- ging of shapes is very different from the dictation of sequences of symmetrical forms which one sees in many modern kindergartens. Contrast the. usual Dei>artnientJ THE USE AND ABUSE^OE DESIGN 527 method of presenting forms of symmetry with what Froebel says of this kind of work. He says, ''How shall these representations of forms of beauty be carried on with the children ? In the same way as mothers play with their children, of their own accord and guided by motherly love. Some particular object which has a symmetric form has been represented by the mother or the child or by both together. Thru its symmetry it captivates for an in- stant the child's attention. The watchful mother perceives the fascination and seeks to heighten and retain it through words spoken or sung." Notice the life-names in the rhymes he gives: This is a very pretty play All our blocks in a wreath to lay. Now all our blocks to the middle go And clearly a beautiful star they show. When the flowers and circles meet Then we look like flowers sweet. It is difficult to see how a kindergartner, who tries to follow Froebel to the letter, can read these words and still continue to dictate to children sequences of forms which have no meaning whatever to the child. What is a sequence to the adult mind may not be to the child's mind because he does not see the underlying philosophy. Recently, as a matter of observation and experiment, I dictated a long series of forms with blocks. The children obediently made form after form with little apparent joy. Finally, I worked into a more divergent figure which I thought too scattered to be seen as a whole by the children. I was surprised at the spontaneous burst of admiration with which it was greeted. "Ah! isn't that pretty ?" "That's pretty," and "It's a star," came in a chorus from children who had been almost silent up to that point. To my mind, this was an indication that each form is a separate thing to the child to be approved or not on its own individual merits, not as part of a larger whole. The use of a sequence may be legitimate as a means to an end but it is certainly not an end in itself. Easy forms must precede the more difficult ones but each one must have a meaning of its own. I do not believe that sequence work can be made to any extent the outcome of the child's own thought, and I do believe that Froebel was right when he said, "All that does not grow out of one's own inner being, all that is not one's own original feeling or thought, or at least awakens that, oppresses and defaces the individuahty of man instead of calling it forth." I believe that, to be educative, design must become the working out of a problem. The child must see the need for it and must think out the best way to fill that need. To be sure, an able teacher can make almost any work educative by the way in which she presents it, but, by the same power, she can make a thing which is inherently 'interesting that much more educative. What is true of method is true also jof materials. Why should we confine ourselves to blocks, tablets, rings, and parquetry papers, when there are so 28 NATIONAL ED U CAT ION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten many leaves, grasses, shells, nuts, etc., that might serve the same purpose and that appeal so strongly to the child? Primary education has long since dis- carded the tyji^e forms for drawing and other work and has taken nature material instead. The kindergarten would only be carrying out FoebePs suggestion if it did the same. Perhaps by studying primary methods the kindergartner might get a better perspective of the child's life, and so help him realize his highest possibilities in each stage of his development. Turning now to the other phase of the topic: What are the reasons for teaching art in the kindergarten ? To answer this question we must first answer the larger question: ''Why do we teach anything ? What is the aim of education ?" Looking at the many and varied answers to this question, we find that right living and adjustment to environment, natural, human and spiritual, is the general ideal sought. If this is the aim of education, it must also be of every branch of education. We must teach art not because it may train a few possible artists but because it affords an experience which will broaden life. If we look at education from the cultural standpoint, we find that the study of artistic expression gives the aesthetic and artistic development which increases a hundred fold the richness of life through the power of appreciation of the beautiful. If we look at it from the utilitarian standpoint, we find that the study of artistic expression gives the means for gaining control of the mental image and trains the imagination. Imagination is at the foundation of all human activity. The power of imagining things as they are and as they would be in different combinations lies at the very root of production and invention, and makes progress possible. Imagination creates the sympathy which governs our relation to those around us. I have heard it said that lack of the picture-making faculty is responsible for most ot the criminals of the world; that a person who could imagine beforehand all the effects of an act would avoid crime. If the study of art will train the imagination and help men to live better lives, it is well worth while. Design is a form of art which may be systematically studied by even a young child. It inculcates a love of order which is the basis of righteousness. Denman Ross says there is more ethical value in manual training than in the study of a dozen sciences. For the child of kindergarten age the first of the laws of design is the all- important one. Balance and harmony are too subtle to appeal to him, but repe- tition or rhythm is the response to a native instinct. Life itself is essentially rhythmical. Every bodily and every mental process shows this. Respiration, heart-beat, and the processes of waste and repair are the constant accompani- ment of life and if their rhythm be disturbed, pain is the result. Day and night with their alternation of activity and rest have a definite influence over the mind. We might multiply examples by showing how the patter of the rain- drops, the ceaseless ebb and flow of the ocean, the growth and decay of plant life, the change of season, and many other processes of nature are a part of life and have affected man thruout the ages. I ix^partmentl THE USE AND ABUSE OF DESIGN 529 It is perfectly natural that children should find satisfaction in rhythmical activities and forms. Design is rhythm applied to the picturing activity. Groos in his Play of Man states that the pleasure which is derived from form is primordial and universal, and he goes on to trace the development of design in the earliest forms of art. In so far as the Recapitulation Theory is applicable, we may gain some knowledge of the child's instinctive attitude from the study of primitive life. In the early development of the arts, man decorated his person, his pottery, and his baskets with representations of the activities of nature. A series of vertical lines represented the fall of rain, a broken line stood for lightning. These show simple repetition tho the latter begins to have in it the elements of contrast and alternation shown again in the compound curve for waves, and the alternation of sun and star indicating day and night. As the race progressed there came to be a fuller appreciation of design and mere repetition was supplemented by symmetrical and bisym- metrical forms arranged with reference to balance and harmony and studied as to proportion, relation to background, and appropriateness to the subject decorated. In the kindergarten, we naturally begin with simple repetitions and alter- nations which the child happens upon in his play. In drawing, painting, and other occupations, the repetition of a unit may be the result of simple efforts of control. We may wish to give the child an opportunity to experience the activity of using a brush and he may just daub, daub, daub, and if by chance, on holding it off, he discovers a system of arrangement, he will try to reproduce it or will vary it for the satisfaction of this instinct. Simple arrangements in stringing or pasting have a wonderful charm for the child. Even grown people find a certain fascination in stringing beads and similar activities. After such work involving only repetition more purposeful design may be introduced and the child may compare different pieces of work and learn that beauty depends upon spacing, balance, and tone as well as upon repetition and alternation. Every design which a child makes should have some excuse for being; that is, it should be made to suit some definite purpose. It must not be a border or ornament such as we use on objects but it must actually decorate the object itself. The crafts are the natural basis for design. Pottery, basketry- weaving, bookbinding, and wood- and metal-working supply the productions which call for decoration and in a school where these industries are taught, most of the design work would originate in this way. But what about schools where there are no facilities for teaching these crafts ? Must design be imposed upon the children according to the teacher's ideas ? By no means ! Most of the failures in the teaching of design result from this" very fault. The object to be decorated and the need for the design do not grow out of the life of the children and consequently interest is lacking. Subject-matter and material should be in a large degree the outgrowth of the environment and should differ in different localities. For instance, with children whose homes and 530 NATIONAL EDUCA2UON ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten schoolroom were destitute of curtains, we would not attempt to make a border for a curtain. Similarly, we would not lead children who had never seen a rabbit to use this form in decoration. Of course, in both of these cases the teacher might provide the conditions to make the lesson of vital interest. If a window or a closet needs a curtain, nothing could be a better excuse for a study of design than the making and decorating of siich a curtain; and if a rabbit visit the kindergarten or the children be taken to see one, it would be very natural to use that as a unit of design. Lacking these incentives, however, there are always available articles made of clay, wall-paper, carpets, and curtains for the doll's house, borders for the blackboard, book-covers, blotters, calendar-cards, wall-pockets, picture frames, valentines. May-baskets and boxes, and other construction work. When the object to be decorated has been chosen, the kind of a design to be used becomes the problem. Dr. Haney says, "A design which is to be applied must primarily consider both the purpose of its application and the nature of the form it is to decorate. The first question must aways be : Is the problem a proper one? Should this form be decorated; and if it should, what shall be the nature of the decoration ?" These questions should be answered by the children after sufficient study of good examples. Classic decoration, as well as artistic designs found in the environment, should be presented in order to give the children a wide range of visual material to influence them in the selection of designs for their work. Friezes for the room, made by the combined efforts of the class, are very good. For these, the units should be objects of interest, appropriate to the line of thought for the season or the day. More or less natural outlines should be used, as conventionalizations come at a later period. At Thanksgiving a frieze may be made by alternating corn-stalks and pumpkins on a back- ground of soft brown. At Christmas the units may be a Christmas tree and a Santa Claus cut from crepe-paper decorations. In March a windmill and a boat have been used effectively. At Easter a chicken and an egg may be used and later in the spring, flowers or animals, birds or insects. I leave it to you to decide which of the two phases of design is more educa- tive and which you will use. At the same time, I would remind each one that we are not true disciples of Froebel unless we present to the children that which serves to awaken self-activity in the broadest sense. Whatever the form of the work it must be self-expression. What they do is far more impor- tant than what they make. SUMMARY There are two distinct phases of design: (i) making symmetrical figures, borders, etc., with the traditional kindergarten material; (2) decorating definite objects with designs studied from the standpoint of art. The first form of design was described by Froebel, but it seems that his spirit has not been imitated by those who use forms of symmetry in uninterest- I)ei>artmentl MOTIVE AND METHOD IN PRIMARY ART WORK 531 ing sequences. These are not educative when given in the usual way. Chil- dren do not see sequences as adults do because they cannot understand the underlying philosophy. The second phase of design may be made the outgrowth of the children's own experiences and, therefore, allows great opportunity for development. We teach art, as we teach all branches, to broaden the children's experience and help them to live. Art trains the imagination — imagination is the basis of all human activity. Design should teach the laws of repetition, balance, and harmony. Repeti- tion is natural to the youngest children because rhythm is fundamental to life. Balance and harmony can be taught in the grades better than in the kinder- garten. The crafts are the natural initiative for design. Where these are not taught objects made by the children should be decorated or friezes and borders should be made for the room, curtains, etc. Whatever the form of the work, it must be self-expression. It is the process, not the product, that counts. MOTIVE AND METHOD IN PRIMARY ART WORK BEATRICE WELLER, INSTITUTE INSTRUCTOR AND SUPERVISOR, NEW YORK, N. Y. The object of all our thought is the child. In its broadest interpretation, the aim of our educational system today is to develop the head, the heart, and the hand — that trinity of the individual — symmetrically, giv^ing him a better appreciation of right living and happiness, and a knowledge of how to get the greatest measure of enjoyment out of life in this beautiful world of ours. We want to make the child intrusted to our care self-helpful, and possessing power of initiative, preparing him for his life's work, giving him the ability to appreciate, the power to do, intensifying high ideals, and increasing his effici- ency so that he shall be of the greatest service to society. Ideals in education are rapidly changing. In the old idea individualism was an unknown quantity. The new scientific spirit has completely revolu- tionized many departments of our education, and is rapidly invading others. Character building is the first aim in the new education, and in our endeavor to erect a perfect structure, we seek to cultivate a love of the beautiful in music, literature, art, and nature. This love of the beautiful and for it, as an abiding element is, perhaps, second only to religion, as a protection against gross living. The school should be a part of life, not merely a preparation for life. The conditions of our environment have undergone such rapid changes that our process of reaching the ideal in education must undergo radical changes also. Longer school hours, different home and neighborhood environments and occupations demand a change in curriculum, if we wish to give a child the same insight, skill, and independenee which marked our men of action in the past. We must also teach them the doctrine of responsibility as well as give them the power to do. 532 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten One of the greatest civic needs today is training for better citizenship and truer patriotism if we hope to maintain the original standard of a republic. The school should be the most potent influence for good, clean, honest, conscientious, interested citizenship. Ruskin sounded the keynote of warn- ing in these words: We are always, in these days, endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor, we want one man to be always thinking and the other to be always working, and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative; whereas the working man ought often to be think- ing, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. The greatest institution in the world today is still the home, despite what some skeptics say and write regarding the lack of home influences in our congested districts like those of New York City. The influence of the home is felt the earliest, the longest, and the strongest. A most important thing in education, then, such being the case, is any subject which will enable the caretaker to make that home more attractive. Beauty is always uplifting. We hear a great deal today about being in harmony with our surroundings, we admire a well-balanced individual, and we all appreciate the rhythm of motion. These three things, balance, rhythm, and harmony, are the qualities which everything must possess to be beautiful. They are the foundations of the artistic and this foundation is to be laid in drawing ( ourses of our schools. I. There are but four ways of giving our thoughts to others : language, written or spoken, number, music, and drawing. Where adults express themselves almost wholly by spoken or written words, the child, as the savages, attempts to express himself by pictures as well. With the child this expression by picture drawing is a real pleasure, a form of play. Froebel first called our attention to the fact that play was a great factor in the child's development. The desire for self-expression in music and art is instinctive. In the early years of a child's life he finds it necessary to acquire his knowledge by sight perhaps, more than hearing, and since his vocabulary is Hmited he turns to drawing, appealing to the sight of others as the easiest means of self-expression. II. In the second place we all realize that ''Knowing is not a complete process until it terminates in the act of doing." The ideomotor activity — the co-operating of a thought with its muscular expressing — is one of the sore needs of the present-day education. It is to fill this need for the right directing of motor activity and to train the child to a greater degree of an interest in and knowledge of his surroundings, based upon an instinctive desire, that drawing is recognized as an essential and not as a fad in our public schools. The feehng that drawing is still a fad and will eventually be relegated to become a companion with other fads, still exists in certain localities, probably because it was not included in the ancient venerable, and, so far as they went, eminently essential three R's, tho its educational value is almost universally conceded. It is connected with the arts and trades much more closely than Department) MOTIVE AND METHOD IN PRIMARY ART WORK 533 is generally recognized. There is hardly a profession in which it is not used directly or indirectly, either in the preparation for or in the profession itself. Doctors, manufacturers, architects, constructors, engineers of all kinds, mer- chants, journalists, all must plan out their ideas on paper first. If this fact were universally recognized the subject would receive a wonder- ful impetus and parents would demand and insist that a thoro course should be taught their children. All opposition to the school art movement would disappear and it would be but a few years comparatively before its beneficial results would everywhere be felt. As a vehicle of expression 'tis most potent. It gives the individual another avenue, and a very direct and concise one, by which he may give his thoughts and emotions to the outside world. Dickens — that monarch in the art of word pictures — takes three pages of closely printed matter to tell how a cartwheel came off. A bright boy can tell the same thing on one sheet of paper, with a dozen strokes of the pencil, and be as well or better understood. The picture is a language common to all classes of society and to all nationalities. In the dark ages, they used this means of expression to educate the mass of the people in religious belief. At the present day, another style of picture, the cartoon, is used to call attention to some vital issue of national or local importance. We have noticed that the first barrier to the successful presentation of drawing is the idea that drawing is a fad. The second great barrier is lack of preparation and knowledge of the subject on the part of the grade teacher. In many cases, she received no early training in drawing, and during her special preparation, gave so short a time to this branch that she failed to get any knowl- edge of the science of it. The word talent is one that is very much overworked. It is more or less indefinite in its meaning, but all the people who have done things in this world of ours are supposed to possess it in large quantities. Thomas Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park, was once asked what he considered the secret of his genius. ''Genius, my friend," repHed the great inventor, '*is one-tenth inspiration and nine-tenths perspiration." ''I cannot draw; I have no talent," is a common cry of the grade teacher. ''I don't think my child can draw ; he has no gift for it," is the comment often made by the uninformed parent. And it is very diflacult to convince a person with such an idea that it does not require talent to learn to draw, that anyone can learn the principles which underlie all art work, just as easily as he can master the principles of mathematics. All he needs is the willingness to try. Drawing is a science and should be taught as such. It consists of principles and causal relations, all of which may be taught and learned as easily as the principles of mathematics. The subject comes under three heads: First, representation, the reproducing on paper of our surroundings; second, construction, the art of making; and third, design, the art of decoration. The principles of the first are four in number — ^position, proportion, direction, and perspective. Each of these in turn have subdivisions. Position teaches the relation of one object to another object, as placing one tree at the right of another. Proportion teaches the 534 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten relative size of one object to another, or of one part as to another part, as the comparative size of the windows to the side of the house, or the relation of the height to the width of an object. Direction teaches what hnes are used to represent certain surfaces, as a road winding up a hillside, and perspective teaches one to reproduce the third dimension, thickness, on a flat surface — as looking down a village street. All this can be taught or learned as easily as the rule of three, and it really forms a very much more interesting lesson. A little child has absolute faith in his power to do, and perfect willingness to try to draw anything proposed, so long as the object or scene is one which appeals to his imagination. He is not abashed if the result does not rival a masterpiece in its beauty. His Indians, soldiers, autos, and trains are to him of the greatest interest because that is the way his imagination pictures them to him, and he considers one stupid when he fails to recognize that the lot of lines he tenders for inspection is his favorite horse or some much-loved member of the family. There is not the timidity and fear to overcome, which prove such a stum- bling block in the path of the older ones, when they first try to reproduce some- thing on paper. So far as is within her power, let the teacher nurture that unabashed willingness, encouraging each effort, praising the good parts, for there is always something good when the effort has been there; suggesting another look to make the mental image more vivid and striving to keep off the evil day when the child shall awaken in self -consciousness to defects, and lose the desire for that form of self-expression. Energy indirected has a tendency toward the destructive side. Energy when directed toward constructive and creative work will prove a blessing to the individual and his associates, and it is our business as teachers to direct that energy so that it will prove a blessing. For there is just so much vital force which seeks an outlet and, being used in the right direction, the destructive tendencies will disappear because of disuse. No great desires have ever been givenwith the thought that they be leftfallow. They were given by the Giver of all, for some specific purpose. God had some definite design when he gave the love of picture-making to the little child. A mother once gave this thought — *' A thing that the child loves to do so well must have some definite bearing upon its culture and judgment." Taught in a practical manner as a science, drawing can be mastered by everyone. It develops the aesthetic qualities in our natures and makes us more keenly alive to the beauties of our surroundings. It is another vehicle of expression. It lays the foundation for many of the professions which the child may wish to enter in later life. Of all the reasons why drawing should be taught to children, however, I am inclined to put into most prominence this one, the child loves the work. To reproduce all the things he loves gives him the keenest interest as well as a delightful channel whereby he may use his mind and at the same time give play to his desire for muscular activity. DepartmentI MOTIVE AND METHOD IN PRIMARY ART WORK 535 The result of careful training in this branch is '* self-reliance, honesty, accuracy, perseverance; it invests dull subjects with new life, develops whole- some respect for labor, and the laboring classes; it keeps the boys longer in school; it trains the mind to think, the eye to see, the hand to do, and it gives systematic drill to the child's motor activities whereby he gains complete control of his powers." DISCUSSION Elizabeth Harrison, Chicago Kindergarten College. — It is interesting to note that the authorities on art education in their threefold classification of "representative," "con- structive," and "ascetic" training agree with the kindergarten division of handwork into "life-form," "forms of knowledge," and "forms of beauty." We are urged so much nowadays to connect all school activities with life that some kindergartners have dropped all work with forms of symmetry or "beauty-forms," forgetting, it seems to me, that a love of beauty ought to be a part of all lives. For deep down in every heart is a hunger for it, and a love of it means much to any life. The danger that today threatens the kinder- garten is that it may be turned into a preliminary training-post for utilitarian purposes, and all poetry and beauty be denied the young soul. We talk of the enormous importance of training for social service. Has not the life that loves and knows how to create beauty an added power for social service ? Therefore let us continue to give to young children experiences in creating "repetition, balance, and harmony" in a simple childish way, as well as experiences in creating utilitarian objects. A second point which interested me was the strong plea made for bringing the child into contact with art beyond his own simple efforts. If pure air invigorates his physical body and noble conduct inspires him with higher ideals, surely artistic surroundings must feed his love of beauty and harmony. And all that tends toward development of beauty and harmony rather than ugliness and discord helps to elevate life and advance it toward its spiritual goal, W. N. Hailmann, Interlaken School, La Porte, Ind., was called upon to say a few words. He approved the general tendency of the papers, insofar as they emphasized the pre-eminent importance of self-expression on the children's part as contrasted with the logical requirements of the occupation. He expressed great reverence for the "divine crudeness" of the children's work and deplored the still persistent efi"orts of teachers to suppress the latent possibilities of which it gave evidence, by precocious forcing of the teachers' view upon the child. In discussing certain fundamental principles on which the solution of the problems involved rests, he would substitute for the conventional trinity of head, heart, and hand, what he called the "quinity" of the exploring hand, the interpreting head, the appreciating and desiring heart, the planning or directing head, and the achieving hand. In this quinity he assigned to play a place in its first half; to drawing and art, in the second half. He warned the kindergarten against infringing in its educational work too extensively upon the province of the primary or elementary school. In the development of the indi- viduality that comes to the family, he would assign to the kindergarten predominantly the task of socializing this individuality and to spare it the pressure of the conventionalizing elementary school. In conclusion he referred to a maxim of Goethe's as a key of the situation in the growth of the child's purposes or needs which, he held, the kindergarten, would do well to adopt and which he quoted as demanding that in his development the child should or does pass "from the useful, thru the true, to the beautiful." George W. Eggers, head of Department of Graphic Arts, Normal School, Chicago. ' — It seems futile for a mere art teacher to attempt to add anything to what our speakers of 536 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten the morning, with their richness of experience with the tiniest of children — the real artists — have so beautifully said. There is one impression, which above all others, I always carry away from a gathering where many kindergartners are present, and of which I have often desired to speak to them. It is that sense of repose — that sense of having in some way solved the problems of life that vex the rest of us, and of having achieved thereby a sort of poise or spirit of quiet, a mood which even communicates itself to the fortunate Philistines who now and then find them- selves within the kindergarten camp. It is the kindergartner who has brought the more reposeful, more wholesome spirit into education, and we cannot help feeling that in imparting it to the children under her care she has cultivated in herself a greater abundance of the same. Two or three years ago I heard Dr. Hillis define art as "the bodying forth of an inward soundness." This definition, quaint as it may seem at first, will bear deep analysis. To produce great art, individuals, as well as nations, must possess within themselves first of all this "inward soundness." I beUeve that the atmosphere or spirit which we feel, whether we visit the kinder- garten class or the gathering of kindergarten teachers, this wholesome outlook on the garden of life, which I have mentioned before, I believe this to be the manifestation of that "inward soundness," and further I believe that if the vital and characterizing ideals of the kindergarten were to be carried up even more freely than they now are thru the grades, and spread out into our grown-up world, and into the life of the nation itself, we would need feel no concern for the future of that national art of which art teachers dream — for it would be as natural a reality as the blossoming of the flower in its season upon the plant — the resistless expression of the nation's inward soundness. CONSERVATIVE AND PROGRESSIVE PHASES OF KINDERGARTEN EDUCATION PATTY S. HILL, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. [Outline] 1. The kindergarten represents a body of teachers who are studying, progressing, and growing. Kindergartners are well represented in universities and university extension courses, studying philosophy, psychology, child-study, nature-study, art, primary methods, etc. 2. The kindergarten is conscious of its own deficiencies, hence the great desire to study, modify, and reconstruct. 3. Criticism of the kindergarten is coming from kindergartners themselves, as well as from those outside the ranks. 4. Division into parties is a credit rather than otherwise. This is the wholesome • evidence of differences of opinion necessary to growth and progress. The differences of opinion in the kindergarten are no more marked than in any other department of education, as, for example, the differences in attitude toward the three R's in elementary education. The same differences in point of view are to be found among students of art, literature, philosophy, psychology, theology, etc. 5. Main causes for the division into parties, found in kindergarten circles, are differ- ences in temperament, in training, in philosophy, in psychology. 6. Needs for future development of the kindergarten: (a) Kindergarten training schools to affiliate with normal schools and universities in the preparation of their teachers; (b) The need of supervisors of both kindergarten and primary schools who have been prepared in both kindergarten and primary education; (c) Superintendents and principals of schools who have given the same respectful study to Froebel and the kindergarten that they have given to Herbart and the problems of the elementary school. L Departnieui] KINDERGARTEN AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 537 THE CO-ORDINATION OF THE KINDERGARTEN AND THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Mrs. Alice H. Putnam, superintendent of Chicago Froebel Association.— After declaring that there is a break between the kindergarten and school, Mr. Gregory passes at once to the methods employed in dealing with the difficulty. I believe a better way would be to look the distinction squarely in the face and see what causes the trouble. That is the way a physician would begin his curative process, so I ask you to consider whether the ideals of school and kindergarten are the same? The most concise and masterly statement of Froebel's principles that I know of is that given by John Jay Chapman in his essay on "Education — Froebel," in the book, Causes and Consequences. He sums up Froebel's laws thus: "The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops thro creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children, and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed." These principles are needed at every step of the educational way. They are as fundamentally true for the twelfth grade and the college as for the kindergarten. But as Mr. Gregory has said — different phases of the same truth appear at different stages of growth, and varying applica- tions are needed. "A growing organism!" I sometimes wonder if people who have not lived with very young children for twenty-four hours of the day, year in and year out, begin to realize the infinite and constant self-adjustments of the child to the situation in which he finds himself. Do educators in general know what it means for the mother or kindergartner to keep pace with the child's constantly changing attitude in the very early years — mentally, physically, and spiritually, in order that at each stage she may make the conditions for the develop- ment of the child what he needs, what it is best for him to have, that he may grow har- moniously ? Is this truth recognized and applied by the kindergartner in the making of her daily program ? Is it a plastic or fixed plan ? Is it determined by a general knowledge of children — ^without reference to a particular group — or does she really know what this particular group can do or can not do, and does she try to hold each one to his best ? And the school: are the lessons, the discipline, the requirements, based upon this living fact, or upon conventions and traditions ? Just where does the child's living estimate of the value of these traditions appear ? Do school boards reckon with it in the planning of the buildings and playgrounds — or is the necessity for right quantities and qualities of the air the children breathe properly met; the seats in which they spend considerable time — are they adapted to growing organisms ? " The child is a unity." As Colonel Parker used to say — " the whole boy goes to school." His restless body isn't sloughed off at the schoolroom door. He is constantly emerging from the " big, buzzing, blooming confusion " — or, as Froebel calls it, "the state of chaos" — and trying to find himself in relation to all things which interest him. In play, his mind acts in its wholeness. Is it so in his work ? Is that too an expression of all there is in him ? This leads to the third truth : that only thru creative activity can the child find an *' at-one- ment " in the conditions of his daily living. This does not mean that everything he does has to be evolved from the depths of his own consciousness, but that thru the whole-hearted doing of play or of work — thru the doing of things for which he feels there is a purpose — even if it should be an apparently formal thing like working now and then from dictation in the kindergarten, if it has a meaning to him, if he feels that something is coming of it — he will give himself to it gladly. Any action that takes the child's whole self into play — that calls for an exercise of feeling, willing, and thinking, can't help being useful to him. Now how much chance is there for this in the average schoolroom ? "To have found one- fourth of an answer through his own effort," says Froebel, " means far more to the child than to half hear it in the words of another." The same idea Browning gives us, "Well it is for the youth to strive through acts uncouth toward making, than repose on aught found made" 538 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Kindergarten The fact that children are benefited by other children, and that it is good to lead them to live more for others, needs no comment. We all believe it. The vital question is: Has Froebel on the whole given us a true ideal ? The question of the personality of the man has nothing to do with the case. He was certainly consistent — true to his principles — and on the whole they are in accord with modern psychology. No one has ever illustrated the idea of motor activity as the main center of early development more emphatically than he has done in the "Play with the Limbs" in his Mother-Play Booh. Dr. Dewey said to me once, "the whole of psychology is in that play." So, too, we find his lessons in the begin- nings of sociology true to the core. As to "standardizing the kindergarten," listen to Froebel — "A life whose ideal value has been perfectly established in experience never aims to serve as a model in form — but only in its essence — in its spirit." A word as to the materials which are to the little kinder- garten child what books are to the school — one means by which the child gets thought — one means by which he expresses himself — one means by which he comes into close relations with form, color, in fact with most elementary attributes of objects, useful only as means to an end. Time will not permit me to make a plea for the use of most of the kinder- garten material. It helps the child in the use of nature material in that it gives concrete con- stants, and the very limitations of it have an advantage, when set over against the many variations in nature. Together, they enable the child to solve many problems. Kindergartners owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Gregory for his paragraph on p. 30,1 in which he speaks of Froebel's desire to make the child conscious of his power, but I've no time to consider the justness of it now. As to the loyalty of the kindergartner to Froebel (p. 34),^ is it any wonder when a young woman comes into the kindergarten training class and finds what Froebel would open up to childhood — ^what he opens up to her — that she becomes enthusiastic, that like any novitiate she feels that here is a cure-all for many a misunderstanding of childhood ? But more than that: if she is in a school that believes in self-activity she has the jov of mak- ing some educational discoveries for herself. Suppose she blunders. Suppose, because the truth now grasped for the first time is large in comparison with her previous experience in school, she overestimates it — even to the point of exploiting it, time and more truth will help her to gain her balance; she will see things in their true relation as she lives and studies longer; she will learn that this kindergarten is but the first step on the ladder, that is to take her up from "God's earth to God's heaven," as Froebel puts it. It can only do its own work in its own way. I can't quite agree with Mr. Gregory in thinking that the kindergarten will ever pass away. It stands for a unique purpose — in a unique phase of child life — the presentation of conditions for the nourishment of the germs of thought, feeling, and will — the pathway from subconsciousness to the conscious growth; and this process is worthy of a name of its own. There will always be some people who take a special interest in this stage. These will be drawn to specialize in this field, but they will realize that, to understand it, they must know what has gone before, must know the home environ- ment, as well as that which will come later — the school. When a sapling is transplanted from its nursery to a new field, there is not, at first, much sign of growth. The adjusting itself to its new soil goes on underground — and the more it is let alone the better, provided it have such light, air, and water as is necessary. I can't help thinking that the constant talk of the break between kindergarten and school acts as suggestions are likely to act. If each teacher who feels that all is not as it should be would talk less about it and work diligently to see that right principles are every- where applied — if she would put some of her traditions into a good hot crematory, reduce them to ashes, and use these to fertilize the soil for both kindergarten and elementary school, the closing sentence of Mr. Gregory's fine paper would indeed be realized. Meantime let teachers of the grades, especially the first, second, and third, come to- ' Seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education. Part II. Department] KINDERGARTEN AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 539 k gether and compare notes as to what has been done and what can be done to work econom- ically and harmoniously as well as progressively. To this end I have brought a schedule which was prepared by a group of Chicago kindergartens — not at all as a formulated statement of what had been done but as a sort of chart to keep them sane and steady and definite as to their purpose. Years ago I had a somewhat similar leaflet which I always passed up to the first- grade teacher when the kindergarten children entered. Mine was a little more defi.nite, for I told what stories, songs, and games the children had had; something of the construc- tion work we had done, giving our aim in each case, and something of the methods by which we reached it; what blocks we had used; what grains and seeds we had planted or played with and what forms the child had a living or a playing acquaintance with. Do not mis- understand this — it was not that any finals had been reached — but it seemed only fair to the child and the teacher to let her know something of where the children stood as to general intelligence, habit, physical condition. Elizabeth Harrison, Chicago Kindergarten College. — Superintendent Gregory seems to have grasped so clearly the distinctive difference between the kindergarten and the kindergarten principles which underlie all development that his paper scarcely needs discussion. Yet I would like to emphasize one or two points. He speaks of "the divine fire" which animates the kindergartner and devoutly wishes it could be had by the grade teacher as well. Here is a thought for us kindergartners. If we had enough of this divine fire we would transmit it. It is as contagious as any other fire. Show me the kinder- garten teacher who realizes the sacredness of her work and the divine significance of educa- tion, that it is not merely the giving of knowledge, but awakening and development of "per- sonality"— show me this kind of a kindergartner and I will show you the kindergartner who has awakened and inspired her next-room neighbor to better work. Are we as kindergartners, who have been trained in insight, Hving so that this fire within us warms and gives light to those who are near us ? The second point of which I would like to speak is Dr. Gregory's praise of the law of "self-activity" which he wishes the grade teacher understood better. Here is another point for us to consider. Are we sure that our daily work with the kindergarten children can always be called by that name ? Do we fully understand the meaning of the word self- activity ? It is not indulging the child in his caprice, nor wasting his time in trivialities. Unless it helps him to unfold within himself something that is worth while it is not true self -activity. If we could show the primary teacher results that manifested creative power in our children, even in its simplest forms, we would not need to argue against cut-and-dried methods. The wonderful growth which the lower grades have made in the past few ^ears shows that the earnest primary teacher is just as anxious to improve as the average kindergartner. There is one point on which I think Dr. Gregory is not just to us. He speaks of our using the third gift, for instance, because it was Froebel's expression of a great idea. We do not use it because it was Froebel's invention but because it is a simple, easy means of bringing to the child contrast of size, relationship of number, a unit of measurement, the three directions of up and down, right and left, top and bottom, and shows in a very concrete way the dependence of parts on the whole and a whole on its parts. These same things are illustrated in a morning program in a dozen other ways. We use the kinder- garten tools just as any other intelligent worker uses his tools — because they serve our pur- pose, not because they were invented by some one individual. And I hope we are broad- minded enough to use better tools if better tools are invented. But a sensible workman does not throw away a good tool because somebody advertises that he has made an inven- tion of something else. New tools do not make skilled workmen any more than old tools. The test is, "Does this or that tool do the work desired ?" Emma C. Davis, Cleveland, O. — In response to the request of the chairman I wil 540 A^^ TIONA L ED UCA TION A SSOCIA TION [Kindergarten speak first as to the continuity of the training carried forward in the grades by means of the materials used in the kindergarten, altho there is another point of greater impor- tance I wish to touch upon. My experience is that in up-to-date school systems nearly all, if not all, of the materials used in kindergarten "occupations" are used in the primary grades, either in the art and manual-training courses or in the "expression-by-hand" activities and exercises, or fre- quently in both. That a definitely outlined course of training beginning in the kindergarten "occupa- tions" and going on thru the grades is not more common is due to the fact that in very few, if any, cities the number of kindergartens is equal or anywhere near equal to the num- ber of first grades, and therefore a definitely outlined progressive course which is feasible where these ideal conditions prevail is not usual. But notwithstanding the conditions as they are there is an encouraging degree of continuity and progression in the work as it is now carried on, and this is becoming more pronounced as the organization of public kinder- gartens becomes perfected and more truly a part of the system of schools. And by this I do not mean that the kindergarten work needs to be organized; it is already splendidly organized, perhaps even too perfectly. This leads me to the second point I wish to speak upon, the relation of the kinder- garten to the grades above. I have been surprised to hear recently so much about definite attainments in the kinder- garten in the way of number work, and even in the elements of reading and in other definite measurable attainments. That the children's number sense is trained and that their perceptions take definite form is true; that their ears are trained to the recognition of differentiations in sounds is also a fact; that the ideas of space and dimensions are developed is without doubt. But it seems to me that a required standard of measurement for such training would be fatal to the best work of the kindergarten. The children who come out of the kindergarten do not, under present conditions of organization, make their way thru the grades any faster, usually, but they bring to the work trained intelligence and the social spirit, developed senses, skill of hand expression as well as of language expression — all of which enables them to do the work better, to realize a richer content, and to have more joy in the work. If the kindergarten accomplishes this, it seems to me it has filled its niche — has accomplished a splendid mission. Alma L. Binzel, director of kindergarten training, Stout Institute, Menomonie, Wis. — I shall confine myself to the actual attempts we are making to solve this problem in the training schools in Wisconsin. The kindergarten departments of the Milwaukee State Normal School and of the Stout Institute at Menomonie had their origin in an efi"ort to meet demands for kindergarten teachers; their development is accompanied by » growing recognition of the following facts : First, that an insight into theory, methods, and subject-matter of elementary grades is essential to the doing of the most intelligent work in the kindergartens by the teacher thereof; second, that requests from small cities for teachers prepared to do both kindergarten and elementary work are frequent; third, that demand for elementary teachers with some kindergarten training and experience is on the increase; and fourth, that effectiveness and economy are dependent, in many cases, upon finding the particular phase of work with young children for which prospective teachers are specially adapted. Appreciation of these facts has resulted in the modification of courses to such an extent that the requirements for elementary teaching are being met. Two years ago the state legislature acted upon the matter so that today the graduates of the kindergarten depart- ments are recognized as qualified to teach not only in kindergartens but also in first, second, and third grades. By the elimination of some of the phases of the traditional kindergarten work it has been found possible to give a course in y)edagogics involving consideration of the law? o1 Deijartment] KINDERGARTEN AND ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 541 teaching, of the subject-matter, and of the methods of primary work. This is followed up by actual teaching in the grades. Eighty forty-minute periods are allotted to this, whereas three times that amount is devoted to kindergarten teaching. For the coming year a reversal will be made for those choosing the elementary as their field. A two-year's trial has convinced us that this plan is not only desirable but also worth while. It so happened that the woman who was responsible for the work along elementar}"- lines at Stout Institute had never before dealt with a group of student teachers with kinder- garten training. Her experience had been, however, a very extensive one with normal- school students for she was for many years supervisor of the model department and practice teaching, instructor in methods at a state normal school, and hence the following comment is of special interest and value : " I have never had a group of teachers take hold as readily, do effective work as early, appreciate so thoroly the basis of criticism as these kinder- garten students. It is no doubt due to the fact that the various courses given to prospec- tive kindergartners prepare them to see and understand the child in his many relationships, with his many needs and interests, in a way that is not equaled by the usual work in other departments of normal school." ^ On the other hand, the kindergarten critic teachers feel justified in saying that work with kindergarten children is stronger because there is knowledge of next steps; because there is greater clearness, concerning whys and wherefores, that comes through restate- ment and reapplication of fundamental laws to more than one phase of teaching. Not that we have reached our goal in the unification of courses and in the attainment of the consequent economy for adults and for children but we are studying the problem and approximating toward a sane solution, we hope. In such an attempt every criticism made by grade teacher or supervisor must be wel- comed and acted upon. For instance, when the supervisor reports that the art work of children in a certain building does not come to standard for first grades and that the class teacher maintains that the drawing habits fixed in the kindergarten are responsible then this question must be answered: Does the supervisor of drawing, who by the way is frequently the teacher of art to junior kindergarten students, concern herself only with their development of power and skill in execution, or does she deal with the pedagogy of the subject so that as seniors and teachers these students understand the work with young children ? If the specialists fail to concern themselves with beginnings that are made in the home and utilized in the kindergarten the continuity must be a matter of accident. Lack of articulation would be frequent where conscious design is not present; herein lies the waste and misdirection of student and child, energy and time. Upon kindergarten and grade teachers, upon supervisors and specialists, devolves the obligation of seeing that articulations in conditionings characterize the environment of the child so that the continuity of .and progress in his development is insured. To welcome criticisms, to discover their causes, and then to remove them, this is the only attitude that we as teachers ot children can afford to cultivate. ■For statement of work given and elaboration of views held see Stout Institute Bulletin, No. 3, Vol. Ill : "Advantages of Unifying Training Courses for Kindergarten and Primary Teachers" by Mary D. Bradford, supervisor of elementary work. , DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION SECRETARY'S MINUTES OFFICERS President — J. K. Stableton, superintendent of schools, Bloomington, HI. Vice-President— Mi'A's. Adelaide S. Baylor, superintendent of schools, Wabash, Ind. Secretary— Mms S. Belle Chamberlain, state superintendent of public instruction, Boise, Idaho. FIRST SESSION.— Tuesday Afternoon, June 30, 1908 The department met in the First Methodist Church at 2:30, the president of the department, J. K. Stableton, presiding. George P. Brown, editor of School and Home Education, Bloomington, 111., spoke on "The Physiology and Psychology of Elementary Education." The discussion was opened by John W. Cook, president of Northern Illinois State Normal School, DeKalb, 111., and continued by Ella Flagg Young, principal of Chicago Normal School, Chicago, 111., and Elizabeth Harrison, principal of Chicago Kindergarten College. The second paper of the afternoon was presented by James H. Van Sickle, superin- tendent of schools, Baltimore, Md., on the subject "Is the Technique of Reading, Arith- metic, and Writing Receiving due Attention in the Elementary Schools Today ?" The paper was discussed by W. C. Martindale, superintendent of schools, Detroit, Mich., and P. M. Harbold, superintendent of training department, State Normal School, Millersville, Pa. The subject was thrown open for general discussion. Upon motion, the president appointed the following committee on nominations: Duncan Mackinnon, San Diego, Cal. Charles H. Keyes, Hartford, Conn. T. A. Mott, Richmond, Ind. Wednesday Morning, July i, 1908 A joint session with the Kindergarten and Art Departments was held. , For minutes of the meeting see Department of Kindergarten Education. Thursday Evening, July 2, 1908 The Department met in the First Methodist Church, and was called to order by the president, J. K. Stableton. The report of the committee on nominations was as follows: For President — James F. Chamberlain, State Normal School, Los Angeles, Cal. For Vice-President — Miss Adelaide S. Baylor, superintendent of schools, Wabash, Ind. For Secretary — Miss Margaret McConkey, supervisor of primar}' schools and kinder- gartens, Springfield, Mass. The report of this committee was on motion unanimously adopted and the nominees declared elected. R. R. Reeder, superintendent of the orphanage, Hastings-on-Hudson, N. Y., presented a paper on "Moral Training an Essential Factor in Elementary-School Work." Fassett A. Cotton, state superintendent of schools of Indiana, being absent, his paper in discussion was read by Laurence Duncan, assistant state superintendent of Indiana. The second paper of the evening was "Mathematics in the Elementarv Grades" 543 544 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATJON [Elemeniaiy presented by Robert J. Aley, professor of mathematics, Indiana State University, Bloom- ington, Ind. The discussion was opened by I, C. McNeill, superintendent of schools, Memphis, Tenn. The department adjourned. S. Belle Chamberlain, Secretary. PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION GEORGE P. BROWN, EDITOR, " SCHOOL AND HOME EDUCATION" BLOOMINGTON, ILL. In the first paragraph of his ^' Essay on History" Emerson says: There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. . . . Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Taking Emerson's statements as our point of view, education may be defined as the process by which one obtains admittance to the right of reason, and so gains access to this universal mind and becomes a party to all that is or can be done. Elementary education is that state .of this process which conducts the growth of the child from the dawn of his intelligence through his preparation for entering a secondary school. That part of this elementary process which we call the elementary school seeks to prepare its graduates to begin to learn some industrial vocation; or to enter a high school for a more advanced training in power and scholarship than is needed as a preparation for beginning to learn a strictly industrial pursuit. The elementary pupil cannot gain admittance to the right of reason; he can only make the preliminary approaches to such admittance. The primary duty of the elementary teacher is to gain a clear conception of what is the best preparation the child can make for this next stage of his education. The two classes of powers that constitute the child are the physical and the psychic. They make the body and the mind. We have come to understand better than formerly the interaction of these powers, and the bearing of this knowledge upon education is better appreciated. Modern investigations in both physiology and psychology have revealed a new child to the school teacher. The physiological processes in man are similar in kind to those of the lower kingdoms of life. Education from the physical point of view is concerned chiefly with the nervous system of this animal inheritance, and especially it is concerned with the gray matter of his system. The psychic processes are those of the psyche or person who is the new Uepartmentj PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION 545 J — e> IL being that has emerged at this human stage of the evolution of life, and who uses the nervous system of the body for attaining his ends. The doctrine of this thesis is that the body as nervous system is the servant or instrument of the person or self, and, therefore, it denies that the body is the source or creator of this new being. The full extent to which the person may become master of this machine — may come into control of this servant — doth not yet appear. The body, in and of itself, is but an animated machine — a living automaton — which accumulates and transmits energy according to physical laws. The life process of this mechanism animates the system of afferent-efferent, or sensory-motor cycles that constitute the nervous system. Each of these cycles, as you know, consists of a sensory nerve filament, a central cell, and a motor filament. These filaments I understand to be simply the prolongation of the gray matter of the cell. When the stimulus from the environment external to the cycle attacks the receiving end of the sensory filament it is transmitted to the central cell which directs its course through the efferent or motor filament or filaments to the muscles or other tissues upon which it operates. The purpose of the cycle is to transfer the stimulus received from without the cycle from one point in the organism to another. Now the entire complex of processes which make the nervous system is the co-ordination of many thousands of these afferent-efferent cycles which move with the precision of the shuttle in the power loom. This system of nerve cycles is a harp of thousands of strings, which, when played upon by the environment, gives always the same music to the same stimulus. I speak of this to remind you of the mechanical nature of the processes of the human body, which body is the instrument of the soul. Now the person who uses this mechanism is quite another being. In the infant stage of its growth this person is spontaneous and lawless free power, which must attain to ordered freedom thru education. When this power first comes to consciousness it is will-as-desire, or desire-as-will, and this is the infant personality or ego. This free power is what eventually grows into the educated man or woman thru the acquisition and use of knowledge in attaining its freedom. By freedom I mean the liberty and power to do as one desires within the limits imposed by the common mind. No will can be free that does not will the freedom of all. How can the elementary school best lead, thru the influence of its environ- ment, this free, lawless power on its way toward freedom in our social order ? I take it that this is our fundamental problem in the elementary school. Emerson says the "secret of education lies in respecting the pupil." Free- will is the spark of divinity within the child. His free-will best comes to respect the free-will of others thru the respect of others for his free-will. The need of better results from the schools, especially in character and power, is universally felt, and there has been, in consequence, much advertis- ing of new^ educational routes. Just now the industrial line is much in evi- 546 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION lElemeniary dence. It is certainly true that the process of putting ideas into material forms in obedience to mechanical laws affords an opportunity for respecting the free-will of the pupil in his growth toward freedom, superior to that of "backing-the-book," with which it is often contrasted. But the emancipation that comes thru industrial education does not reach very far. There are some of these devices, such as industrial education, manual training, domestic science, and others, which ought to be in the tool-chest of our old reliable edu- cational route, to be used upon occasion, but none of them can be a highway from lawless free-will to rational freedom. The goal of education, since man began to think, has been the free use of opportunity under the law imposed by the common mind. Every individual in this country is a party to the laws imposed by the common mind. Hence such common law is self-imposed by each individual. ''Man thus becomes a law unto himself," which good authority declares is ideal freedom, I believe this definition of freedom holds good whether one is a rationalist or a prag- matist in his philosophy. The first and most commanding duty of the elementary school is to bring the infant psyche — ^which is will-as-desire — into control over the physical instru- ment which he must use in his rise to manhood, and which he must live with and keep in order while an inhabitant of this planet. This psyche must rise to manhood thru (that is, by means of) the acquisition of knowledge; for knowledge is necessary to its attainment of its ends. Knowledge is embodied in words or other symbols, therefore oral and written speech have always been the leading subjects of study in elementary schools. The personality, or psyche, this will-as-desire, not only creates the words and other signs that symbolize his knowledge, but he registers them in certain convolutions in one of the hemispheres of the brain — ^generally the left hemisphere. He does the same thing with his music, his arithmetic, and all other symbols of ideas and other psychic experiences. These must be ready for use when the personality calls for them. These brain convolutions are practically the same in the brain of the chimpanzee as in man, but the chimpanzee can make no use of them for the chimpanzee is not a person. Only a person can create speech and store it away in the brain. The chimpanzee is a system of motor-cycles played upon by its environment; it is an animated machine. Man is all this and more. What he is more is personality — a free psychic force who plays upon these cycles for his own ends. The conflict between man and the beast thus begins in the child. Whether a worse than beast or a man shall be the final outcome, in our present social order, the elementary school can do much to determine. When the psyche rises in desires and in purposes as it advances in knowledge then the instincts belonging to the beast come by degrees into subjection to the higher ideals of the man, and a moral being is the product. The process by which the mind grows in ideals and aims is similar to that of its growth in knowledge; that is, it grows by persistent effort and repeated II Department] PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION 547 trial. Little progress can be made without language. The psyche has a natural impulse to express himself in symbols by means of hand or tongue. Words first enter as sensations from without and are registered' in a well- defined convolution of the brain by psychic power which uses the sensori- motor cycle in doing it. Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from early infancy, knew not one word when she was seven years old. Miss Sullivan tells the story of the registration of her first word after weeks of effort; how she stood transfigured when she first discovered that a certain succession of strokes made on her hand meant water. From that moment she filled the word register in her brain with marvelous rapidity. In four years she was conversing in oral speech with the most cultured people of the nation, who were astonished at her command of English and range of thought. The wonderful things she must have done in educating the brain cells of her Broca convolution to talk — thru her sense of touch alone — shows the power of the will in bringing the brain machinery under control. Only the neurologist can best appreciate what must take place in the brain to produce this result. What shall be said of the teaching of certain psychological professors who would have us believe that the action of ''the finer anatomy of the central nervous system" made Helen Keller's passion for knowledge, made her indom- itable will, and her exalted character ? If I could help to keep that deadly error from finding lodgment in your minds, I should feel that I had not lived in vain. Dickens says in his "Battle of Life" that Dr. Jeddler was a great philos- opher and the ''heart and mystery of his philosophy was that he looked upon the world as a gigantic practical joke; as something too absurd to be con- sidered seriously by any practical man." Was the doctor a professor of physiological psychology as well as a philosopher ? I can only mention, in passing, such illuminating examples as Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman, hoping that those who have not learned the lesson they teach of the dominance of personality over the sensori-motor mechanism may be encouraged to make a study of the processes by which these persons were educated, and may read such suggestive books as Brain and Personality, by Dr. William Hanna Thomson. The way in which the will registers its knowledge is akin to that in which it registers its ideals and purposes and thought — the process by which it grows. It is by the growing experiences of the personality resulting from persistent repetition and study that the soul develops. I have opportunity to give only this single illustration of the interaction between the nervous system and the personality in the growth of the soul. The rest of my time will be given to speaking of the psychology of elementary education. There is a psychology common to all individual children, and a somewhat different psychology of different groups of children, but the most important to child and teacher is the psychology of the individual child. 548 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary That which is common to all seems to be this, that what children desire they are impelled to obtain, and they seek some way of obtaining it. Involved in the movement are the desire that reaches toward some object, the will that executes or appropriates, and the intelligence that directs the execution; and they act in this order in the evolution of the race and of the individual. This suggests the psychic cycle by which the personality approaches its self-realization in early years. This, it seems to me, is a psychological experi- ence common to all children, and to men and women, most of whom, in this regard, are but grown-up children. The impulse to do the agreeable thing and reject the disagreeable is the law of the infant will, and this remains true until he arrives at the "age of rea- son." When the primary school requires of the child to do the disagreeable and reject the agreeable, the natural order of growth is not followed. This reversal of the order of nature may be temporarily necessary in some mental attitudes of the child, but only in so far as to secure the change of attitude. The child's voluntary efforts are determined by his desires, except in so far as these desires are inhibited by influences external to himself. These inhibi- tions can be made more educative than they are, and they are an important part of the process. I have no time or space in three thousand words to describe the steps by which, in the primary grades, the child is led to construct for himself a body of language and of meanings and register them in the brain, nor to show how the child's imagination can be used in perfecting his language and — what is more important^n filling the mind with a registration of beautiful deeds, and noble ideals, and loving sympathy for what is good and true and just in life. The elementary school is the school par excellence for laying the foundations of character. The impulses of will, desire, and interest that clamor for satis- faction are a wild, free power which must be led to subject itself to order. The best school is the environment that stimulates interest and joy in doing educa- tive things. The philosophy, religion, and ethics of the human race have always taught, and the history of the world confirms it, that the human soul has from the beginning more and stronger impulses and desires that lead toward love, and truth, and righteousness than of those that lead toward self- ishness, injustice, and malevolence. In the child's conflict between his human impulses and his animal inherit- ances, the teacher finds the human to be the stronger tendencies. There is no access to the child except by way of his environment. The free personality of the child must work itself into order under the influence of the school. The school can perform this function better than the family. I cannot detail here the steps of the process. There are many ideal schools in our country where they can be observed. It is like the process which Hawthorne describes in the ''Great Stone Face" where he tells us what hap- pens to every child in a greater or less measure, when the environment is favor- able to the best results. u Department) PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION 549 There is a prevailing notion that the value of a school is in the knowledge the children acquire. An inteUigent member of a school board in one of our more enlightened cities declared that he always supposed that the sole busi- ness of the school was to impart knowledge. He did not see how the will and feelings could be taught. It is the purposive free-will that becomes the man or the woman whom the elementary school conducts as child thru the grades. Knowledge has no moral quality. It helps the evil will "who knows better and does worse" as willingly as it works for righteousness and justice. We have a saying that ''knowledge is power." Knowledge is the servant of power. I do not know what will be said to those at the final reckoning who are now proclaiming that the supreme duty of the elementary school is to advance scholarship ; who say, "Let the other institutions attend to the rest of (he boy." But I do know that the boy cannot be taught in sections with the best results. It is the prevailing weakness of our social order that people disregard their convictions of truth when immoral desires and purposes are uppermost in them. The determined man can make himself believe, or believe that he believes, that the worse is the better when he wishes it to be so. If knowledge were the power which rules the world this could not be true. Socrates made knowledge the commanding virtue, it is true, but he assumed that a man who knew could not be a fool, and do the worse when he knew the better. I am pleading that the education of the will and the desires of the personality shall be the commanding purpose of education in the consciousness of teacher and parent. It is now, at best, only an incidental purpose in the school. I am considering the will to be that psychic force, or spiritual unity, that feels and executes and thinks. The school must regard all these aspects of the soul's activity and so distribute the emphasis between them as to promote the supreme purpose of education, which is the moral life. I am not making this the conscious purpose of the child in his work in the school. His conscious purpose is to do the work the school assigns. •Nor am I saying that thought begotten of knowledge does not become identified with power in the best educated man. I am considering the con- dition of children's minds in the first years of school. The lines of effort in the elementary school that will best realize our ideal of life are three : 1. It must give such knowledge and train to such thinking as will best direct this uninformed will to the attainment of its ends. 2. It must lead the desires to test the ideals they create by a feeling of the worthiness of the ends toward which they lead. 3. It must persistently practice discovering ways and means of attaining ends which the child deems worthy; and this is what is meant by teaching him to think. He must be ever solving problems. The school must respect the child's view of life and take that as its point of departure in educating him. The main educational route is toward the goal 55© NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary of a high order of social life. As I have intimated, two ways may lead to this end: one the industrial, the other the scholastic. But the elementary school I have in mind will afford the best preparation for the pursuit of either of these special ways. The child's natural develop- ment should be fostered; it should not be interrupted. It is in this sense that the elementary school is not consciously a preparation for life, but is life. It should turn out the best-developed boys and girls practicable. If, when this is done, the demands of our civilization shall continue to require that we arrest their further development into full grown men and women in order to make of them captains of industry and finance, or of some other specialty, then we must needs wait for a higher stage of the evolution of man for his harmonious and complete education in the school. But it is the duty of education to cry aloud and spare no effort to persuade the people that manhood and womanhood of a high order constitute the power and honor and glory of that nation which shall continue to lead in the civilization of the world. Whatever is done in the elementary school that is directly related to a special vocation should be done because of its general educational value in any and every vocation, and only so far. It is certainly true that the initial steps in mastering modern industries and occupations are steps toward freedom in any pursuit. What the world needs is men and women of power. When the schools work for the attainment of results in power which are not measured by per cents., they will produce more persons of power and efficiency. The ele- mentary school is for stimulating and putting into order in the lives of the children worthy feelings and purposes thru the accumulation of knowledge, and thru such practice in the use of knowledge as will mature these feelings and purposes into habits. Habits should be the stepping-stones of dead selves to higher things, and never to lower things. We should be concerned vastly more about the aims and ideals of the chil- dren. This concern will result in making the need of knowledge more and more evident to the pupils, and will turn their will and desire toward its mastery. It is thus that the school will follow the natural order of the growth of the child and of the race. How inadequate is the conception that the commanding purpose of the elementary school is to construct the instrument by which desires are to be realized, and leave to chance the choice of ends, or the worthiness of the desires. The natural order of growth, I repeat, is first a desire for some experience and an impulse to attain it; second, putting order into impulse and desire by the use of knowledge; in other words, it is will prompted by feelings and directed in its achievement by knowledge. I have only entered upon the threshold of the consideration of one psycho- logical element that belongs to the work of the school, but what has been said will suggest the order in which the other elements must follow. Department] PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION 551 I have tried to emphasize the source of power and the general process by which power becomes developed and effective. What I have in mind to say of the auxiliary processes that become active at different stages of the child's growth, and of the agencies and instruments to be used to make this power most effective in the social order would fill a volume. DISCUSSION John W. Cook, DeKalb, III. — An analysis of this interesting paper discloses the following body of doctrine: (i) Mind is the common possession of all men, hence all of its possible ranges are open to each within the limits of his individual capacity. (2) Edu- cation is the process of realizing in each individual the largest possible embodiment of the common mind. (3) The highest manifestation of this embodied mind is a moral per- sonality. (4) A moral personality is a being that has become conscious in some good degree of certain things with regard to itself: (a) Of its participation in the common mind. (&) Of its consequent identification with an established spiritual order organized by the energy of universal law. (c) Of the possibility of that free self-control in conduct which is the explanation and meaning of the existence of desire, {d) Of the necessity of conformity to the organic law in the case in order to realize the free self-control which is the end of desire, (e) That it has favored the survival of desires that are in harmony with this necessity. I submit the following rather formal propositions as at least applicable to the argument with no claim that they are either original or new. 1. A distinction should be made between training and education. It suits my pur- poses better to limit the application of the latter term to those processes in which the pupil has a somewhat definite conception of what is happening to himself and in which he is disposed to lend a hand in furthering the realization of ends that begin to be explicitly seen. Whatever of a purposeful disciplinary character precedes such a consciousness I prefer to call training. In this discussion, therefore, we are engaged in the consideration of what the teacher should do for the child that the child would desire to have done for him if he knew himself, and that the youth will approve when he discovers what has been going on. 2. The consciousness of being a moral personality cannot be reached within the limits of elementary education. It is because of this delayed insight that elementary education is of such enormous importance. The teacher must represent that introspective attitude which the child has not yet developed. If he fails to have the highest respect for what he finds in the child the case is parallel to that in which one who has come to know himself finds nothing within himself that merits his respect. To such a being the moral world has suffered collapse, for all sense of worth has its basis in a feeling of personal worth. It is within this area of spiritual experience that the real tragedies of human life are enacted. A teacher who is lacking in this attitude toward his work should be cast out of the temple which his presence desecrates. Emerson's remark, that "the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil" is another of the many illustrations of his wonderful insight. 3. The relative values of knowledge and habit during the period in which the ministry of the teacher is training rather than education is a theme that may well engage our most careful consideration. By knowledge is here meant the mental creation of what is ordi- narily thought of as truth, in its various aspects. By habit is meant the organization of automatic reactions to substantially identical stimulations. Habit must take marked precedence, but with a diminishing preference thruout this whole period. 4. The direction of habit-forming activities is a most delicate task. Habit is the vanishing-point of education. While all education must eventuate in habit, the formation of a habit arrests education at that point, or, perhaps I should say, completes education 552 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary at that point. To organize one into one environment and thus to render him immune to another presents at the same time benign and malignant features. And here is where imminent peril lies. 5. The antidote to the arresting tendency of habit is growth in knowledge. Growth in knowledge implies the acquisition of an acquaintance with new objects and ideas and with new aspects of old objects and ideas. We have been so much impressed with the signifi- cance of the doctrine of apperception that we have lost sight, at least partially, of its complementary doctrine of estrangement. It must never be forgotten that growth in knowledge necessitates the invasion of new and strange fields. This is hostile to the essential conception of habit. But, like the chambered nautilus, we must move into the new and larger house; yet, unlike the chambered nautilus, we ought not to seal up the old. 6. Growth in knowledge contributes to the formation of that moral personality which is implicit in freedom in at least two ways: (a) The method of acquiring knowledge is the solution of intellectual problems. The problem-solving activity is peculiarly the method by which the intellect grows, and intellectual growth is essential to the development of any worthy personality. (6) Without knowledge man is the mere shuttlecock of circumstance. There is no real will in its absence. Impulse implies it, desire begins its definition, reason comprehends it, will incorporates it into the character. Mere intellectual apprehension is of small consequence in the concrete life of a personality. Knowledge in the elementary school is for the same purpose that it is anywhere else; it is for conduct, for guidance, for fulfilling the destiny of a being who becomes really human just so far as he shares in the reason common to all men. Its value may be justly estimated by the will that it awakens and mediates. To do things one must desire things, know things, and will things. Elizabeth Harrison, Chicago Kindergarten College — In the inrush of new thought that has come to us in the realization that our problems in education are necessarily chang- ing as our civilization changes, it is refreshing to listen to a paper which insists so clearly in defining the ultimate aim of all education to be the development of the personality of the individual child. The greater the personality or soul or ego of any individual, the greater is that individual's power, and the greater the power the greater the possibility of "social service." Unless some such idea is held steadily in view one is apt to think that art or manual training or physical culture or some means to an end is the all-important thing in education. When, as Mr. Brown's paper so admirably shows, we comprehend that feeling, or desire, as he chooses to call it, to stimulate the will-activity to voluntary activity, and when that knowledge or thought guides this will-activity to efi&ciency, we begin to adjust our curricula, and avoid undue emphasis on any one factor of development. I wish to speak this afternoon on the danger of our forgetting the value of training the imagination of the child, as the source of all volitional activity. In our present-day enthusiasm over the physical training of the child's body, and his industrial training toward social independence, we are apt to overlook the fact that both of these receive their real value from the personality, so to speak, which is housed within that body, or which is at work in that same body applied to some form of bread winning. We need strong person- ality more than we need strong bodies or able financiers, valuable as these are when ruled by the right kind of a spirit within. It is this inner life which is the source of all outer power and success worthy of the name. In speaking of language as the largest and most spiritual of the child's instrumentali- ties, Mr. Brown adds "What is more important than all else in this matter is to what use the child's imagination can be applied, not only in perfecting his language, but filling the mind with pictures of beautiful deeds and noble ideals and sympathies, with that which is good and true and best in the image world which his will constructs." Are we giving enough time and attention to the right training of the imagination? All art, all literature, and all religion are products of the power of the mind to see the unseen; to establish a relationship between the finite and the infinite. Department] TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING 553 In fact all that is highest and best in the attainments of our race are the results of the power to image something better, larger, more beautiful, than exists in the realm of external experience. We realize the immense importance of training the creative power which results from a trained imagination, properly developed. We either ignore this poetic creative side of education, or we train it in a haphazard or oftentimes pernicious way. As for example the recent craze over dramatic presentation of such heroes as Robin Hood, arousing in the child of today the spirit of rufl&anism. Is it not as important that we con- sider what kind of stories we tell to children, what reading we put into their leisure hours, what poems we teach them to love, what pictures we hang on our school-room walls, as that we consider what folk-dances they shall learn or what handwork shall be introduced, or what household activities they shall share in ? I am not decrying rythmic training of the body, nor clever skill of the hands, but let these take their proper place as instruments to be used by the creative imagination, that the world may grow richer and better in its inner life as well as in its outer material prosperity. IS THE TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING RECEIVING DUE ATTENTION IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS TODAY? J. H. VAN SICKLE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, BALTIMORE, MD. READING If the discussion of the technique of reading is to get its trend from the common definition, "the method of performance or manipulation in any art," it would at first thought appear necessary to limit it to oral reading. Technique, however, plays so important a part in getting thought from the printed page, consciously in the early school years, unconsciously later, that we are fully justified in considering technique e>^en in silent reading. The conclusion of the Committee of Fifteen, that "learning to read and write should be the leading study of the pupil in his first four years of school" undoubtedly stated a belief very general at the time the report was written, and one which is in a sense valid today; but competent authorities are not wanting at the present time who would change the emphasis, even in the first lessons, from "learning to read" to "reading to learn;" and from "learning to write," "to writing for the purpose of making a record." This change of emphasis is very noticeable in courses of study that have been revised in the last few years; it is so marked as to be almost revolutionary. It is also in evidence in all the newer series of readers. The difference between the two points of view, though apparently a differ- ence chiefly in statement, has in fact an important bearing both on method and subject matter. The former attitude emphasizes the technique of reading but fails to suggest present use of reading to the learner or to reckon with motives which make an appeal to him while he is acquiring technique. In the recent courses of study and in the newer method, readers' motives from the child's standpoint are prominent. These are : to get meanings, to give infor- mation, to give pleasure. Now-a-days formal considerations, such as pauses and inflections, are 554 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary passed over lightly. We also expect children to use many words that they do not yet know how to spell. We are seeking short cuts to the f i Uest possible use of reading as a means of getting information. In these days ys hen men of all occupations and little leisure read the new^spapers each mcrning, reading is no longer an accomplishment for the few, an end in itself. It is cnly a means to a practical end; so the most direct method must be sought to master the reading process. Hence in our schools, introduction to reading by way of the spelling-book and the building up of new words, letter by letter, has dis- appeared. After a small stock of sentences and words has been acquired there follows an analysis of words into their elements. The old order was elements first — then combination. The new procedure reverses this order; but while it defers analysis it does not ignore this important step. The danger is that the step of analysis will be neglected, and little power be developed to attack unknown combinations. When analysis is neglected we have bad spelling because children are not trained to observe the elements of words. The older method — that of the alphabet, syllable, and spelling-book — moved less directly toward meanings, but by its very nature secured power in word recognition. When, however, analysis is given suitable attention the prevailing methods secure better technique than the more formal ones because they appeal to the need for expression, thus working in co-operation with child nature rather than against it. As this truth has become plain to teachers we have seen the close of an era dev^oted to the advocacy of so-called synthetic and other formal methods in which technique for technique's sake was deemed more important than technique for thought's sake; but we have not yet seen the end of the practice of such formalism. Practice lags far behind theory partly because of the disinclination of conservative teachers to change their accustomed ways and partly because the new ways unquestionably involve greater labor on the part of teachers of beginners. Our foremost schools of education hold that reading should not be taught as a formal end in itself, and that the child's reading vocabulary should grow mainly from his daily varying and developing needs of self-expression in the social activities of the school. If the teaching of reading and writing is to avoid the formal method of drill, the two arts will be taught together and the first reading will be of script which the children and teacher produce; for thus only may the fresh interest and the motive for good form in writing and ready and fluent expression be secured. The ideal would be for each child to write the sentence which he will immediately or later read — in other words to make his own reading-book. Each book would be different from every other book. The group story scheme, now quite common, falls somewhat short of this in that the resulting sentences are a composite of all the individual contributions and the resulting collection of sentences is no child's own. At a later stage phonetic drill is resorted to for voice training and pronuncia- tion, but it is relegated to a separate period and is treated as preparatory for reading. It is when the child does not know a word that the teacher takes Department) TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING 555 him into the mechanics of reading; but she does not mix technique and interpretation. Here lies the chief difference between the old methods and the new. Use cf the book is deferred until the children can read. From the first they are led to regard the page as containing a story, and they read to get the story. This attitude of mind which is cultivated so successfully by our best primary teachers is not utilized to as good advantage in the intermediate and grammar grades. It must be admitted that in many instances the early promise of intelligent and intelligible reading is not fully kept up. This is chargeable to a faulty ideal of the recitation. How seldom do we see children trained to listen to the recitation of their classmates with any real purpose of learning therefrom. In studying their lessons they know that each classmate has access to the same items of information. If at the reading period each has before him the very words to be uttered by the reader, there is no real audience for inspiration — no adequate motive for effective expression. It matters little whether the reader is even heard by his mates. One obvious remedy for lack of technique here lies in so arranging the oral reading that there shall be a real audience to inspire and to be inspired. Effective silent reading such as is neces- sary in studying geography and history would be forwarded by furnishing a variety of textbooks, by emphasizing the use of books of reference, and by re- adjusting the plan of study and recitation so as to furnish adequate motive for getting information from the printed page. For instance, let the assigned lesson be a topic which the pupils are to report upon from all available sources of information. See to it that these sources are not the same for all pupils in the class, and the opportunity to make a real contribution to the recitation furnishes a motive for effective preparation thru silent reading which is absent when all study the same paragraphs from the same book. The neces- sity also exists for attending to the recitation of others since all are held for all that is presented. Moreover, the reciting pupil has a motive for clear statement since he must make all understand his contribution to the lesson. WRITING What is Jiandwriting ? Clearly a means to an end. What is the end sought ? It is manifestly the conveying of thought by written symbols so that it may be readily und^stood. Handwriting is not now, nor was it e/er, a fine art. It is a mechanical device. It is obviously true that one should speak so that he may be understood. He must convey thought by means of the voice so that his auditor may not have to guess at what he intends to say. One should convey thought by means of the written sign so that one may not have to guess what the writer means to say. The hand must therefore be legible. It is not of first importance that it be fast. Beauty is not of importance. It is of supreme importance that handwriting shall be so distinct, so readable, so sure, that nobody may mistake the intention of the writer. In teaching writing, the aim is to have the process become automatic as 556 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary early as possible so that attention need not be given to the movement, but may be free to follow the thought. At first the form must be studied and the mind must be fixed upon the process. In fixing the technique of writing the things of vital importance are the position of paper on the desk and bodily posture conducive to the greatest ease in writing. Proper holding of the pen and proper movement are more important considerations than the particular style of letter which may be in favor at any given time. The supreme im- portance of early cultivation of life habits should be regarded here. The position of the paper on the desk and the position of the writer determine the angle of the writing: If less attention were paid to the slope of the letters and more to securing correct position, practice in movement, and correct habits in writing, better ultimate results would be obtained. But satisfactory tech- nique does not require that all children should use the same letter forms or the same slant or hold the pen and paper in the same position. Individu- ality is to be considered in it all. It is, however, in the interest of economy of effort, both in teaching and learning, in these early years when children have so much to acquire of the formal side of all studies, that the letter forms adopted in writing shall be as nearly as possible like the printed forms they will see in their reading books. Vertical forms are therefore to be commended in beginning writing. Any slight change of angle that may be natural to the individual or that may later be required is so simple and so easily made that it is unnecessary to force the primary school to depart from a style of writing that is so natural and so easily learned. In former times children were often taught to make print letters before attempting script; but the script of those days was the difficult Spencerian script which had little resemblance to the print of the book, and learning it after print was to the child almost like learning a second language. The labor of learning to write has been greatly reduced by the adoption of simple letter forms. It is my conviction that in places where these forms have had reason- able permanence and where careful attention has been given to teaching penmanship in the first five elementary grades, the results are fairly good thruout — far better than they have ever been before. In Baltimore this is conclusively shown by comparing the manuscript work of pupils in our eighth grade with that of pupils of the same age and grade frojn 1852 to 1889. We have bound volumes of examination papers which were written by pupils who wished to enter the high schools in each of those thirty-seven years. These volumes furnish indisputable evidence that the writing of grammar grade pupils was far less legible than the writing of present-day pupils of the same age. Doubtless greater expertness could be secured in the penmanship of pupils in the three upper grades if it were made a specialty and if all the teachers in those grades were expert teachers of penmanship; but instead of being a specialty as it may properly be in the school of business, penmanship is a means which the pupil uses toward the larger end of getting educated. If, when he Department] TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING 557 leaves the elementary school, his writing is reasonably rapid, neat, and easy to read, a moderate amount of special practice in penmanship will give his hand the qualities which we admire in the practiced penman. But the ele- mentary school cannot and does not undertake to turn out professional penmen any more than it undertakes to turn out skilled accountants, or artisans ot any sort. It does, however, undertake to fit children to write a plain, easily read hand, and I venture to say that it now accomplishes this purpose to a greater degree than ever before. While this is true, it must be admitted that even better results might be obtained if more attention were given to technique in the earlier lessons, particularly in the first and second grades. Some of the most thoughtful of my associates suggest that in the first grade no penmanship should be permitted except under the immediate direction of the teacher. The custom of allowing children to use penmanship without guidance for so great a portion of time in the second grade tends to fix bad habits more firmly. A fifteen-minute writing period for directed practice is quite insufficient to correct habits fixed by two hours of undirected writing. Forms of seat work requiring less writing should be devised for this grade. Work carefully supervised should be continued thruout the third, fourth, and fifth grades, allowing difficulties to be met progressively. Thereafter systematic speed tests and the rejection of written work carelessly performed should be sufficient to maintain and increase skill. The fact that the dictation speed test in writing is a feature of the civil service examinations should be known by teachers and used to stimulate children to meet the standards of the world. ARITHMETIC I do not know exactly what is meant by technique in arithmetic — ^possibly facility and accuracy in fundamental operations. It may perhaps be said that if we are not now getting the desired technique we are getting at it. Children are to some extent making their own problems, using price lists and actual measurements in connection with school and home occupations. School work in arithmetic is growing more purposeful and to the extent to which the need for thoughtfulness and accuracy is appreciated by the children, we find the necessary drill work undertaken with determination and zest. We are familiar with investigations made some years ago by Dr. Rice, in which it developed that there was little relation between the time devoted to arithmetic and the results obtained. The effort made in the past decade or two to make the teaching of arithmetic more rational has undoubtedly led to improved results. But we still attempt too much. We have ehminated some of the topics that used to appear in the texts, but we have too many left. The fundamental operations in arithmetic, with a few of their simple applications, are the only ones that pupils in elementary schools have oppor- tunity to employ. After developing these, and fixing their technique by drill, continued use of arithmetic in connection with drawing, manual training, 558 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary geography, physics, etc., as called for in the quantitative aspect of such studies, will furnish sufficient practice to keep arithmetic a ready tool. But to follow recent tendencies to the extent of making the textbook in arithmetic a compen- dium of useful information about a variety of industries for the sake of show- ing the application of arithmetic to them is as time-wasting a scheme as the older plan of filling the book with arithmetical puzzles. The brevity that must of necessity characterize the treatment of an industry in a textbook on arith- metic defeats the informational aim, and the topic as an industry demands greater maturity and larger experience on the part of the pupil than to do the arithmetical computations incident to the study. Either the industrial topic is beyond the comprehension of the children or the operations in arithmetic involved are too easy to bring adequate increase of mathematical knowledge and skill. Arithmetic, like other studies, possesses a unity and continuity of its own which cannot b,e freely violated without a wasteful scattering of effort. Many opportunities arise for useful correlations between arithmetic and other studies; but when orderly development of a topic in arithmetic is governed by the exigencies of some other subject, we violate the true principle of cor- relation and fail to secure advance of mathematical power proportional to the time consumed. Says Raymont : In giving a lesson or a series of lessons upon any particular topic, the teacher should press into his service allied material that will help toward the completer grasp of the topic under consideration, but should exclude all else. By ceasing to teach obsolete topics and by following this principle of true correlation we may easily, by the close of the sixth school year, teach all of the arithmetic that our pupils will ever need and give drill enough to insure accuracy. It would be well for teachers to become familiar with the tests for facility and accuracy which their pupils are likely to be subjected to in the business world. A kind of test with which the boy is not familiar is likely to confuse him and cause him to make errors which he would not make in the school- room. For example, boys who are able to write numbers properly from dictation, and add accurately fairly long columns, made many errors when subjected to an addition test by a bank cashier who had advertised for help. The unusual condition which handicapped the applicants was the necessity of holding in the left hand a bundle of checks ranging in amount from more than a million dollars down to thirty-seven cents, while copying on a pad with the right hand the sums represented by each check, and then footing the column, knowing that account was being taken of their speed as well as of their accuracy. In this instance mistakes in placing the figures were far more numerous than in actual adding. The boys were confused by the one element in the test new to them — the manipulation of the checks. Our pupils can easily meet the business man's demand for accuracy and facility if we will but find out how he makes his tests and then give such tests in our classrooms. Departmentl TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING 559 By way of review I would say: As to reading, the most enlightened practice of today in the lower grades is toward early mastery of meanings, accompanied by due attention to technique. It may be questioned whether our grammar- grade teachers are so training their pupils for independent use of books as to enable them to meet the promise of these favorable beginnings. As to writing : in places where pedagogical considerations have been allowed to govern in the selection and retention of simple and easily made letter forms, the writing of school children is reasonably rapid and far more legible than that which prevailed two decades ago. Improvement is to be sought in the early fixing of correct writing habits. We begin teaching formal arithmetic too early, and we continue teaching it too long as a separate study. We include too many topics, and in our most recently exploited correlations we waste time on topics that do not lead to increase of mathematical skill. In practice for facility and accuracy we should accustom our pupils to varied tests so that they may not be nonplussed by unusual conditions. DISCUSSION W. C. Martindale, superintendent of schools, Detroit Mich. — Early in June I received a communication from the leading speaker, stating that his paper had not yet been outlined and suggesting that I take up the discussion from my own point of view. This statement is made to account for any apparent lack of correlation between the leading paper and the discussion. Simple as the question seems it is vitally related to the history of the development of elementary education in the United States. Consider for a moment the subject of arith- metic. As a rule our present courses of study have come to us from the past. They origi- nated before the development of secondary schools as a part of local educational endeavor. When the early grammar schools and the Latin select schools formed the local educa- tional vehicle for preparing students for business and college, the arithmetic taught was embodied in a few elementary principles with a minimum of practice. Then the elementary school expanded and took over the preparation of the children of the masses for their every-day life. That life in a new and expanding community was dominated by a business or commercial spirit. The old idea of fixing a few arithmetical principles was revolutionized into an endeavor to supply all the kinds of problems required for the conduct of any sort of business. Teachers, somewhat under the force of public opinion, somewhat from their own inclination, made arithmetic the feature of the course, the real reigning "fad." The development of the graded system helped to keep arithmetic in its place of para- mount importance. Standings in arithmetic are gotten at easily and offer a very con- venient basis for classification. For a variety of reasons, then, elementary-school courses in arithmetic became gradually swollen until they contained problems of every conceivable sort. Today the usual three-book course, or, to state the fact more explicitly, the ordinary outlined course of study for the elementary school, furnishes more processes than the ordi- nary registered accountant is able to perform without some thought and study. Is this to be the accepted subject-matter for pupils whose average age is fourteen years when they complete the elementary work ? I believe that time may be more profitably employed. However, I do not mean that arithmetic is to be neglected. We cannot afford to neglect it. We are too firmly convinced of its value to the child and the demand for it is too insist- ent to go unheeded. 56o NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary I do believe, however, that there should be a readjustment both in prescription and assignment and that something should be left for the continuation and the secondary school. I believe that the technique of arithmetic is receiving due attention in Detroit. We have done something in the matter of eliminating superfluous material. The necessity for quickness and accuracy in the performance of the four fundamental operations is emphasized. Clear comprehension of principles is required and in certain districts of the city commercial work is provided in the eighth grade. By this means many pupils who would otherwise leave school are retained and even go on to the high schools where they receive the business training they desire and are at the same time subject to the cultural influence of other subjects. I do not believe that the teaching of the technique of arith- metic has been injured by these methods and we cannot afford to neglect the demand for accuracy in arithmetic. Faithfulness in this matter is just as much a part of education and tends as much toward the upbuilding of character as do literary appreciation and skill in the use of English. A word on the subject or subjects of reading and writing. The discussion today from one standpoint is a direct result of the tendency in recent years to infuse thought and imagi- nation from the very beginning into the processes of learning to read and write. It is not enough that a child shall learn in the first year to recognize and pronounce words. The process should be associated from the beginning with rich content. If the stories and pictures which delight him and the physical activities which make up his life furnish the inspiration for his first simple reading lessons, these lessons are a medium for thought and imagery and activity from the very beginning. The words are not mere black characters on the page, but open doors into the child's fairyland. The same thing is true of writing. The tendency today is to teach writing as a branch of language, not as a detached and mechanical thing to be afterward properly related to the larger subject. Instead of beginning with lines and proceeding in a fixed order to words and sentences, children are allowed from the beginning to write words and even short sent- ences. The writing lesson is based upon the reading lesson. A skillful teacher will be successful, using the term to indicate mechanical accuracy, with either method. Granting this, there can be no question as to which method is pref- erable. Any method which inculcates carelessness is bad, but the carelessness where it exists lies usually in the application and not in the method itself. We are withdrawing the emphasis on technical grammar in the middle elementary grades. We are trying to have children use language rather than dissect it. We are endeavoring to select reading-matter which will appeal to them so strongly that mechanical difficulties will be overcome by means of interest. By training them to write as a means of self-expression, we infuse the breath of life into the mechanical process. By making arithmetic a training of judgment we provide the proper incentive for quickness and accur- acy. All of these things tend to make the school attractive rather than repellent to the average child. The active boy particularly is held in school and does not merely float along until he is old enough to go to work. P. M. Harbold, superintendent of Model School, State Normal School, Millersville, Pa. — ^Whatever the trend of advanced educational thought with regard to method in reading, this one thing seems evident in certain sections of the country. In primary work the technique of reading receives at least its due amount of attention. Almost all of the popular methods of reading used today devote much time, particularly during the first year, to the mechanics of the process. Upon the examination of the pedagogical literature extant one must conclude that, in intermediate grades almost no emphasis is laid on tech- nique and, in grammar grades, literature, as such, claims all attention in the reading classt The end and aim in reading in any grade, it seems to me, should be that which makes for IL Departmentj TECHNIQUE OF READING, ARITHMETIC, AND WRITING 561 the sanest unfolding of the child's powers, that which gives him mental discipline, and, at the same time, that which has in it the element of interest. It is a well-known fact that the elementary school is the people's school, and that a comparatively small proportion of the children ever enter secondary schools. The large majority of our good middle class must go out into the world without that culture and powers which training in the secondary schools and colleges must give. This fact argues for this thought : Whatever else the elementary school aims to de-telop in the child who has small chance of higher education, it should aim to develop all the capabilities in the child which an elementary education can develop. I mean that power which the child can use in his every-day life as he performs the duties of a good citizen, power that aids him in becoming self-supporting, power that is a means to further self-development, power that makes him independent, and power that is in order to the enjoyment of life. This then lays the basis for the kind of work to be done in our elementary schools , and its special application to reading is obvious. We shall speak of four phases of the work in reading which partake of the nature of technique and which may not be neglected without injury to our school work. The first of these is a definite, thoro training in certain elements which are essential to the intelligent use of self-helps. It was stated above that in the primary grades much drill on the elements finds its place. This is as it should be, and from these elements, mere raw materials, something can be made that will serve a larger purpose in later school days and in life. These elements must be so mastered as to be of value later. They must become available in actual practice. In the second place there should be training in the use of self-helps. All about man today are books, papers, etc., which can be made use of by him if he is trained in the proper use of these helps. Educated man either knows, or knows where to find what he doesn't know, and how to acquire what he has found. We need to teach our youth to know some things, to know where to look for the things which he doesn't know, and to make him master of that which he has found. To be more specific in a few instances, I would have every child, upon leaving the elementary schools, know how to use the dictionary, and books of reference intelligently, and perhaps how to make the most of a library. Not only must elements and the use of self-helps be mastered, but also training in the accurate mastery of the content of the printed page deserves mention here. We are living in an age of many books, newspapers, and magazines. He who cannot get the content of the printed page rapidly and accurately loses time which is a thing of great moment. Silent reading is a matter of technique which becomes paramount to any one in busy life or in schools of higher education. This is a power which can be trained to an almost un- limited degree. This is also an age of expression as well as of acquisition. Not only must a man be taught how to acquire knowledge and information, but he must also learn to express him- self before his fellow-men. The laborer wants to be heard by his fellow-men, the farmer has occasion to discuss before his fellow-farmers the questions of the day as well as the problems of his own calling, and man in society has opinions which demand expression. This power of expression should be trained in the elementary school to a greater degree than it is at present. To this end the argument for considerable good oral reading has a place in the discussion of the technique in reading. The declamation, or the selection found in the reader, memorized and spoken intelligently, manfully and forcefully also demands more attention than it at present receives. Bearing all this in mind, we ask ourselves the question: shall the technique be of such a character as to benefit those who never go beyond the elementary school, without due consideration for those who enter high schools, academies, seminaries and colleges ? The answer is not far to seek. Generally speaking, that training in technique which makes the child by the time he leaves the elementary school practically independent of teacher and tutor in the getting of thought from the printed page is also the best training for the 562 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elemmiary youth who pursues courses of study above the elementary schools. Good training in tech- nique in the elementary work almost invariably predicates a successful career in higher education. MORAL TRAINING AN ESSENTIAL FACTOR IN ELEMEN- TARY SCHOOL WORK R. R. REEDER, HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON, N. Y. An interesting study on the history of education in this country is the shifting of emphasis from one point to another in the zig-zag course of develop- ment of the public -school curriculum. There is probably no better index to an estimate of the relative worth placed upon the various branches of study or methods of teaching them in the elementary school than the proportion of time devoted to their consideration in the programs of this Association during the fifty years of its history. In running thru the Annual Reports one soon discovers a surprising dearth of matter on the subject of the teaching of morals. Each branch of the curriculum in its manifold aspects of content and method has been treated again and again, and great progress in the making of a course of study better adapted to the needs of the children and of the times has undoubtedly resulted from these discussions. But instruction in morals, altho conceded to be of vital necessity in all educative endeavor, has never had extended or intensive treatment at the hands of this Association, and from the present status of moral instruction in our public schools as compared with any former period, it is not easy to see that any progress in this field has been made. The inconsistency involved in conceding first rank in worth and least attention in discussion to this subject of instruction may be explained by the fact that our public -school system was established as an adjunct to the home and the church at a time when both of these institutions stood for much more in the life of the child than they do today; at a time when the child was much less a ward of the state than he is today, when life was rural, homes wxre houses and lands with firesides and gardens — not tenement boxes — ^v^^hen religion was potent in the home, parental authority was unquestioned, and the church and minister functioned largely in every community. These conditions have all changed. The delinquent child of today is the product of city and town life. Out of 130,000 children in our reformatories, 98 per cent, come from cities, towns, and villages. At the House of Refuge in New York City 78 per cent, come from the tenement district. In Baltimore crime is 50 per cent, greater in the slum tenement district than in the city at large; in Chicago 260 per cent, greater. With the growth of factory industries the home as an industrial center has steadily declined. With the elimination from home life of the old-fashioned chores and daily responsibilities for home-making services and industries, has come the breaking-down of family discipline and parental control. Chil- dren can't behave if they have nothing to do. An idle child is a danger signal. Department) MORAL TRAINING IN ELEMENTARY WORK 563 Today and for the next ten weeks all over this country hundreds of thousands of idle children will be flying danger signals. Along with the weakening of home influence has come an immigration of a million or more foreigners annually — ^parents too ignorant to learn our language with children too quick to grasp the privileges of American liberty without the sense of self-control or social responsibility which safeguards it. The result upon child life of all these disintegrating factors is not only an^ increase of juvenile depravity, but a ratio of precocious crime and delinquency not known a half-century ago. While the state may have been but a passive agent in the recidivism of the home resulting from changes in social and industrial conditions, she has nevertheless been an active agent in the elimination of religious instruction .from the public school. Moral instruction in the earlier period of education in this country was inseparably bound up with religious instruction. But the state in demanding of the church "hands off" in all matters pertaining to the public -school system has brought about a gradual but effective elimination of religious instruction from public education, forced a schism between religious and moral instruction, and left the latter swinging in the air. Whatever may be true of the ability of the mature mind to form moral conceptions and act upon moral grounds independent of religious feeling or of the consciousness of a Supreme Being, it is certainly true that such ethical abstractions do not appeal to the child mind. At each step in the elimination of religious instruction from the public schools the state has assumed increased risk. The public -school system is the extension downward of the nation's police force. It is the peaceful arm of the police system before it has become necessary to don the blue coat, brass buttons, and locust wand. The only rational and adequate means at the state's command to safeguard and perpetuate herself, her laws, and her institutions, is thru the education provided for her future citizens in the public schools. The state is expending immense sums of money trying to correct grievous ills by legislation. The children of today form the state of tomorrow. Nine-tenths of these children receive their education in the public elementary schools. Character by culture thru public -school education instead of by-laws and penalties should be the aim of the state. An education which is not moral is unsafe both for the individual and for the state. With these facts before us — ^which must be patent to everyone — it certainly needs no further argument to show that moral instruction is essential to elementary education. Except for the peculiar conditions under which public elementary education has developed in this country, it would certainly be uncomplimentary to us as a body of teachers and to our progress in educational affairs to find it neces- sary to discuss at this late date such a fundamental proposition as that which forms the subject of this paper. Its appearance on the program is a confes- sion of neglect in previous years to give the teaching of morals the consideration due to such a vital interest to education and democracy. 564 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary In his paper before the National Council of Education at Los Angeles last year, Mr. Clifford W. Barnes, chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Committee on Moral Training, said : Generally speaking, systematic moral instruction may be said to have no place in our American school system, for it has only been tried to a very limited extent in a few^ small places. The organization two years ago in London of an International Committee on Moral Training, the cordial hearing given this committee by the National Education Association a year ago, the special investigation of the problem of systematic moral instruction in public schools undertaken by the Association, for which a generous appropriation was made, the establishment of an executive office in Chicago by the International Committee, and the employment of a number of experts gathering statistics as to the best work being done along the line of moral training in the schools of eight European countries, indicate an awakening of interest in the subject greater than at any previous time in the history of education in this country. An old argument, but one which is usually maintained with much vigor whenever the question of moral instruction is up for discussion, is this: The organization of the school and the various branches of study included in its curriculum are pregnant with moral content; some even go so far as to say with religious ideas and implications. In fact, one writer in a discussion of the subject says : Each study and each experience has its roots in the infinite. There is no subject in the curriculum, there is no relation in the life of the school which is not packed with poten- tial divinity, and which may not make for morality. This reminds one of that beautiful little story of the flower in the crannied wall. But alas ! most teachers see only the primrose by the river's brim. Unless we are going to get closer to the problem of moral instruction than simply to consider the implications of morality which are supposed to lie in the school organization and the curriculum, we shall but follow the course of previous discussions of the subject in teachers' conventions; namely, tarry a few minutes over the question in this great gathering of teachers and then '*like a man beholding his natural face in a glass" go our way and straight- way forget what manner of discussion it was. Something more definite, more concrete than the "potential divinity in things" is necessary in order that public -school instruction may issue in moral character. Nor would it be profitable for us to spend time defending the public school against criticism for lack of moral instruction or disclaiming responsibility for moral training on the ground that the school controls but about one-eighth of the child's time. We do great things along other and less important lines of instruction thru the public schools. Why should we not accomplish much along moral lines ? The only valid excuse, if any, which might be offered would be the fact that we are forced by the logic of events to teach morals apart from religious instruction. But there is a way around this. While the state has forbidden Department! MORAL TRAINING IN ELEMENTARY WORK 565 religious instruction — ^which practically means the use of the Bible as a text- book— it has not taken a stand against religion as such, nor the use of religious appeal, A child responds to an appeal to his religious consciousness much more readily than to his moral instincts. I have again and again had children before me who were guilty of lying or stealing and have attempted to awaken in them a strong feeling of moral responsibility and guilt, only to be met with an armed and stubborn indifference; but a simple turn from the moral to the religious aspect of the deed, from the abstract, ethical principle to the offended love and justice of a Supreme Being, rarely fails to bring forth an emotional response, a confession of guilt, and a sense of humility which furnish a basis for a new start. Is this teaching religion ? If it is I would that every teacher might be guilty of it. But there is large room for moral instruction in a field in which the religious motive functions but indirectly or not at all. I refer to instruction in sex, sanitary, and health knowledge, in social manners and amenities, in the field of sport, etc. That which reaches the child thru his experience is tenfold more a part of him than that which comes to him thru mere ideas or sensory stimulus. One moral experience is worth a score of formal lessons in morality. One of the boys in our garden class stole radishes from another boy's garden and was caught in the act by two or three of his companions. All of the gardeners were at once assembled ; the boy and his case were set before them. A motion was made that the boy forfeit his garden. It was one of the best in the plot, but by his deed he had forfeited his right to its ownership. The motion was unanimously carried. When the assembly was asked if there was any further business concerning the matter, a motion was made that this boy be required to weed all of the other gardens. This motion was not entertained by the chair, but would no doubt have carried if a vote had been taken on it: First, because, on account of recent rains the gardens were weedy; second, because of natural laziness in relation to such work as weeding gardens; and third, because the thief was an unpopular boy. Soon after the walls and ceilings of one of the boys' cottages in our Orphan- age had been decorated, a boy made with a nail an ugly scratch about ten feet long thru the paint on the wall of one of the dormitories. He was reported at once and brought to the ofl&ce by other boys of the cottage with the request that he be "everlastingly licked." But they were soon convinced that there was no connection between his offense and a ''licking." They were then given some instruction as to principles of punishment with special reference to the fact that punishment should bear a natural relation to the offense and that it should, when possible, take the form of an indeterminate sentence. The matter was referred back to the boys for further deliberation . The decision reached and presented the following day was that the boy should sleep in the attic and go to bed in the dark until such a time as it was thought safe for him to return to the dormitory. He was kept sleeping in the attic for about six weeks. 566 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary Several interesting inferences may be drawn from such instances as these: First, that children are capable of rational action upon moral questions; second, that it is unsafe to give absolute authority into their hands as has been attempted in some of the city school-government schemes; third, that par- ticipation in government under proper restriction is an essential factor in the training of the future citizens of a democracy; fourth, helping to discipline and govern others promotes self-government, for not one case of stealing from gardens has been reported, or, to our knowledge, occurred since this case, which happened three years ago. The damage to the wall was repaired and no similar case of vandalism in the cottage has occurred for about the same period. Each new boy coming into the cottage comes up against a moral leverage with respect to certain home-making refinements and industrial standards which he cannot resist. He is seized and shaped to the molds by forces which he cannot withstand. The same may be true with respect to moral standards in any school if -the teacher works wisely and diligently to establish them. Public sentiment may become as potent a factor for moral uplift among children as among adults. Almost unlimited possibilities for good lie in it, but it is comparatively a neglected field in school discipline. Two of my children attended a high school in Massachusetts where there was almost no cheating or cribbing and what little existed, was frowned down upon by the students — the tone of the school was against it. Later on they attended a high school in another state where there was no sentiment against cribbing, and the practice was very prevalent. I am confident if the garden thief and the cottage vandal had been dealt with as individuals only, other similar cases would have followed no matter what the punishment might have been. The first step in the movement for moral instruction in the schools is the making of a place for it on the regular program. Until this is done it will be to little purpose that we devote time in teachers' meetings to a discussion of the subject. It is about as reasonable to expect spelling or arithmetic to receive sufficient attention thru indirect instruction and incidental attention or applica- tion, as to assume that moral instruction will be effectually imparted thru the observance of the regular school virtues such as silence, order, punctuality, etc., and the so-called moral content of the various branches of the curriculum. Direct as well as indirect instruction in morals should be given in our public schools. The fear of making a moral lesson or application too direct or too obvious has become a fetich with many teachers, and the result often is that no moral instruction whatever is given. The three following cases which have come within my experience are typical of many other similar ones. William — an undersized fourteen-year-old boy — ^when asked why he was so small for his age, told me he could not account for his lack of physical development and vigor unless it was due to the smoking of cigarettes from about seven years of age until brought to the Orphanage School. He said 1 Department) MORAL TRAINING IN ELEMENTARY WORK 567 he did not know the habit would injure him. He is a good boy, trustworthy and well disposed, and would no doubt never have formed the habit had he been properly instructed, Laura, now fourteen years of age, brought with her a vulgar bowery song three years ago when she entered the school, which she immediately pro- ceeded to teach to the other little girls. The song was brought to the office by an older girl. The child showed little knowledge of the meaning of the song when questioned about it, dropped it at once when instructed concerning it, and is now one of the most refined girls in the school. Kenneth, at fifteen years of age, told me what a hard struggle he had had to break up the habit of self-abuse after my first conference with the boys on the subject some three years before, also that he had not known the practice was wrong or would work injury to him until so instructed. School nurses and settlement workers find in thousands of homes deplorable ignorance concerning dietary, sanitation, and the care of children and the sick, resulting in ill-health and a high mortality rate. So may teachers find among school children such distressing ignorance concerning morals as results every year in a record of juvenile delinquency, vice, and crime, all of which could be greatly reduced by proper instruction. DISCUSSION Fassett a. Cotton, state superintendent of public instruction, Indiana. — In the dis- cussion of the paper I shall confine my remarks to the consideration of two points: the teacher the greatest factor in the school, and the nature of school work. These will .be considered as factors in moral training. The greatest factor in any school is the teacher. Indeed, the entire success of the school as an institution depends upon this factor. The greatest problem in connection with school education has always been to secure competent teachers, and this will always be the greatest problem. The qualities that make for success in teaching are exactly the same as those required for success in any calling. These are: (i) Personality; that is, the quality of being some- body, oneself, and at the same time recognizing that there are others. It carries with it the ability to meet people and to take part in the affairs of the community. An ideal teacher presupposes the highest standard of morality. In discussing this standard it must be remembered that the real teacher is always more, much more, than a mere instructor. While consciously imparting knowledge the teacher is unconsciously teaching infinitely more than the mere facts involved in the subjects in hand. Imitation is one of the strongest factors in education. All unconsciously the children take on the physical bearing of the teacher, his manner of speech, his mode of dress, his ways of thinking, his very character. The teacher becomes a model of the children whether he would or no. It is not suflScient then that he be a good instructor merely. He must possess that subtle something called personality which by its very presence teaches. Recognizing this as true, the people, almost as a matter of fact» havp come to set up a higher standard of conduct for teachers than for others. This is perfectly proper. A teacher's conduct is the evidence of his character; therefore the necessity of genuineness in the teacher, who is the guide, the inspiration, the source of the life of the school, cannot be overestimated. The school will be just what the teacher is — it can be no more. 568 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary The last chapter in Glimpses of Child Nature, a Httle book written by the author of Jean Mitchell's School, describes six types of teachers. There is the profuse and gushing little entertainer who doesn't know the difference between a nursery and a school. There is the snappish, ironical, sarcastic, suspicious tyrant who seems to think the chief end of teaching is to humiliate the children. There is the nervous, energetic, worried teacher, sometimes really sincere, but wearing herself and her pupils out. There is the self-satisfied, placid, deliberate, lazy teacher. There is the "best disciphnarian in the city," who has no time to waste in teaching. Then, there is the genuine, womanly woman, with the missionary spirit, with a genius born to teach, with a personality whose presence brings sunshine, whose words cheer, and whose smile is a benediction. We have seen all of them. What a misfortune it is that the children must come under the influence of the first five ! What a misfortune that all children cannot enjoy the presence of the sixth type ! The teacher makes the school what it is — a joy or a sorrow to childhood. We must have scholarship in our schools; but with it we must have men and women. The teacher owes it to himself and his pupils to be just as true, just as cheerful, just as genuine as possible every day. (2) Scholarship, the knowledge of the subjects he is to teach or of the things he is to do. A teacher's knowledge of a subject is quite comprehensive. It includes a knowledge of the facts themselves, a knowledge of the things that make the facts a subject, a knowl- edge of the nature of the mind that is to learn the facts, and a knowledge of all the con- ditions under which the facts are to be learned. (3) Skill in presentation, or the ability to do things. This carries with it the power to take the initiative in school work. Combining these three qualities there should be the simple common-sense that enables one to adjust himself to any and all conditions that may arise. With these qualities present a great deal may be done in the way of teaching moraHty. But this can only be done by teaching eternal principles or right conduct. It is a question of making each individual realize completely the " ethical self." This involves the question of personality already referred to. He only can be moral who, in every act he does, is conscious that there are others. Acts are moral, immoral, and unmoral, and education should make each individual able to discriminate. Persons able to discriminate can be developed, and this, I take it, is the work of the teacher in the realm of morality. But this must be done largely thru living. The daily concrete acts are to be the means; the people cannot be legislated into being moral. For example, temperance cannot be taught by showing pictures of alcohol-inflamed stomachs. Temperance is a broader, subtler thing than is indicated in so-called "scien- tific temperance." The story of Daniel's right living is a better temperance lesson on the positive side than all the negative lessons that can ever be taught. Morality must be grown by feeding upon positive fundamental truths. The child ought to be taught to use his senses in nature that he may take on habits of observation. He is to be taught to express in one way and another what he has observed that he may get skill in doing things and habits of industry. Out of such experience comes good judgment, which is also habit, and is the very essence of morality. By constantly practicing those things which he would do and be, one builds into himself, by a sort of human immanence, the character he would possess. The man who learns to get things just right and true in the physical world and whom nothing else satisfies cannot be a bad man, so closely do exactness and uprightness run together. Indeed, physical and spiritual training are so closely related that separate consideration is almost impossible. It is recognized that doing things physically carries with the doing exactly the same growth of character or moral power that doing things spiritually does. Too much attention cannot be given to the moral training of children. Indeed, it is agreed that the supreme end of all education is manhood and womanhood, and that all subjects taught and all things done in the school are but means to this end. Children are Department! MATHEMATICS IN THE GRADES 569 to be trained so that thought and act will withstand automatically every temptation. A judgment that cannot err is the only positive safeguard in life. President Eliot says: The school should teach every child, by precept, by example, and by every illustration its reading can supply that the supreme attainment for any individual is vigor and loveliness of character. Industry, persistence, veracity in word and act, gentleness, and disinterested- ness should be made to thrive and blossom during school life in the hearts of the children who bring these virtues from their homes well started, and should be planted and tended in the less fortunate children. Furthermore, the pupils should be taught that what is virtue in one human being is virtue in any group of human beings, large or small — a village, a city, or a nation; that the ethical principles which should govern an empire are precisely the same as those which should govern an individual; and that selfishness, greed, falseness, brutality, and ferocity are as hateful and degrading in a multitude as they are in a single savage. After all, the surest way for a boy to be somebody is for him to learn to do something well. The dominant instinct of childhood is that of action. The healthful child must be doing something, and all of education in the home and school could be narrowed down to^ skillful direction of this energy. No child is naturally bad, but the child who is very much alive may shortly develop wrong tendencies if he is not directed in right channels. The solution of the problem lies in the utilization of all home and industrial experience to build into the child habits of industry. The boy and the girl must be taught to do things for their salvation. A system of education that leaves one without the power to undertake and accomplish things in life is worse than worthless. The parent jvho permits his boys and girls to grow up without teaching them to help themselves, is, to say the least, very unkind to them, and this unkind- ness may easily shade into criminal neglect. If this nation is to endure all of the people must be educated. They must be intelli- gent, temperate, industrious, skillful and constantly employed if they are to be prosperous and happy. These are the qualities that belong to real education. MATHEMATICS IN THE GRADES ROBERT J. ALEY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA Mathematics is a universal subject of study. It has long had a very prominent place in the curricula of elementary, secondary, and higher schools. It has had more time than any other subject, unless it be language. The time and energy given to it speak eloquently of its value. The place of mathe- matics in the school course is in no danger. The friends of the subject, how- ever, can do good service by calling attention to the reasons why it is in the course of study, to a better arrangement of its material in the curriculum, and to improved methods of teaching it. The course of study will be more reason- able and the teaching more rational if both are based upon the nature of the subject taught. In general, a subject has no place in a course of study unless it furnishes the student with useful knowledge and also contributes to his culture. Mathe- matics justifies itself as a subject of school study on both of these grounds. It would be difficult to find any subject more closely related to every-day life than elementary mathematics. The child does not live long until he feels the need of quantifying and numbering his experiences. He must know the common mathematical experiences of his fellows in order to be on good terms iwith them. A careful analysis shows that but few of the experiences of 570 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary life are wholly free from mathematical notions. Should all mathematical ideas be eliminated, factories would be closed, commerce destroyed, and business stopped. Such simple matters as telling the time, or buying four pounds of sugar, would be entirely impossible. A subject so closely connected with the common every-day affairs of men must ever be a matter of school study. On the side of culture, mathematics is able to do some things for the student better than they can be done by any other subject. Being a pure science, the science of necessary conclusions, it early introduces the learner to organized knowledge, to logical thinking, and to necessary inferences. In mathematics conclusions are not made because they are pleasing or desirable, but because they are inevitable. The nature of mathematics is such as to train the student •away from the formation of conclusions to buy gold-bricks of any style. If the mathematical type of thinking were more common, the get-rich-quick concerns would be less common. The delusion of 50 per cent, dividends on stock that cost 10 per cent, cannot long remain in the mind of the man who thinks mathematically. The mathematical form of thinking is of great importance. It is funda- mental, for it has been developed in every civilization. It may be described as consisting of three parts: first, the careful observation of facts; second, the application to these facts of known principles; and third, the making of the inference that facts and principles compel. No one ignorant of this form of thought is either safe or educated. The nature of mathematics is such that it compels attention. No one can master its secrets unless he gives himself wholly to the task. The immature student soon finds that wool gathering in mathematical work is costly. In adding a column of figures, if the mind wanders at the haK-way point, the penalty of doing it all over is immediately assessed and collected. In long division, the least wavering at the moment that the quotient figure is about to be determined is disastrous. It means going back and doing it all over again. This happens everywhere in mathematics. For every act of inattention the penalty is immediate and certain. The certainty of the penalty soon brings respect for the law, and the student begins to resist the pull of outside forces. He learns to attend. The course in mathematics for the grades should be formed so as to meet the needs of the child by contributing knowledge that he ought to know, and by giving power that he should have. The great fundamental storehouse of mathematics is arithmetic. It is at the bottom historically, logically, and psychologically. From the necessity of the case it must form the main part of the grade course in mathematics. The grade course should be made for the grades and not for the high school. For this reason formal algebra and geometry have no place in the grade course. The algebra of the equation and much concrete geometry should be in the course. There is no longer any good reason why either teacher or pupil should shy at an equation or dodge a simple geometrical fact. It should be remembered that mathematics is in the singular Department] MATHEMATICS IN THE GRADES 571 number. No definite boundaries separate its subjects. Arithmetic, algebra, and geometry overlap and interlace. Much of arithmetic becomes easy and intensely interesting by the use of the equation or by the application of some simple concrete geometry. In some of our best textbooks both of these ideas are included, but generally in a supplement or in separate chapters. These ideas should be embodied in the arithmetic as an integral part of it. Much of the fundamental part of arithmetic must be remembered. The reasoning of the later parts is greatly hindered unless there is the material for reason in the memory. No power of the mind is more active in the early school life than the memory. During the first four years of school life, normal children take delight in exercising this faculty. The course in arithmetic should use these years for gaining mastery of counting, and of all the funda- mental relations of numbers. In many of the best schools of Europe, nothing beyond the fundamental operations, except the simplest sort of work with fractions, is attempted. In many of our schools we have been too ambitious and have attempted work entirely too difficult. It would be far better to make the arithmetic of the first four years fit more closely to the nature and needs of the child. Upon his entrance to school, indeed, several years earlier, the child has need of numbers and derives keen pleasure from multiplying his number experiences. Number opens for him a new soul window and gives him a wider outlook. Work with number should therefore begin in the first grade. If argument for this statement is needed, one finds it in the experience of Pestalozzi and in the success of thousands of his disciples. It has been urged in opposition that the time during the first and second years of school fife could be used to better advantage in doing other things. This may be true, but the better things have not yet been found. The task of finding a substitute for number work that will prove more interesting, and give more valuable returns, is so hard that a thoughtful man will hardly undertake it. In the first and second grades the work should center about counting and number applications to very simple experiences. In some schools this work is made incidental. The objection to such a program is that it generally becomes accidental, and nothing of value is accomplished. The work of the first two years should include systematic exercises in counting by ones, twos, and threes, forward and backward, acquaintance with number symbols to at least 100, and the number combinations involved in the experiences common to this age. It need not be said that most of this work should be concrete. In the counting, however, the child soon gets away from the need of actual things, and counts from the sheer joy that the rhythm in the counting gives. The child should have the number symbols, because they give him needed tools and make it easier for him to be kept busy rationally. In the third and fourth years counting should be extended to include counting by nines, tables of the fundamental operations learned, the commonly used facts of our system of weights and measures mastered, skill gained in speedy 572 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary and accurate addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, mastery of the meaning and use of the few commonly occurring fractions attained, and the ability gained to apply the tool, mathematics, to the simple problems of buying, selling, and measuring. Incidentally, and not accidentally, thru the first few years, acquaintance should be formed with the common geometric forms, these simple properties learned, and number applied in determining easy boundaries, areas, and contents. The interest of the child is so closely related to physical activity, that a large part of the mathematical material of the first four years should come thru the work that the child does. Many of the problems that he solves should be made from data that he himself has gathered. This data may come from his other studies, from measurements that he has been directed to make, and from experiences at home, at the grocery, or in the shop. Whatever relates number to the experiences of life will help in keeping up the interest. With the fifth school year the more formal side of arithmetic should be begun. The child has now reached a stage in his development when he can begin to appreciate more formal statements and sustain interest in more complicated reasonings. The transition should be gradual. The more complicated problems should be seen to arise easily from the experiences of home, farm, shop, and business. The work of the last four years of school in the grades should include fractions, common and decimal, percentage as used in profit and loss, divi- dends, assessments, taxes, gains in wealth, population, etc., simple interest, with principal, time, and rate given, ratio and simple proportion, mensuration applied to all commonly occurring forms, square and cube root by factoring, square root formally, problems of analysis, and sufficient algebra to insure the easy use of the equation. The obsolete and needless parts of arithmetic should be omitted. Many of the recent textbooks have done well in omissions. Perhaps none of them has quite succeeded in getting rid of all the useless lumber of the past. There are sufficient fields of present-day arithmetical application to use all the school time of the child. Giving time to the dead things of the past is not only needless, but very harmful. Our system of weights and measures is bad enough at its best. All obsolete and unusual units should be omitted. Such tables as Apothecary and Troy are for the druggist and the jeweler, and have no place in school study. The addition of several numbers, each consisting of miles, furlongs, rods, yards, feet, and inches, is never required outside f)f an arithmetic, and it should not be required there. Long problems requiring reductions thru three or four units are simply useless refinements of cruelty, and should be relegated at once to the junk-pile of oblivion. Greatest common divisor by long division has no application outside of a book, and besides, no pupil in the grades can comprehend it. It should be omitted and the factoring method alone taught. The same is true of least common multiple. Its applications are simple, and the factoring method is sufficient. In fractions much time could be saved by limiting the work to Department) MATHEMATICS IN THE GRADES 573 fractions of frequent occurrence. Entirely too much time is spent in reducing fractions to uncommon denominators. In percentage and interest most of the indirect cases are of but Httle practical importance. They should not be treated arithmetically, but should be handled by means of the equation. In this way they become interesting, easily understood and readily retained. Such applications of percentage as involve fractional parts of bonds and shares of stock and the inverse case of commission and brokerage should be omitted. Compound and annual interest and partial payments, except in very simple form, should be omitted. The subject of exchange, as usually presented, is far more complicated than the reality. Only its simple business side should be presented. Square root has little application and cube root still less. Omit the latter entirely and teach the former as simply as possible. Other subjects that should be omitted are circulating decimals, true discount, equation of payments, complicated problems, partnership, compound propor- tion, and all business problems which do not conform to present usage. The course should be planned and organized with the following very definite ends in view : a) Accuracy and reasonable speed in the performance of all fundamental operations. b) Power to add or subtract mentally any two numbers less than one hundred. c) Skill and ease in the use of short cuts, especially those involving the use of aliquot parts of one hundred. d) Complete mastery of simple fractions in all useful relations. e) Absolute mastery of the use of the decimal point in all operations with decimals. /) Acquaintance with business forms and customs, as found in stores, in shops, in banks and on farms, and ability to use mathematics in answering questions that arise in these various forms of business. g) A good acquaintance with the simple equation and the habit of using it in all arithmetical problems where its use is advantageous. h) The mastery of the common useful facts of geometry which may be attained by concrete or inductive methods. i) Skill in straight thinking in the presence of complicated data. However valuable the study of mathematics may be, and however perfect the course of study, the best results will not be attained unless there be a good teacher. The teacher is always the most important factor in the school life of the child. Buildings, apparatus, textbooks, and course of study may all be ehminated, but as long as there is teacher and child, good educational results are possible. A very essential equipment of the teacher is wide knowledge of mathe- matics. He who knows arithmetic only, does not even know that. Arithmetic is a part of the science of mathematics that is not seen in its beauty and bearing unless it is looked at from the vantage-point of a more advanced part of the subject. Algebra and geometry throw much light upon arithmetic;, because they have their roots in it, and because their elements are a part of it. Wide knowl- edge of mathematics enables the teacher to judge the relative values of different topics, to see the logical structure of the whole subject, to anticipate and prepare 574 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary for difficulties, to recognize the recurrence of old truths in new dress, to be fertile in illustrations, and to grade the presentation to the needs of the class. It is a mistake, often repeated, to suppose that wide knowledge will cause the teacher to teach over the heads of his pupils. Over-the-head teaching is usually a cloak for dense ignorance of the subject. The teacher has not yet been found who has stood before his class embarrassed because he knew too much about his subject. The teacher needs some pedagogy of mathematics. He needs to re-think his arithmetic with a view of teaching it. He needs also to be able to put himself in the place of the learner. This requires considerable knowledge of child psychology. The ordinary pedagogical preparation required of all teachers is the foundation for the mathematical teacher. His particular preparation consists in fitting his psychology to the subject of mathematics, particularly to arithmetic. The early part of arithmetic must of necessity be concrete and inductive. To be interesting it must be connected with familiar experiences. The child, however, soon gains the power of abstracting number from objects and finds keen delight in dealing with number apart from objects. There is a time when it is necessary to connect some sort of a story with five. The teacher who continues this number story-telling very long, not only does an extremely silly thing, but a very harmful thing as well. Growth is toward the abstract and the symbol. This growth is greatly retarded and may be entirely stopped by continuing too long with the concrete. The guide here, as elsewhere, must be the judgment founded on common-sense. In the more advanced parts of arithmetic the problem is the most important factor in the development of the student. It is the exercise ground for the mathematical form of thinking. The teacher should see to it that the problem yields all its worth to the student. He should teach the student to attack the problem in the following systematic way: a) Read the problem and thereby get in mind all the given relations and the unknown things to be determined. h) Think — that is call up in mind the mathematical principles needed and decide how they are to be applied. c) Make a symbolical statement of the solution. d) Make the required calculations and verify. Good teaching will lead the student to apply this form of solution to all problems. There is no better whetstone of wit than mental arithmetic. Good teaching will restore mental arithmetic to the place of honor and power that it once held. It cultivates mental alertness, quick and accurate thinking, and the most direct method of attack. If a few minutes each day were spent in mental arithmetic thruout the grade work, much better results would be attained. Finally, good teaching requires time, care, and patience. Ideas are not fixed in a moment. They must have time to germinate. Care must be taken DepartmemJ MATHEMATICS IN THE GRADES 575 in cultivating the ideas, so that vigorous growth may be possible. Patience is needed to enable the teacher frequently to step aside and wait, for in mathe- matics the purpose of the teacher is to make himself useless to the student. DISCUSSION I. C. McNeill, superintendent of schools, Memphis, Tenn. — In discussing the ques- tion of numbers, or arithmetic in the primary grades, a working-basis must be assumed or agreed upon. I take it that as to what should be taught there is a wide difiference of opinion. The legal age at which children may enter school is a variable factor in the dif- ferent states. Hence, what may be required or advised for children in Tennessee, where the legal age for entering school is six years, would be too strong for the children of Wis- consin, or any other state with similar laws, where children may enter while they are still tender infants. For the reason suggested, the standard of requirements cannot be uniform in the vari- ous states and it is unwise to attempt to make it so. Time spent upon a discussion of the practical side of the extent of the work in the lowest grades is not well spent in this Association. The course of study in the elementary grades should be framed to make the attack from the concrete side. When the sensational element has entered the minds of the children, it should be kept alive by use. The aim to make pupils become quick, accurate, and self-reliant in dealing with the elementary arithmetical tools, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, should characterize the work. In arithmetic, as in other lines of study, percepts, concepts, and necessary relations are strengthened by vigorous but rational use. The pupils who become free in the processes are not bound in attacking new and more complicated concrete relations as they appear in succession in a well-planned course. As to the plan of the study of primary numbers the question is not so complicated. The movement of the mind in grasping primary number ideas and the relation between them is a problem of rational method. Any method to be of value must rest upon the capacity of the pupils taught and a knowledge of how the mind works in making a union between the thing and the symbol used to represent it, as well as how relations between quantities or numbers are firmly and correctly established. There is often a great waste in elementary number work because some teachers, who are not imbued with the fundamental conceptions of numbers and arithmetical relations, fail to stimulate the pupils in a way which will cause them to make the initial attack with sufficient vigor to accomplish something in each new lesson. Partially understanding the subject, the teacher, imbued with the idea that arithmetic is a fad, does not see the end to be reached from the beginning. Her pupils "mark time" and in the course of events reformers ( ?) with no regard for the needs of the children attempt to banish number work from the primary grades. A few "old-time" principles which should bring about conscious and habitual reac- tions are: The idea must precede its s)nnbol. Close observation makes correct comparison possible. Sense impressions precede thought relations. Rational movement proceeds from the known to the related unknown; from the simple to the complex; and from the concrete to the abstract. First impressions must be clear, distinct, and vivid in order to leave correct mental images by which later impressions may be apperceived. The first problem should look to the last thru all that come between: The development of each section of work should furnish a foundation upon which the new mental images that immediately follow may stand. A constantly increasing demand upon the pupils' mental activity should go hand in hand with his progressive gain in power. 576 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Elementary How to prepare the lesson is the most important question to the pupils. They cannot work intelligently unless they understand the aim of each day's study. The function of the teacher is to guide activity. Learning is the pupil's act. Before an intelligent assign- ment of a lesson can be made the teacher must consider carefully just what steps are new and how far the pupils are prepared by what they already know for the advanced work. In assigning the lesson the teacher should impress upon the pupils the particular end in view; and should make sure that they understand just what they are to accomplish and by what plans and devices they may best succeed. The next day's recitation will test the understanding of such directions and the faithfulness of a class in following them. In determining the pupils' preparation to begin a new line of work the skilled teacher will approach the learners on their highest plane of old work, directly related to the new material to be considered. If they move from this position with ease and freedom, it is good evidence that the lower phases of the subject are well organized in their minds. If they do not show a mastery here, it is well to descend to the next lower phase, or to a place where they are able to stand firm. Diagrams are of great value in teaching fractions and all other relations in which the spacial element may enter. As a rule, it is a good plan to leave diagrams on the board for constant use until the pupils can readily visualize them. When the diagrams can be held in the minds without too much eflFort, it is not helpful to attention or study to keep them before the pupils. In their study it is of great value to have pupils picture or represent new conditions in diagrams. Mensuration is not comprehended until pupils, thru practice and test, perceive the relations. Explanations should always be given in simple, direct sentences. It is sometimes a good plan to have one pupil tell the story of a problem in part and then have another com- plete the statement of the process by which the correct result is reached. When, by questioning or being shown, the backward pupils have learned how to dispose of the material in hand, they should be called upon to show that they can take all the steps leading to the correct end. A good test is to change the condition somewhat and then ask for a solution. In bringing a pupil to an understanding of a problem or a principle the learner must always go back to what was known as a starting-point. As we look ahead to plan what should cause effort to move without loss of time or wastQ of energy, the question: What is to be done with this day's lesson in elementary arithmetic ? becomes both practical and philosophical. DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY EDUCATION SECRETARY'S MINUTES OFFICERS President — Gilbert B. Morrison, principal, William McKinley High School, St. Louis, Mo. First Vice-President — H. H. Cully, principal, Glenville High School, Cleveland, Ohio. Second Vice-President — Fletcher Durrell, Department of Mathematics, Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, N. J. Secretary — Solomon Weimer, assistant principal, Cenplal High School, Cleveland, Ohio. FIRST SESSION.— Tuesday Afternoon, June 30 The Department of Secondary Education met at Epworth Memorial Methodist Episco- pal Church, Cleveland, at 2:30 p.m. President Gilbert B. Morrison read an address on "The High-School Situation." J. Remsen Bishop, principal East High School, Detroit, Mich., presented a paper on "A Shifting of Ideals Respecting the Efficiency of Formal Culture Studies for All Pupils." This paper was discussed by George D. Pettee, principal. University School, Cleveland, Ohio, and David S. Snedden, Teachers College, New York, N. Y. "How Shall We Assist Our Pupils When and Only When They Need It?" was the subject of a paper by H. E. Kratz, superintendent of schools, Calumet, Mich. The discussion of this paper was opened by W. H.- Holmes, superintendent of schools, Westerly, R. I. General discussion followed. SECOND SESSION.— Wednesday Morning, July i The department met in joint session with the Department of Technical Education to consider the topic: "The Cosmopolitan High-School Curriculum." This was presented from the standpoint of colleges of engineering by W. T. Magruder, professor of mechanical engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus; from the standpoint of the high school by Spencer R. Smith, principal of Wendell Phillips High School, Chicago. The discussion was introduced by Wells L. Griswold, principal of Rayen High School, Youngstown, Ohio. Upon motion of Spencer R. Smith, the following resolution was adopted: Resolved, That a commission of seven be named by the Department of Secondary Education to make a study of the conditions surrounding our city high schools with a view to the development of a rational system of constants, the reorganization of the electives on the basis of study value, and the preparation of a curriculum that may be considered basal in the organization of a system of study for the cosmopolitan high school. Further, that this commission co-operate with a similar committee from the Depart- ment of Technical Education and with such other bodies as may be interested in the work of secondary schools. And, further, that this commission be herewith empowered to invite the co-operation of other organizations thru invitation to appoint committees of conference. THIRD SESSION.— Thursday Morning, July 2 The department met in Epworth Memorial Church, at 9:30 A. M. A paper on "School Athletics" was read by Malcolm Kenneth Gordon, St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H. As a part of the discussion of this topic the report of a committee to the Board of School Commissioners of Indianapolis was read by its chairman, C. E Emerich, Indianapolis. General discussion followed. The report of the Committee on a Six- Year Course was presented by Eugene W. Lyttle, inspector. State Education Department, Albany, New York. Aft»r reading the report, Mr. Lyttle moved its adoption, which was carried unanimously. 577 578 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary On motion of Mr. Stuart the committee was continued in order that it might make further investigation and report later. E. W. Lyttle. — It became apparent from the discussions yesterday that the high- school principals here assembled strongly favor the cosmopolitan rather than the differ- entiated high school. The arguments advanced were founded not on theory simply but on facts and thoughtful experience. Fundamentally our high schools are political, moral, and social agencies. Incidentally they should train for vocation; but their largest func- tion is training for life. Separation into technical, business, and preparatory high schools inevitably encourages class distinctions, causes loss of social sympathy, and is not condu- cive to good scholarship. Moreover differentiated schools make it far more difficult to correct mistakes, while differentiated courses render such corrections easy. Differentiated high schools also cause great loss of the students' time in travel to and fro. In view of these considerations, I have been asked by many principals to introduce the following resolution: Resolved, That it is the sense of the Secondary Department of the National Education Association that the building of differentiated high schools should be discouraged and that the introduction of differentiated courses in all large high schools should be encouraged. The resolution was unanimously adopted. The Committee on Nomination, consisting of the following: Edward L. Harris, Chair- man, W. H. Stuart, E. W. Coy, reported as follows: President, J. Stanley Brown, principal of Township High School, Joliet, 111. First Vice-President, S, A. Underwood, principal of Westfort High School, Kansas City, Mo. Second Vice-President, Wm. H. Smiley, principal. East Side High School, Denver, Colo, Secretary, Solomon Weimer, assistant principal, Central High School, Cleveland, Ohio. The report of the committee was adopted. The department then adjourned to meet in round-table conferences in the afternoon. Solomon Weimer, Secretary ROUND-TABLE CONFERENCES Mathematics: Leader, H. E. Slaught, professor of mathematics, the University of Chicago. The following program was presented: 1. The Teaching of Algebra in Its Relation to the Present Educational Trend — Thomas K. McKiNNEY, professor of mathematics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. Discussion by John C. Stone, associate professor of mathematics, State Normal College, Ypsilanti, Mich. 2. The Teaching of Geometry in Its Relation to the Present Educational Trend — William Betz, teacher of mathematics. East High School, Rochester, N. Y. Discussion by Richard S. Beardsley, teacher of mathematics, Englewood High School, Chicago, 111. It was moved and carried that the chair appoint a committee to combine the various syllabi on geometry into one. Allen H. Hitchcock, Secretary Foreign Languages: Leader, Ernest Wolf, teacher of German, McKinley High School, St, Louis, Mo. The following program was presented: 1. Objective Aids in the Teaching of Modern Languages. Paper by Mr. Wolf. Dis- cussion by Adolph Kramer, teacher of German, South High School, Cleveland, Ohio , 2, The Teaching of Ancient Languages by Modern Methods — ^W, L, Carr, teacher of ancient languages, Shortridge High School, Indianapolis, Ind,; Julia Benson, teacher of Latin, Yeatman High School, St. Louis, Mo, English: Leader, Ernest C. Noyes, teacher of English, High School, Pittsburg, Pa. Papers were presented as follows: Department] THE HIGH-SCHOOL SITUATION 579 1. Ideals versus Realities in High-School English — Mr. Noyes; Sara Van Metre, Manual Training High School, Kansas City, Mo. 2. Some Practical Problems in the Teaching of English — Alfred M. Hitchock, teacher of English, High School, Hartford, Conn.; Genevieve Apgar, teacher of English, The Teachers College, St. Louis, Mo. General discussion followed. Milton Frye, Secretary Science: Leader, Milo H. Stuart, principal of Cleveland High School, St, Paul, Minn. Papers were presented upon the topic: The Laboratory Notebook — ^What Should It Contain and How Should It Be Made ? as follows: Physics — ^William M. Butler, St. Louis, Mo. Botany — Milo H. Stuart, St. Paul, Minn. Zoology — Tracy H. Holmes, Chicago, 111. General discussion followed each paper. Ernest E. Rau, Secretary PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS THE HIGH-SCHOOL SITUATION GILBERT B. MORRISON, PRINCIPAL OF MCKINLEY HIGH SCHOOL, ST. LOUIS, MO. The secondary school on account of its position in our educational system, its intimate relation with the elementary school on one side, and the college on the other, and on account of the demands put upon it as a fitting school for life, has become an arena of diverse opinions and ideas. These ideas embody social, pedagogical, and economic conditions which make the high school the main center for departure and differentiation. Our opportunities were never so great as they are now — opportunities which come from the willingness of the people to be taxed for high-school purposes. This willingness is expressing itself chiefly in school buildings which mark great improvement in convenience, sanitation, and architectural effectiveness, and an attempt even to make them monumental in their appear- ance is not infrequent. With the universal consent of the people to be taxed for whatever is necessary for the support of the high school, has come the architect who has employed his talent in giving us buildings more convenient and more beautiful than we have ever known before. We have passed into what we may properly call the era of monumental schoolhouses. But there is still room for improvement. The architect, exposed as he is to the temptation of emphasizing architec- tural effectiveness, has neglected certain well-known physical laws which, if observed, would supply to our buildings perfectly pure air. In the great improvement in ventilation which the past twenty years have witnessed, the point of bringing to the classrooms pure warm air in sufficient quantity has been reached, but it has not been properly distributed and utilized. Owing to this failure, we are still breathing vitiated air, highly diluted' with fresh air, instead of utihzing the fresh air in an unmixed statCi Within the past few years the principles of ventilation have been appHed in the Capitol building at Washington, D. C, and within the past year in k church in St. Louis, Mo. 580 ' NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary A systematic study of this question by this department might, it seems to me, do much toward stimulating a general interest in the direction of a much-needed improvement. I would suggest therefore the appointment of a competent committee to investigate this need. The general situation in our high schools justifies a conservative optimism. Considering the vast increase in population, the correspondingly larger enroll- ment, the growing tendency to specialize, the extension outward of the course of study adding many new studies to the curriculum, and the large number of teachers needed to meet these growing demands, the quality of the work is probably as good as could reasonably be expected. We are, I think, safe in saying that our schools are better today than at any previous time in the history of this country. But this optimism should not blind us to our faults. Speaking generally, I would say that notwithstanding our careful grading and our complex machinery of organization, excellent as they are in their way, the improvement in teaching has not kept pace with the improvement in buildings. It must be confessed that the schools of today lack the vitalizing leaven of individuality. The school buildings of the past could bear no com- parison with those of the present. This has been an achievement of wealth and architecture, but we find no such achievement in pedagogy. While good teaching may be found in certain places, we have an army of teachers, many of them college graduates, drawing a moderate salary, going through with the purely conventional processes of assigning lessons, hearing them, giving examinations, and measuring their standards by the number of pupils they fail to pass, teachers who are giving much attention to their subjects and little attention to their pupils. But where are our great teachers of today ? Where are our Comeniuses, our Pestalozzis, our Froebels, or even our David Pages and our Horace Manns ? The conditions at the present time are, it seems to me, rather unfavorable to the development of the most effective teaching. The present social standard by which merit is measured by wealth has, to a considerable extent, permeated the schools and it has come to be the popular belief that the cost of a school is the measure of its efficiency. The crystallization of our schools into great systems has a tendency to reduce schools and school men to a dead level of characterless uniformity. We have in our schools thousands of teachers doing lifeless routine work because of their love for wife and babies, and their fear of the steam roller — teachers who, with the proper encouragement and freedom, would become really efficient forces. Passing now from these general reflections on those fundamental conditions which form the real background of our work, permit me to refer briefly to some of the questions which are at the present time calling for solution, some of which will occupy the time of the excellent program which we have before us. In the past few years athletics have occupied much time and care and conditions have, on the whole, been much improved. The solution has been sought chiefly through the Interscholastic League. On the value of this DepartmenlJ THE HIGH-SCHOOL SITUATION S8i means of managing athletics opinion is divided, but the weight of argument and opinion, as indicated by the answers to a questionnaire sent out last Septem- ber, seems to be on the side of confining athletics to the home field. Another question now engaging the attention of thinking principals and teachers is that of the class recitation — ^whether it has not to some extent become an agency for examination rather than one for teaching and for assisting pupils when and only when they need it. The aim of education is to place the pupil in an atmosphere favorable to his natural growth, with conditions favor- able not only for receiving needed help but also for the proper stimuli for self- help. In full view of this aim the recitation is on the witness stand to answer as to its real efficiency and proper function, and as to how much of the pupil's time in school it should claim. The problem of overcrowded courses has been, since the outward extension of the curriculum was forced upon the schools by the progress of the times, one which has caused no little concern in the minds of those who had been taught to believe that certain formal culture studies were necessary to all pupils seeking an education. The complete and correct answer to this problem has not been reached, but there is an opinion rapidly gaining headway that no study necessarily has any exclusive claim to culture value, and that any study, or piece of work, may have this value if pursued in the proper way and in the proper spirit. The best thought seems now to be that a liberal education does not consist in so much of this or that, but in the state of mind which a piece of work inculcates, not so much in the value which the knowledge of language, mathematics, science, or manual training possesses per se, as in the mental attitude which results from their pursuit. This thought ascribes to a liberal education proper inclinations as well as useful knowledge — an inclina- tion to read, an inclination to study, an inclination to work, an inclination to do right and to be just, an inclination to live and let live, an inclination toward efficient service to self and to others. With this view of an education and of culture, the difficulties arising from a crowded course of study disappear. The case is no longer one of overloading, but one of proper selection, of adaptation to the needs of the varying tastes and powers of the individual pupils. Permit me at this time to call your attention to the condition of music as it exists in the high schools of this country. Answers to questions on the subject reveal considerable diversity of theory and practice, ahd there is a general feeling that it is not what it should be. In a few cities it is made com- pulsory and is chiefly confined to routine chorus singing of songs learned by rote; in others it is not required of boys; in others it is made optional, taught in classes and graded. Now, important questions arise here. Music being a fine art of a refining and uplifting character, should it not be made universal and carried into the soul of every boy and girl ? If so, can if be done ? If a boy can sing and doesn't want to sing, should he be made to sing? If so, what will be the nature of the soul product ? If a boy can't sing and wants to sing, should he be allowed to sing ? If so, what effect will it have on the 582 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary souls of those who listen to him ? If a boy can't sing and doesn't want to give daily demonstration of the fact, should he be made to do so ? Should a pupil who doesn't sing be compelled to sit and listen to others sing when he wants to study ? Is the assumption that he is absorbing soul nourishment under these conditions sound ? If a teacher of music can not keep the absorbers in order while the singers pour in, should other teachers of the school be called in to hold the boy? What is the general effect of this on the school? Should music conditions in our schools be maintained which only one teacher in a thousand can properly meet? Or should our requirements be made to fit what music teachers have demonstrated their ability to do ? Why should a public-school teacher be called upon to pursue a method entirely different from that which he practices in his private classes ? Is the aim of high school music for spectacular purposes, or for the development of the pupils ? Is it the proper function of the public school to teach music to those who want it as other branches are taught ? If not, why not ? These are a few of the ques- tions which should be carefully considered and answered, and I would respect- fully suggest that a committee of five be appointed to investigate the music situation and report at the next meeting. But the most important problem which now confronts the high schools of this country is that of industrial education. On this question, I have expressed my views in a recent article in the Manual Training Magazine and I here quote a few extracts: It is now becoming evident from the widespread discussion of industrial education from many sources that this country is looking to it for other purposes than that of general education. Associations for the promotion of industrial education have been formed. Complaints that the public schools are still too mediaeval in their methods are heard from certain quarters. Many schools are making their appearance: "Trade Schools," "Tech- nical Schools," "Foundations," "Arts and Crafts Schools," "Industrial Schools," "Textile Schools," "Poor Boys' Schools," "Manual Labor Schools," "Grade School Manual Train- ing Schools," "Manual Training High Schools," etc., etc., are being built by enthusiastic millionaires. These schools represent an endless variety of types each revealing the point of view of its founder. Some claim that a school to have any value should be fully equipped for technical instruction; others that technical training is worse than useless. A certain class holds that all book learning should be limited strictly to what a boy needs in the shop. Another class, that theory and practice should go hand in hand. A few still believe that no manual training in school is essential, even for those who will follow mechan- ical pursuits, Hblding that the humanities "make men," and that a man will pick up his trade when he needs it. But the belief that manual training in some form has come to be an essential in public education is becoming almost universal. Now, in"'each of these views there should be'a grain of truth common to all the rest. We should be able, if we can discern this common element, to get a perspective view enabling us to foresee the relation of industrial education to the high school of the future. It seems to me that this element is not difficult to find and that it may be expressed in very simple terms. I believe it might read something like this: Every American boy is entitled to all the learning he is capable of taking. This learning should be both mental and manual and should be made as practical as possible. In other words he should, to the extent of his ability, come to his own in the heritage of the theoretical knowledge of the race in so far as he can by training]be taught to embody this knowledge in purposeful practice. Department] THE HIGH-SCHOOL SITU ATION 583 This conception of the problem calls for great breadth and flexibility in our schools and in our curriculums. If we are to make it possible for every boy to receive his birth- right, the flexibility and versatility of our schools must be commensurate with the endless diversity of talent and opportunity. The boy who can go no farther than the eight ele- mentary grades should have along with his three R's all the manual training of the practical sort that can be worked,into a well-balanced curriculum. If the limitations placed upon him by poverty or a paucity of natural endowments condition him to a life of manual labor, then that labor should be made as skillful as possible; for this reason manual training of the plainest sort should be offered through the grades. It should consist of those simple fundamental processes which underhe the mechanical trades and should so far as time and the powers of the pupils will permit be carried forward in the artistic spirit. So far as it goes it should be in the direction of community industry. Differences in talent should be recognized from the start and each boy's work adapted to his powers. If he is dull in books and unable to keep up with his class let him do what he can and give him more of the manual training. If he shows no promise of skill in the use of tools give him less manual training and more books. Find the boy and then proceed to build upon him; and in dealing with him keep close to the border line between what he knows and what he does not know— • between what he can do and what he can not do. It is the discovery of this line and con- stantly keeping it in view that constitutes good teaching. Boys treated in this manner through the elementary schools will be able to earn an honest living in factory, shop, count- ing house, or department store. When the boy who by reason of ability and opportunity reaches the high school the essential nature of the process well begun in the grades should not change. It is still a^ process of keeping to the border line between what he can do and what he can not do, still a process of proper selection and adaptation. This adaptation will be made possible thru intelligent diflferentiation. Fortunately this differentiation will not mean revolu- tion. It will only mean a careful study of the past development of our schools, and of the present demands. The suggestion of the introduction of the industrial or trade school idea into our high school is not new if we consider the question from a generic point of view. Ever since the establishment of public high schools in this country about seventy years ago they have been undergoing change and this change has always been one of differentiation and specialization of function. Even the names which have been given to different groups of studies called "courses" indicate clearly enough that these groups from which pupils of different bent may choose are intended for different purposes, and these purposes are economic. Latin and Greek were at first placed in the curriculum because they were supposed to fit students for service in the learned professions. Science was introduced to meet the demands of an era of scientific activity and invention. The commercial studies, typewriting, bookkeeping, stenography, and office routine were added to the curriculum in answer to the demands of trade and commerce. With the growth of large cities came manual training to supply the motor activity of which the absence of country life had deprived our boys, and to counteract the one-sided influences of an education exclusively bookish. These facts in the history of secondary education furnished but one answer to the question as to whether the demand for indus- trial education should be met in the high school. It remains only to ascertain just what shall be the nature of this, the next differentiation. In reality the problem is not so difficult as it appears, inasmuch as the manual training already in our best high schools furnishes the kind of training needed — a training which certainly contains the underlying principles of many industries. We have only to add to the courses we now have by including more of those processes employed in the various trades. The selection of these processes wall have to be carefully made with the assistance of practical men representative of the indus- trial community. Along with these additions there should come a greater latitude and flexibility in making out individual programs for pupils of varying ability and inclination — a flexibility ranging between programs almost wholly academic to those almost exclusively 584 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary manual. All studies and exercises should be elective in the sense that principals and directors may give each individual boy what he needs and vi^hat he is able to receive, regard- less of traditional standards. We must adjust our schools to the principle that it is just as necessary and legitimate to help a boy to a trade as it is to help him to a profession — that training for citizenship is putting each and every boy at his best, and keeping him there as long as practicable. , The highest and best type of secondary school is cosmopolitan, and contains under one head all branches which have proved their right to a place in high-school curricula. The new differentiation which will sooner or later be made that will provide a certain amount of training for industrial ends will probably take place as others have done, and become an incorporate part of the school which will continue to retain its cosmopolitan character still preserving a perfect social unity and equality between all classes of children regardless of the composition of their individual programs. That the problem of indus- trial education will be worked out in the high school seems certain: first, from the observed tendencies of the past to differentiate the work and to add to the curriculum in conformity to changing conditions; second, that the age of the pupils just passing from childhood to manhood is most favorable to it— an age most suitable for those bodily exercises requiring dexterity and strength; and third, that the work is already begun in the well-chosen pro- cesses and exercises as now carried forward in finely equipped shops. The gradual addi- tion of more shops, more equipment, more processes, and the granting of a larger flex- ibility in the choice of work should solve the problem. A SHIFTING OF IDEALS RESPECTING THE EFFICIENCY OF FORMAL CULTURE STUDIES FOR ALL PUPILS J. REMSEN BISHOP, PRINCIPAL, EASTERN HIGH SCHOOL, DETROIT, MICH. After getting out of it, so as to be able to view it from an independent stand- point, Arthur Christopher Benson said:^ For a good many years I lived a busy and fairly successful life as a master at a big public school. I will not dwell at length upon this, but I will say that I gained a great interest in the science of education, and acquired profound misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual process known by the name of secondary education. More and more I began to perceive that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like lines. Mr. Benson's arraignment of English secondary education in a general way apphes to secondary education in this country. Having no recent pro- nouncements at hand concerning our own secondary schools, perhaps we may take President Hadley's words concerning our colleges as applying also to our secondary schools :^ There is no question that the development (of the American College) was salutary, that the American colleges in 1908 did larger and better work than they would have done if, like the English university of today, they had followed more conservatively the older lines; yet, still, we are in perpetual danger in three directions from over-specialization, from dilettantism, and from pedantry. Certainly, if we simply reproduced from generation to generation the culture attained, not adding or detracting, the result would be a Chinese uniformity. If cruelty and suffering, vice and crime could be eliminated in any scheme and that scheme made perpetual, no one could find fault. But » "From a College Window: The Point of View." * Speech at Bryn Mawr Commencement, June 7, 1908. Department! EFFICIENCY OF FORMAL CULTURE STUDIES 585 man is only at the best relatively free from physical and moral ills; by change alone he seems to progress. To stop change would be to cut him off from the hope of something better. It is advisable not to make unchangeable gods of anything. Latin and Greek, that delighted, satisfied, and to some extent trained, aesthetically and morally, a large part of the people at one time, lose, in time, their vital force and must be replaced by something containing what seems to me a different form of vital force. A rhythmic movement is one of Nature's mysterious methods. Each generation of men must pass, in part consciously but for the most part uncon- sciously,' through the cycle of the race's experience. Then each generation adds something to that experience and to some extent determines what the experience of the succeeding generation will be. True education makes the pupil more significant. To do so, it must evidently be sufficiently reminiscent of the past, vitally related to the present, and in a developmental attitude toward the future. It is not unnatural that the instruction of children in the lore of the past should have seemed the best method of educating them. Education was at first principally, one might almost say, only, concerned with a leisure, or at any rate, privileged class. There was no such idea as yet conceived as that of attempting equality of intellectual opportunity. Education was a means by which parents transmitted to their children the privileges and advantages which they themselves had wrested from the mass of the people or which they had inherited. If education was to remain a mean toward this one end, no better material could be found than the literature of preceding civiliza- tions. This literature was the crowning and permanent glory of the past — the sole surviving effect that had in it the possibility of going on unchanged forever. To study it and absorb its spirit was to put off provincialism for the time at least, and to join the great band of those who have viewed from a great height the panorama of humanity in all its hopes, aspirations, and achievements. When education came to be viewed in a different light, i. e., not as a means to preserve privilege for the few but to extend opportunity to all, irrespective of rank at birth, the old means was found wanting. Many of those, in fact the far greater part of them, who were to be educated were now without inherited wealth or the position that commands in inscrutable ways a certain financial support. At a comparatively early age these young people must stand behind the counter or at the bench and make a living by manual labor of some sort; there was no escape from this. Consequently, when the traditional material was offered, it was practically refused. A few kept at school; the rest left at an early age. The state was supporting a sham; for this education was pretending, at common cost, to equalize opportunity. In actual fact, it was giving at pubhc expense to those able, or who could be compelled to pay for it, what before they had paid for. The mass of the community remained little affected. Those who had advocated universal education as the at-last- discovered panacea grew uneasy and lukewarm. The defect was not at first 586 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary clear, but it soon became evident that true education for the mass of men must be vitally related to present-day activities. In the development of the educational program it is natural for the same warring forces to appear that are at work thruout our political and social fabric. Democracy, all over the world, but especially in America, is today confronted with what possibly may be its final problem. By subtle but effect- ive means a leisure class founded upon special privileges or wealth, or more often upon a combination of these things, has been formed and maintained in every community of considerable size, at some time in its history. The democratic ideal, now voicing itself with greater insistency every year, would wrest from the privileged class its most permanent asset — the privilege of transmitting its most distinguishing characteristics to its natural heirs and of preventing the natural heirs of other classes from acquiring these characteristics. If we refuse the holders of wealth and privilege — the leisure class — the vantage ground of intellectual cleavage, we threaten the existence of that class. It is self-evident and not necessary to prove that all so-called higher education was at first jealously fashioned in such manner as to exclude those who had to aim, from childhood, at wage-earning skill. When, after vague beginnings, the extraordinary device of universal education for all the adolescent young of this nation issued as a full-fledged experiment, the old material of intellectual and aesthetic training, the heritage from the dominion of the privileged few and the practical slavery of the many, being all that existed, was used. Latin, Greek, mathematics, and a modicum of science, with English in some makeshift style, formed the course of study offered to all young Americans who had completed the elementary grades. The leisure class, dimly perceiving that their privileges were threatened, tight- ened the barriers into the colleges and watched the result — and a strange result it has been. The college primarily stood for the production of a leisure class. The ideals of a democracy call for a different aim in education, and these ideals, to triumph, must absorb or eliminate other aims. The aim of the college, as first constituted, and the aim of democracy are fundamentally adverse and, to some extent, mutually destructive. The leisure-class idea permits college teachers to trade on custom, caste, the assumed and guarded privileges of cliques, and other influences diametrically opposed to the underlying principles of democracy. To yield to these influences would be to abandon the demo- cratic ideal. Our fathers — ^we ourselves until now — have been slow to realize this dilemma or, at any rate, have been slow to acknowledge it. The ideals of democracy are not to be abandoned without further struggle, and today the fight centers on public secondary education. Deny the oppor- tunity for continuity in the college of all work in the secondary school of recognized value, and you at once create privilege or caste. The manual- training high school as distinct from the high school pure and simple, if it involves a limitation of possibilities for continuity of work in higher institutions Department) EFFICIENCY OF FORMAL CULTURE STUDIES 587 that have full recognition as colleges, should not be encouraged by any upholder of democratic ideals. The only safety for the democratic scheme is the removal of all barriers, with caution in the introduction into the course of material beyond the scope of the means at hand and the time at the disposal of the pupils. The world of necessity, as it grows older, accumulates too large a mass of memorized material; some of this must at times be sloughed off, now in this way, now in that. It is probably not too rash to assert that public opinion, or the portion of it enlightened on this point, does not now sustain the claims of any subject of study on disciplinary grounds alone. The element of sustained attention to orderly sequence, regularly recurring, is necessary to the mastery of any bodies of related facts such as are properly subjects of study. The part of the Universe which we inhabit is so constituted that anything in it is immediately and more or less logically related to many other things. Every- thing in it involves, more remotely, a vast number of things. The investigation of anything can be made disciplinary if pursued from the standpoint of its general relations; if pursued from the standpoint of the investigator's needs and interests, it is practical. More and more are we coming to believe that subjects to be taught to the normal, ordinary adolescent must combine these qualities, or the attempt to teach him be comparatively ineffectual. If either, the practical element should predominate. PubHc opinion has veered away from what had been accepted upon the mere assertion of intellectual ascetics — that the very absence of interest, when subjects of investigation are presented upon abstract or general grounds, argues only a necessity to force an apparent interest or consign the pupil to intellectual perdition. When all is said, formal culture studies resolve themselves into Latin and Greek. Our art heritage and to a great extent our heritage of speculation of all sorts is Greek; our heritage of poHtical organization and of elaborate systematizing of human relations is Roman. For a reason not far to seek, it was true, up to four hundred years ago, that no one could be a thoroly cultured person without a knowledge of Latin. All the books of wisdom were written in that language; the church knew no other tongue as an official language. The vernacular everywhere seemed to have in itself no elegance and permanence. Latin writings were translated into it merely for convenience but without any idea that the translation would have any lasting literary value. So fixed become men's habits, especially in what concerns the training of the young, that the rise of a genuine and intrinsically noble literature in French, English, and German, altho this later literature contained the significant material of former hterature, had apparently no effect upon the accepted methods of nurturing or attempting to nurture the minds of the young men who belonged to the privileged class of the European nations.- I mean that the fact of Shakespeare's having written Macbeth made it none the less impera- tive that a young Englishman should have read the Hercules Fur ens of Seneca. The Romans themselves were not so hidebound. The study of Greek declined 588 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary in Rome after Rome itself had produced a native, if not an original literature. The German showed himself of the same temperament, in this regard, as the Englishman. He still labored partially to master ancient drama when his own inspired masters of poetry and poetic philosophy had given him native material as good in quahty and infinitely more suited to his type of mind and to his physical environment. The French held Latin in closer relation to themselves, both linguistically and in inherited traits of character. The impress of the Roman on the Gaul was indelible; on the Anglo-Saxon and on the Teuton only such as his obstinacy chose to keep it. Unless Latin and Greek,^ with all their close relation to our past develop- ment, can show a certain and sufficiently intimate relation to our present life, that causes them to have a sufficient element of immediate, practical interest and value, they must go into the limbo where reside Hebrew, Old Romance languages. Old High German, etc., etc. If geometry and algebra cannot relate themselves intelligently to immediate natural interests, some other classification of mathematical facts must and will be found that will do so. Algebra that tells about the heads of whales will be reserved for those who are zoologically inclined. The rest of us will solve problems concerning the value of food rations, the facts of physical science, and other matters that at least have some natural appeal to our interest in the result of the solution. When the process of cutting loose from the old regime of secondary educa- tion had begun, it was seen that ideals respecting the efficiency of formal culture studies for all pupils had radically shifted. There seemed to be a widespread feeling that such efficiency had been experimentally proved to have been fancied and never real. Interest, founded upon actual environ- ment and continually broadening its own environment, and this broadening of environment again widening the scope of interest, this noble and generous process is first, last, and all the time the only process universally applicable that will induce all normal minds to undergo training and enrichment. Only general faults have to be guarded against: according to Benson — diffuseness, too much detail, unbusiness-like method; according to Hadley — overspecialization, dilettantism, and pedantry. And this question, large as it is, is involved with far larger considerations. Out of the seething cauldron of modern life may be emerging not a new principle in conception but a new principle in actual acceptance. May it not be true that we now believe that every human being, as a sentient creature born into our companionship, must be protected from the greed of his fellows — ^w^hether it be greed for superior wealth or superior aesthetic environment; in other words, that upon the race devolves the solemn duty to provide first for the com- pletest possible development of every child from the hour of birth to that of death under the best possible conditions, before natural advantages of individ- »^,The great labor and fine acumen expended upon the language and literature of the classics has produced results that bring the science of these tongues into the category of the exact sciences. Perhaps the study of them, or of one of them, should be offered as an alternative for one of the natural sciences. Department] EFFICIENCY OF FORMAL CULTURE STUDIES 589 iials are given opportunity to develop and assert their acquisitive power ? Race charity, supreme, triumphant, is perhaps to take the place of all private benevolence and in its exercise exert the wisdom of the ages, enlightened with the new discovery, a sacrificing love capable of the greatest sacrifice of all — that of a natural advantage over one's fellows. The colleges will follow suit by accepting for entrance such part of the secondary work as they may choose, leaving the secondary curriculum to the skill and conscience of those whose business it is to fashion high-school work to the needs of each community which the school serves. All other subjects must perforce be begun in the college — all this will be a matter for the skill and conscience of boards of overseers, trustees, regents, or whatever they may be called. It is a forbidding but natural phenomenon of American life that there should have been formed an educational clique, consisting of those who had been classically trained with the intention of giving instruction in the classics. This clique is difficult of entrance and has been hedged about by such artificial barriers as the German degree and the cant language developed by daily use of the grammatical and rhetorical phraseology of classical research. The members are in awe of their own learning, which is considerable, and selfishly determined to hold their privileged position which, despite modern trends, they still possess. It matters not to them that the majority of the human race have no desire and no capacity for the study of dead languages. A love of the human race transcending the love of certain graceful and interesting things that can be made to environ the life of a portion of that race is a con- ception beyond the narrow^ souls of these people. They devise subtle methods by which the elect (those with interest and capacity for classical study) are selected and invested with certain privileges, or with a certain prestige which is no less real for being an ingenious fabrication. Through a strange t)Tanny called college (or university) domination, they still force the schools to do their will, at the peril of having the pupils of the schools refused entrance to the opportunities for advanced study. ^ The purpose of this paper being to deal wjth tendencies, theories, move- ments of the Zeitgeist, and other such intangible aspects of the ideal, it would be foreign to our purpose to mention schemes and panaceas proposed to set at rest the educational questionings, and thru this, the social unrest of our day. There is much promise in such schemes as the co-operation plan pro- posed by Dean Snyder of Cincinnati, whereby half the time in alternate weeks is given by pupils of schools above the elementary, over fourteen years of age, to work, under sanitary conditions, in the actual industries and businesses of the community. In this scheme, every young man and young woman is a producer, an acquirer of practical skill, a subject of developing agencies of ' In this they are no greater sinners than their mathematical and scientific brethren; but the example ol tyranny over secondary schools was set by the classical men and indicates their presumptuous attitude toward heir fellow-men outside their sacred clique. 590 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary the purely intellectual type— all at the same time. There is at least great promise in such courageous attempts to grapple with the problem. It is not surprising that even the onus of having been inconsistent must be borne by some who are advocating a frank relegation of formal culture studies to the same plane as all studies. Loyalty to the old gods is not a crime; nor is it a crime to abandon the old gods to their fate when the new gods have plainly supplanted them. There is enough modern material, well digested and of sufficiently broad interest, to make a course of study for nearly every type of mind. To supplant any of this material with antiquated subjects is to sacrifice reality to an idea, which should recommend itself to Americans least of all peoples. DISCUSSION David S. Snedden, Teachers College, Columbia University. — I take no exceptions to the excellent paper and the able discussion. I wish only to emphasize some of the points brought out. The American people have always been disposed to support cordially all efforts at secondary education. But this association should formulate a better and more comprehensive definition of secondary education. As I see it, secondary education is developing on a very great scale and its content is being greatly modified. We should call all kinds of the education of youth in the adolescent period "secondary," and make no such distinction as "vocational," "industrial," "technical," "manual training," "trade schools, " etc. Make your courses, their content and quantity, fit the need of the individual pupil whether that course shall extend over two, four, or six years. Let the boy have a chance to develop himself. It is the right time now, in my judgment, for the American schoolmaster to assert him- self and break loose from the traditional lines of education. We should all get together and cut loose from college domination and all other domination. Louis P. JocELYN, Ann Arbor, Mich. — I am sorry to see no college man defend Latin and Greek from the attacks made upon them today. I, myself, was slow to take up their defense, as my especial line is mathematics, but, as secretary of the Schoolmasters' Club of Michigan, I feel that some reply should be made. In my judgment Latin and Greek are declining because of the intense teaching of bare forms and omitting the literature of these tongues. Teachers of physics should take warning from the fate of Latin and Greek or that subject will meet a similar fate. Too much time is being spent upon the technical part of the subject, while the phenomena of nature are overlooked. The same is true of biology and all other sciences. When I was a boy we used to ramble through the woods and find life in its natural state and environment, but now it has become a wearisome look- ing through microscopes and making notebooks. The pendulum has swung too far against Latin and Greek in some quarters. There is a feeling all over the world that Latin is a good thing. I believe the good, hard subjects of*mathematics, Greek, and Latin are impor- tant and necessary to mind development. The planting of a pea and watching it grow does not always teach the lesson expected. The Indians watched corn grow for centuries without developing mentally. Do not make the mistake of making everything easy for a child. He should have some hard subjects to tackle. It is true, however, that thousands of boys could be saved every year by giving them something they can do, but I would suggest that not all boys should be put into manual- training courses. Some must be left to become future teachers of mathematics and other subjects. In regard to the second paper — ^the percentage of failures in the McKinley High Department] HOW SHALL WE ASSIST OUR PUPILS/ 591 School is certainly very low. It must mean superior management on the part of its able principal to secure a result of but 7 per cent, of failures. I wish that all men who teach were fathers. I became a much better teacher after I had a child of my own. A father sees in every child somebody's darling and treats the child with greater sympathy and better understanding. Mr. Cobalt, Hamilton, Ohio. — ^We are all gratified, I am sure, to know that there are high schools where the percentage of failures is so low as that at the McKinley High School. Where such results are attained, there must be some unusually fortunate condi- tions for pupils and teachers. Much may be accounted for in heredity and environment. Many pupils reach their limitations in grammar-school work and cannot successfully do high-school work. Some pupils go to high school who should not, and necessarily fail in their effort. Sometimes failures occur because of inefl5cient instruction, due to large classes. Teachers who have thirty, forty, or even fifty pupils in a class obviously cannot do good work, nor can a teacher keep up a high grade of instruction through more than five or six periods in a day. Every teacher should have at least one rest period to devote to deficient pupils and laggards, as is done in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the Woodward High School, Cincinnati, two or three extra teachers are employed who give their time wholly to delinquent pupils, with excellent results. Mr. Cook, of Pennsylvania. — There is too large a number of failures in the first year of high school. It seems to me that more attention should be given to incoming classes — explaining to them more fully how to take up the work, using the recitation in part as a study period and showing them how to study. ri;ERBERT C. Wood, East High School, Cleveland. — It might be of interest to know of an experiment in one of the Cleveland high schools to ascertain from the pupils them- selves their opinion of the reasons for failure in the high schools. A series of questions was submitted to the pupils, and one of these questions related to the cause of failure. Ninety per cent, answered that it was because they did not study hard enough. The remaining 10 per cent, attributed it to ill-health and other causes. It may seem a little ungracious for me to speak of the percentage of failures in this high school the past year; but I will venture to state a fact which may seem unusual: while no special methods have been resorted to to bring up delinquent pupils, less than 6 per cent, failed during the past year. Now that the school board has made special provision to care for these backward pupils, perhaps there will be no failures next year. Wells L. Griswold, superintendent of schools, Youngstown, Ohio. — The way to deal with backward pupils is for each teacher to have the time to care for her own delin- quent pupils. It is not true, at any rate, that every pupil should pass every subject in each of the four years, and that there should be no failures. Such results would tend to lower standards and weaken scholarship. Going over a subject a second time is not always a bad thing. In fact, it is sometimes the very best thing that could happen to the pupil, and teaches him thoroness and application. HOW SHALL WE ASSIST OUR PUPILS WHEN AND ONLY WHEN THEY NEED IT? H. E. KRATZ, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CALUMET, MICH. Our topic for discussion was originally worded as follows : Do you believe that the method of class recitation, generally in vogue in Qur high schools, neglects the individual needs of pupils and is in any way responsible for the many failures to pass in their studies ? Are pupils usually assisted when and only when they need it ? If not, what is the remedy ? 592 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary It is evident that the Committee on Program did not intend that the writer of this paper should simply give his opinions and conclusions, but that he should also ascertain how representative high schools were attempting to solve this problem. With this in view, a " questionnaire " was sent to sixteen representa- tive high schools, chiefly located in the Middle West, asking for the percentage of failures; whether they were increasing or decreasing; the causes of such failures ; and the measures taken to remedy them ; the proportion of time devoted to class and individual instruction; how "drowning pupils" were treated; how and to what extent individual instruction was utilized, and what efforts given to training pupils into right habits of study. The percentages of failures as given in these re; lies averaged 22 in all subjects, with an average of 28 in algebra; 24 in geometry; 23 in Latin; 20 in chemistry, English, French, and physics; 18 in German and history. From one of the largest high schools in the West came a very carefully com- piled summary of failures according to grades, and as it fairly represents condi- tions generally, its summary is quoted: The percentage of failures in all subjects in ninth grade is 31 . i ; in tenth grade 21.4; in eleventh grade 19.6; in twelfth grade 13.2. The average percentage of failures in all the grades in this high school is 23 .5. In this same school the leading causes of failures are : first, indifference, reaching an average of 32.8 per cent, of those who fail; second, incapacity, with an average of 24 . 6 per cent. ; third, poor preparation, with an average of 24.3 per cent.; and fourth, ill-health, with an average of 16.9 per cent. Among other causes, that of "improper habits of study" is frequently mentioned. "Lack of concentration," "not taught to think for themselves," "lack of thoroness," "too little parental co-operation," "too little home study," "too much society," "doubled work," "classes too large," "teachers failing to reach pupils in the right way," are other causes mentioned. The means made use of to reduce the number of failures are not novel, but there is evidenced a feeling of growing responsibility for such failures and a greater desire to lessen them. Nearly all the replies indicate that chief reliance in bringing up backward pupils is placed upon individual help, and that this help is given before or after school. Some schools provide open periods for consultation. A few feel at liberty to provide for some individual instruction in the time usually devoted to class instruction. There are also indications that more attention is given to the formation of right habits of study, by studying at times with the pupils in the preparation of an advance lesson and making out programs for home study, and that teachers are more alive to the need of careful study of the slow pupil, his habits, environment, tastes, ambitions, and ideals. A comment from a leading high -school principal in reply to the question as to measures taken to reduce failures we wish to quote, because it raises the query as to what is the wisest attitude in treatment of high-school pupils. Will the somewhat exacting and unsympathetic attitude manifested result Department] HOW SHALL WE ASSIST OUR PUPILS ^ 593 in the greatest good to the greatest number? We quote, "We have no pet scheme, method, or panacea; yet, I have no hesitation in affirming that we are using sustained and systematic efforts to save the waste of inefficient effort, but rather by the method of elimination and by directing the student to more promising fields of activity than by wasting the energies of the teaching force upon incapacity." The replies to the question concerning the proportion of program time devoted to class and individual instruction indicate that, outside of laboratories, class instruction monopolizes more than nine-tenths of the school hours. The time devoted daily to individual work outside of school hours averages about one hour. Some schools set aside a half -hour for individual instruction before the opening session and the same time after closing in the afternoon. The replies to the following question are varied and interesting: In class instruction, when you discover that a pupil is beyond his depth, do you keep the rest of the class waiting until you help your ''drowning pupil" ashore, or defer the helping process until later ? If the latter, when and how do you give help? The general practice is to defer the helping process until later. The follow- ing are characteristic replies : "Let the drowning pupil sink after a reasonable effort at rescue." "Let him drown and help him out afterward." "Indeed I often keep the class waiting to show them how to help a drowning person ashore — thereby showing the class that the danger of drowning was not so great as it seemed. Fear or timidity is often the cause of not 'getting on swim- mingly.'" "The secret of presenting a subject lies in getting the student's point of view and then base your exposition on the facts he already has at his command. Frequently this is merely a matter of review of fundamental principles temporarily lost sight of by the student, but which, if rapidly run over by the teacher, will set him on his feet again and he who thought he was drowning is enabled to wade out without further assistance." Compare the sympathetic tone of this last statement with the one which follows. "I don't Hke this figure of speech that puts the responsibility of saving individuals with such tremendous emphasis upon the teacher. The class is the unit to be saved. Responsibility of the individual to his little social group is the feeling that has educated mankind. Pride in emulating the strongest and best in your class is what saves you; one must feel that one cannot get left behind, and that one deserves to get left behind, if he cannot save himself." An extreme form of individual instruction was presented in question eight as follows : In the recitation period, instead of conducting a class recitation on the lesson previously prepared, how frequently do you assign a lesson in advance for immediate preparation and then devote your whole period to bringing up pupils in arrears by means of individual instruction ? This plan met with very general criticism, but those w^ho criticized most severely, labored under the misapprehension that this individual instruction 594 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION LSecondary was to be made a regular and frequent feature of the daily program, when it is only intended to be used on such occasions when pupils plainly need indi- vidual help. A leading principal says: I believe that more opportunities might be profitably offered by the state along other than strictly academic lines, that would invite application where the task fits capacity. This would draw off from classes many whose presence now swamps scholarly standards. Education of every sort should be for those who have a real desire for it. I believe it time to cease over-anxiety concerning those who are now encouraged to rest content with the strenuous efforts made in their behalf by teachers. Numerous commendations from those who have tried the plan are given, like the following: ''In attacking a new subject, I find it very profitable;" "The plan needs close watching, but is advantageous;" "It benefits the slow- pupil;" "It enables me to see pupils at work, to observe their methods, aptitudes, difficulties, the actual amount of work a certain assignment requires for various pupils. The pupils reveal themselves in their attitude toward their work;" " I seldom find a pupil who cannot catch up if he has the right kind of individual help from the teacher ;" "The exact difficulty of the pupil is better appreciated by the teacher. The teacher's personal force is increased by direct contact with the pupil. The pupil is made to feel his own individual responsibility for the lesson. This feeling is sometimes lost in large classes. From close personal contact a closer sympathy prevails between pupil and teacher." But the most conclusive answer as to the advantages of individual instruc- tion in lessening failures comes from the McKinley High School, St. Louis. A summary of failures by subjects is furnished,' which covers eight semesters. The percentage of failures the first semester of this record shows an average for the entire high school of 16.55 per cent. The last semester, four years later, shows an average of only 7 . 5 per cent, of failures, or a decrease in four years of over 9 per cent. This remarkable reduction to less than one-half the former failures, accord- ing to the positive statement of the principal, "is largely due to individual instruction and a constant effort to help the weaker pupils." When it is recalled that the average of failures in the high schools generally reaches 22 per cent, or three times the percentage of failures where these more helpful measures are utilized, is it not evident that a vigorous protest should be made against this unnecessary slaughter of high-school pupils? The replies to the question. What plans are you utilizing to train your pupils into right habits of study ? do not present convincing evidence that this important field of work is being sufficiently cultivated. Many answers indicate that there is a crying need to train pupils into better study habits, but very little systematic effort is directed to this end. A few give talks on value of concentration, and on the habits of study of successful business and profes- sional men. This very brief summary of replies received suggests some com- ' ments which we wish to make in concluding this paper. » See summary of failures in McKinley High School to be printed at close of this paper. Departmentl HOW SHALL WE ASSIST OUR PUPILS? 595 We recognize that the number of failures in high-school studies must vary- greatly, but we firmly believe that the present average of 22 per cent, of failures is excessive. This means that nearly one-fourth of the work done in our high schools is so imperfectly done that it must be repeated. Such waste of effort in business would be regarded as ruinous. The principal causey of failures according to the replies are indifference, incapacity, poor preparation, and ill-health. A few call attention to improper habits of study, lack of thoroness, not taught to think for themselves, too much society, too little parental co-operation, too little home study, irregular attend- ance, etc. These causes are well known and various remedies have been applied, but the percentages of failures are still excessive. From this investigation, as well as from various other sources, we are led to believe that one of the most profitable fields to cultivate in reducing failures is that of individual instruction, and connected with it, more systematic train- ing to develop right habits of study. Our investigations disclose a generous giving of individual help to backward pupils on the part of some high-school teachers, but in nearly every instance it is given outside of school hours, either before or after the regular sessions and largely at the expense of the teacher's time and strength. The strange feature about it is that so much v^alue is attached to this individual work and. yet it has so little recognition in the school hours and so little provision for its utilization. It seems to be quite generally held that the class is everything and the individual nothing. Every energy of the teacher is bent toward acquiring skill in handling of classes. The limited amount of professional training, given high-school teachers, is exclusively directed to the development of class instruction, while individual training is ignored. We heartily indorse Dr. Harris' views in regard to the inspiring influences, the superior advantages, of class instruction, yet as a means of rounding up backward pupils, a work that must occasionally be done in order to secure those superior class results, there is no other factor so potent as wise and skillful indi idual instruction. Everyone is familiar with the fact that the pace of the pupil who is under wise individual instruction is often twice as rapid as that of a large class. In individual instruction the exact reaction can be brought about, the exact adjust- ment can be realized which sets the backward pupil on his feet, gives him confidence and strength, and makes possible a double-quick movement which regains for him his lost rank in the class. But the objection is raised that the plan of individual instruction sacrifices much of class instruction and cannot therefore be introduced. Individual instruction is only to be utilized when the emergency arises, and that emergency arises when pupils are floundering beyond their depth. The teacher is the wise diagnostician, varying the daily instruction according to symptoms and not administering a fixed amount of mental pabulum according to unvarying class instruction methods. We believe that such emphasis has been placed 596 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary on class instruction, that teachers outside of the laboratories generally regard it their duty to devote all the school hours to such instruction. Somehow class instruction has been invested with miraculous powers. Set it in motion and it will save all the pupils worth saving. It must have exclusive right of way during all the school hours. Apologies must be offered whenever there is the least divergence from this program. There is too common an impression among teachers that if class instruction has been skillfully administered, they have done their full duty and no criticisms can be justly made for a large num- ber of failures. But some teachers are so impressed with the value of this individual instruction that they provide for it outside of school hours at heavy cost to themselves in time, effort, and strength. Why not give it recognition in the program, and to the extent needed ? Why frown upon its occasional and wise use in schools ? Why not include individual instruction, sparingly admin- istered if you wish, in the legitimate means for lessening failures and thus make it the duty of the teachers to plan wisely and carefully for such work ? There is a special technique which applies in individual instruction. So many teachers in their replies raised the theoretical objection that it develops dependence, indolence, etc. Is not that the fault of the manner of giving such instruction? Class instruction can be -so presented that it will also develop dependence. In order to succeed with individual instruction, the teacher must know thoroly each of his pupils as an individual and not as a part of a class. He must discover each pupil's weakness and take the initiative in giving aid. That aid must be given by the development method. ''The weak pupil is strengthened by helping him to help himself; direct instruction is forbidden." Such individual instruction instead of fostering dependence and indolence fosters confidence and energy and contributes to greater efficiency in class instruction. We plead for a fuller recognition of the merits of individual instruction in the plans of high-school teaching, because it will afford better opportunities to backward pupils to recover lost ground, and provide better facilities for much-needed training in better habits of study. From extended investigations into the habits of study of pupils, we are convinced that even in high schools the percentage of failures could be materi- ally reduced by wise training in the art of study. There are heavy losses from unconscious mind-wandering, from lack of concentration, from memorizing words without grasping their meaning or seeing their application, from inability to distinguish essentials from nonessentials, from failure to think out relations between facts as they are acquired, from neglect to work out helpful outlines of the important facts, from failure to test degree of mastery of facts by thoro self-questioning. The art of study is one of the greatest arts, and its mastery, or failure to master it, is fraught with momentous consequences to the pupil. There are those right beginnings, or ways of approach, which lead the pupil on to con- Department] HOW SHALL WE ASSISl^ OUR PUPILS/ 597 scious power and mastery, and there are those misguided and futile efforts which end only in weariness and defeat. How a pupil studies is a matter of much greater moment than what he studies. Habits cling thruout Hfe and shape it. Knowledge is often carelessly gained and easily lost. For a pupil to form bad habits*of study, to drop into habits of dawdling over a subject, to fail to develop his powers of concentration, is to render subsequent school life a drudgery instead of an inspiration, and bars the doors to intellectual pursuits after school days have passed. And yet we have conducted class recitation as if knowledge, subject-matter, was the chief aim. Tests in recitation are all directed to ascertain how much the pupil knows of a subject, or perhaps more correctly, to a discovery of how much of the language of the textbook has been memorized, while the more vital process of how he gained his knowledge is ignored. We believe a little freer and wiser use of individual instruction will afford better opportunities for the much-needed tra,ining in the art of study and that such training will lessen the number of failures. SUMMARY OF INFERENCES AND CONCLUSIONS 1. That the average number of failures in our high school is excessive. Fifteen per cent, is a better standard than that of 22 per cent. 2. That while the number of failures is decreasing slowly the decreasing process should be hastened. 3. That the chief causes of failures are indifference, incapacity, poor prepa- ration, ill-health, and bad habits of study. 4. That one of the causes which contribute to the many failures is a vigor- ous elimination of the backward pupils for fear their presence will ** swamp PERCENTAGE OF FAILURES MCKINLEY HIGH SCHOOL, ST. LOUIS, BY DEPARTMENTS, AND ENTIRE SCHOOL 1904 2nd T. istT. 2ndT. I90SH5 istT. 2nd T. 1906-7 ist T. and T. 1907-8 ist T. 2nd T. Entire School Departments: Business History Greek Latin English French German Spanish Domestic Science . . . Manual Training . . . Mechanical Drawing Mathematics Botany Chemistry ...... Physics Physiology Physiography 16. 55 14.2 2435 16.36 14-3 14 96 0.0 4.2 6.1 0.00 29.60 14.65 7.20 14.30 1397 12.4 159 0.0 27-39 12.25 7.0 18.79 234 0.0 0.84 2.90 22.40 11-59 9.90 22.75 16.55 7-3 8.2 II. I 21.69 10.69 17. 1 23.19 25.6 1.72 2.21 18.50 27.64 23.62 9-5° 18.03 19.05 11.84 7-79 14-7 0.0 16.67 7-36 14-14 20.30 I5-I 0.0 3-42 0.00 23.61 22.13 0.00 1534 10.79 9.90 9.06 5-45 II. II 16.31 6.13 11.88 12.06 2.92 0.0 8.24 0.53 23.04 14- 33 5 -70 9.70 5-17 0.00 7-83 3-26 1.48 0.00 18.95 5-73 6.00 14-65 5.60 0.00 1.97 7.27 17.84 10.69 2.48 10.81 952 0.00 8-59 6.39 4 34 10.00 18.66 7.09 15-38 14-29 8.19 0.82 2.30 3-73 17-31 13.00 2.47 14-41 3-52 3-03 7-5° 484 9.09 5.90. 19.09 5-16 6.42 13-58 8.02 2.23 2.09 0.00 12.20 10.77 1-54 8.76 7-39 4.60 scholarly standards." There is also manifest a lack of sympathy for the slow pupils and an unfair assumption that these are either indolent or incapable. 598 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary 5. That individual instruction, as an occasional supplement to class instruction, has no formal recognition in school hours, but that some teachers value it so highly in the rounding-up of slow or belated pupils that they gener- ously devote time and strength to it outside of school hours. 6. That the correction of bad habits of study thru a freer use of individual instruction is a crying need which if properly met will greatly reduce the num- ber of failures. 7. That there is ground for the belief that the method of class recitation, generally in vogue in our high schools, neglects at times the individual needs of our pupils, and that a freer and wiser use of individual instruction just when needed would materially lessen the present large number of failures. DISCUSSION W. H. Holmes, Jr., superintendent of schools, Westerly, R. I. — I agree heartily with all that Superintendent Kratz has said. His excellent paper is a protest against machine teaching. It is a plea for intelligent teaching — teaching that recognizes individual differ- ences, and individual needs. It is a protest against education by elimination; it is a plea for education by ministration. Mr. Kratz makes an earnest plea for helping pupils to help themselves. He advocates individual instruction as an aid to class instruction. Now, individual instruction will not accomplish the impossible. It will not make brilliant students out of slow and stupid boys and girls; but it will often do something far better — it will put hope and courage into the hearts of such boys and girls and lead them to realize the power that is within them. Our school work has been too largely based upon the discipline of failure. It should and can be based on the discipline of success. An education that "hits the mark" provides an opportunity for every child to win success up to the full extent of his ability, however meager his ability may be. In order to furnish such an education we must adjust our teaching ahd our courses to the needs of the individual pupils. We are running wild just now over industrial training, and there is need enough of such training; but after all has been said and done, we must come back to the fundamental principle that training of any kind, industrial or otherwise, must be based largely upon the power to interpret the printed page. We, in the high schools especially, must teach the boys and girls to master the language of books; we must teach them to study; to get the thought out of its verbal husk, and make it their own. This must always be our chief business. Now, the means devised to do this work is class teaching. Class teaching is a very economical device, and it has done fairly well for the majority of school pupils; but it has left a large minority hopelessly stranded. There is sufl&cient evidence to prove that the greater number of these boys and girls could have been saved by intelligent individual teaching. Superintendent Kratz has told us that the average percentage of failures in all grades of the high school is twenty-two. In the high school of my home town where class-individual teaching has been employed for the past four years, the percentage of failure is 7.3, a difference of 14 per cent, in favor of individual instruction. Superintendent Kratz reports 3 1. 1 per cent, of failures in the first-year class of the high schools. The high school of which I am speaking reports 10.7 per cent, for this year, a difiference of 20 per cent, in favor of individual teaching. In the second-, third-, and fourth-year classes, Superintendent Kratz reports the percentages of failures as 21 . 4, 19. 6, and 13 . 2 respectively, against 5 . i, 9.4, and 2.1 for the corresponding years in the high school using individual instruction, a marked difiference in each year in favor of individual teaching. In his conclusions Superintendent Kratz states that 15 per cent, of failures is a better standard than 22 per cent. We have a little over 7 per cent, in our high school. As I have said, individual instruction will not accomplish the impossible. It will not do much Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUMS 599 for the cigarette fiend. It will not do much for the boy or girl who is socially inclined. It will, however, often accomplish a great deal for the so-called lazy pupil. I have in mind one such pupil in our high school. The teacher said of that boy, "I won't work for him, if he won't work for me." She was led to look at the matter in a little different light. She called the boy to her side day after day and worked with him, not for him, until he began to pick up and work for himself. Now many a lazy pupil can be redeemed in this way. Furthermore, individual teaching will do much for the slow pupil. This type of pupil has always been, and still is, rather a misfit in our schools. He is often slow because he thinks, and real thinking takes time. He finds some point that he cannot under- stand. This point must be made clear before he can go ahead. The ordinary class reci- tation makes no provision for such cases, so the slow pupil often gets far behind the class, simply because his individual need is not met. Class instruction magnifies superficial memorizing. It minimizes real thinking. Again, individual teaching will aid the weak pupil. Some months ago I heard a recita- tion in first-year algebra in a large city high school. The class, as a whole, was a very good one. One pupil, however, seemed especially weak. This girl had not mastered the rule for expanding (a + &)7. For ten minutes of a thirty-five minute period, the teacher kept the pupil at blackboard with absolutely no result. The rest of the class looked idly on for a few minutes, then grew restless, bored, and finally pained, as the pupil at the board showed her discomfiture. How much better it would have been if this teacher, directly upon discovering the pupil's weakness, had excused her from further recitation on the point. Then at some individual period, when the class was profitable employed, aid could have been given in the best possible manner. Class individual-instruction, as I know it, had its origin at Batavia, N. Y., and Superin- tendent John Kennedy and his teachers deserve the thanks of the entire country for giving to pedagogy an exemplification of rational teaching. Under this plan the class recitation is a time for the teacher either to teach the class or to test the class. It is not a time to teach one or two pupils some point that all the others know. The individual period is a supervised study period for the class. During this time the pupils study on advance work, while the teacher works silently at her desk with individual pupils who need her aid. This supervised study period is one of the most valuable phases of class-individual instruction. In closing I venture the assertion that we can aid needy pupils effectively, only by a wise and generous use of individual teaching. L THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUMS FROM THE STANDPOINT OF COLLEGES OF ENGINEERING WILLIAM T. MAGRUDER, PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS, OHIO The American system of public instruction represents the movement toward which the national educational systems of all the great nations of the world are tending. That such a system is desirable in any nation is no longer a subject for debate; and that it is necessary in a republic is beyond question of opposition. The statement that children of school age should have the opportunity to be educated at the public expense is no longer only an axiom in civics, good government, and good morals. It now has the authority pertaining to legal decisions. The argument for public-school education is based upon the neces- sity for the proper training of the child for the position which he will be required fill as a citizen in the community in virtue of his birth in the republic. 6oO NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Hence the necesssity for the education of the child in self-preservation, self- support, and in his civic duties as a good citizen. If this be true, and logical, it follows that every system of education should include those studies which will tend to make him a good citizen, which will teach him how to weigh evi- dence, to discuss public questions, and to decide right from wrong, and which will cause him to vote intelligently and with the exercise of both a public and a private conscience. The day is passed when votes can be changed by empty harangues, by oratorical appeals to passion, and by calumny and slander. Today, the voter is educated and demands a good reason for changing his opinion and indicating it on an Australian ballot. The scheme of studies which the pupil pursues should be such as to teach him how to preserve him- self in both moral and physical health. The invalid and the dyspeptic are seldom good citizens, no matter how exemplary their conduct as men. The curriculum which he follows should be such as to train him to become self- supporting, so that he will not be a charge upon the community. It cannot be gainsaid that a hungry citizen, or the man or woman whose stomach has been filled with food purchased with ill-gotten income is a poor voter and therefore a menace to society. What then should be the character of the program of studies to be offered by a cosmopolitan high school, and from which suitable curriculums can be formed ? 1. It should be American and national and should not ape European methods or customs. There is no good reason why we should not obtain many excellent suggestions from foreign countries, and especially from Germany, the "land of the schoolmaster," but we should take little or nothing bodily. Each feature suggested should be most carefully considered in the light of our own conditions and be modified and adapted to meet our needs. What may be admirably suited for Germans in Germany, may not be necessarily the best for Americans. 2. It should be democratic and suited to the needs of each and every citizen of the repubHc. Being free, it should enable even the poorest child to obtain the education which he may desire and which his mental abilities require. Instead of tending to class distinctions based solely upon the service rendered and the abihty of some progenitor, it should permit the lowliest to obtain the education which will fit his personality for the life of greatest usefulness and service in the community, while allowing the drone and society butterfly to fall out along the educational wayside. 3. It should be of high-school grade. This means that it should not include studies of grammar-school grade; nor should it essay to do the work of the college and the university. If a change must be made in the length of the high-school course, let the division be made at the sixth grade, giving six years to elementary education, six years to secondary, and six years to collegiate and professional training for the well-educated and cultured individual. Then, if more studies or more matter must be included, let the salaries of our teachers Departmentj THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUMS 6oi be made larger so as to enable principals and schoolboards to employ teachers more capable of imparting knowledge and of educating the child to think more intensively. To add two years to the present twelve years of primary and secondary education is to duplicate the work of the colleges and to cater to the wishes or whims of the few at the expense of the many. If a municipal high school of collegiate grade is desired, why not call a spade a spade and let the so-called "people's college" be a genuine municipal college and not a half-and-half affair? The term, "people's college," savors of the demagog, infers that it is for the many, while the present collegiate institutions are for the few. As a matter of fact, both colleges and high schools at present offer curriculums suited to and taken by, only the very few of the school popu- lation. 4. In each of the curriculums into which the program of studies may be divided, should be included the fundamentals of all high-school education and all those things which are needed for good citizenship. These include {a) a working knowledge of the English language, including composition and rhetoric, ability to spell and punctuate, to compose an essay whose meaning shall be clear, and to write a plain business letter in intelligible terms. It may be said that many professors and college graduates cannot meet this requirement; if so, so much the worse for their elementary and secondary school training and for their carelessness in diction and writing. It has been proven conclusively at Northwestern University that everyone can learn to punctuate, and that although large numbers of high-school graduates enter college deficient in spelling, yet less than i per cent, are really bad spellers and possibly deserve to belong to the "cannot-learn-to-spell" class. I believe that if those who do not really try to learn were eliminated, even this small percentage would be very much smaller. It is lack of effort to observe and to concentrate the attention which is the cause of many mistakes in the boy's spelling and arithmetic, and later in his daily work. h) United States history, including the history of the political parties. There is no reason why the history of our nation and government should not be enthusiastically studied by high -school scholars, provided they are skillfully taught. Here is one place where we can quite properly follow German practice and teach the history of our country and our people. But it should be done with intelligence and truthfulness, and a breadth of national character. c) Civics, or the knowledge which should be required for citizenship and before one was allowed to vote as a citizen. If I am correctly informed, the ignorant and stay-at-home voter is more to be feared in this country than the one who can be voted in blocks-of-five. d) The elements of commercial customs, banking, and business law for all high-school boys and girls, so that they will be less at the mercy of the unscru- pulous sharper when forced to decide for themselves in matters pertaining to everyday business affairs. Why continue our fatahstic practice of making our 6o2 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary widows and our orphans pay large tuition fees in the school of experience so that we may be known as the business man of the family ? e) Assuming a working knowledge of arithmetic capable of rapid and accurate use to have been acquired in the elementary school, all high-school curriculums should include a one-year course in both concrete and demon- strative geometry. Few people appreciate the utility of geometry to men and women in business, in housekeeping, dressmaking, upholstering, and. garden- ing, to say nothing of engineering and the sciences. Its most valuable feature is the practice it demands in imaginative thought and in logical demonstration. As such it is an excellent prerequisite for economics. It should always precede algebra by a half-year. /) In our efforts to be non-sectarian in all matters pertaining to ethics, morals, and religion, we have gone to the other extreme, and omit everything that is positive and dogmatic. We no longer tell a child that "lying is sinful," and stop there. We must use a softer term and say that ''lying is wrong" and then must add apologetically that "it does not pay," and that "honesty is the best policy." In many schools, judging by their output, the Bible is unknown even as a sample of English literature, and the ignorance of it among college students as a "mine of English undefiled" is pitiable and sad. g) As each child has senses to be developed besides those of seeing and hearing, an elementary course in manual training should be required of all boys, and in domestic science of all girls. The course for the boys should include at least carpentry, and joinery, and possibly wood-turning. The course for the girls should include plain household cooking and plain domestic sewing. Both sexes should be taught to draw for both the artistic and practical benefit to be derived therefrom. By drawing, I do not mean the making of pictures. Why continue to train the eyes of our children and possibly their ears, and let their sense of touch and muscular adjustments remain untrained? Every child needs to have his hands trained to do something, and especially at the gawky age of the first year of the high school. From the point of view of national economics, the training of the hand should no longer be so waste- fully neglected. We have recently had a meeting at Washington of the governors of the states of the union with the object in view of training our people to preserve and conserve our national resources. Not a word was said about directing and training the latent energies of the millions of hands of the young people of the country so that they would know how to conserve these priceless national inheritances. "Woodman, spare that tree" appeals to our sentiment, but who is there who will teach the woodman how to use the lumber cut from the last tree felled so that he can spare this one, or to cut this one at the right time in its life, and without wasting the best part in stump- age, and without splitting the log ? 5. Curriculums in sufficient variety should be provided as will meet the needs of all children who are mentally capable of receiving a high-school education. Until this is done, in no sense is the high school cosmopolitan. Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUMS 603 For economic reasons, it can be assumed that, practically speaking, the cos- mopolitan high school is metropolitan and is not to be found in agricultural districts, or in villages and small towns or cities; that the cosmopolitan high school is indicative of the tastes, talents, and business of its community; that while it is intensely democratic, it is expressive of the republican form of government in education; that it is American and non-sectional; that it is the department store in education, supplying all needs under one roof and with a comprehensive character of goods suited to the pocket-book of the taxpayer. In the cosmopolitan high school, the courses of study should be so numerous that students having all kinds of minds should be tempted to enter the open door of opportunity, should be guided in the selection each of his own mental nourishment, and should continue for four years to enjoy its invigorating freshness. At least this is what it should be in theory. The classical high school, the boys' high school, the girls' high school, the Latin school, and the manual training high school are English or European, sectional and class names, and tend to divide the children by sexual or artificial lines whenever they are not housed under one roof. One of the objects of public-school education is the elimination of class feeling in the youth of the nation. Each new evolution from the private schools of the earlier half of the last century has been an effort in this direction. Their titles tell what they stand for. The classical, modern language, EngHsh, commercial, manual training, and the various hyphenated science curriculums are all well and good for the few, but it is evident that they do not attract the many. We now hear and conjure with the term cosmopolitan meaning universal and com- prehensive. It is a goal toward which we are travelling educationally. What we need in our elementary and secondary schools are additional curriculums which are intended for the masses and not suited solely to the tastes and pleasures of the classes. It is all well enough to try to eliminate any class feeling among those high-school scholars who are sent to the cosmopolitan high school, but what about those boys and girls who see in the present curric- ulums, with possibly the exceptions of the curriculums in manual training and domestic science, nothing suited to their wishes, tastes, and needs ? Verily, we have eliminated class feeling, by eliminating the class of students who might have any feehng in the matter. Bulletin No. j/p, of the Bureau of Education, by Professor Edward L. Thorndike, shows the terrible results of this elimination, and that it is more severe in the East where private schools still flourish, and in towns and cities where there is a live demand for industrial workers. In fifty-three cities, an average of only 38 per cent, of the children who were in the three lowest grades reach the eighth grade, and in forty-four cities, only 8 per cent, reach the senior year of the high school. In other words, if a man had twelve children the probability is that one of them would reach the last year of the high-school curriculum, provided he lived in the average city. If he lived in a college town, two or even three might get through the high school. But 6o4 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary if he lived in an industrial center, such as Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis, Phila- del hia, Cincinnati, only one child in every twenty to one in one hundred would go through the high school. If, for example, in New York state, only 50 per cent, get beyond the fifth grade, only 30 per cent, get beyond the grammar school and only 8 per cent, get into college and only 2 per cent., or less, get through college, it would seem to indicate that there was something wrong somewhere in our educational system, and that it had gone to seed in academic pods rather than bear fruit of economic, industrial, and social value. We used to divide school and college youths into those who go and those who are sent. This division leaves out the largest class of all, namely, those who are eliminated. What we therefore need in our cosmopolitan high school in addition to our present curriculums are two groups of curriculums suited to the needs of boys and girls who belong tx) the majority rather than to the minority. I would therefore advocate most earnestly the addition of industrial, domestic, and commercial courses which should be of real value to the child and to the community, which should supplement the elementary courses in manual training and domestic science, and which should make all life richer as well as more effective. I am much in favor of trade schools, as we find them in Germany, Switzerland, and France, for the manufacture of the well-trained and skilled industrialist, and such as are so well trained at the Milwaukee Public Trade Schools. But excellent as the trade school is in all things per- taining to the trade, it tempts the boy to leave the regular school and learn only the trade and allied subjects. Trade education alone is not a preparation for life ; it is life itself. Instead of the trade school where only technical infor- mation is acquired, and instead of the school having only the old-time classical curriculum, we should compromise the matter and in the cosmopolitan high- school curriculums should combine the fundamental courses given above with education for certain of the trades, for domestic life, for commercial positions, and for clerical work. We have at last learned that we cannot cast all children in the classical mold of a classical education, no matter how good it may be for the few. We should be permitted to cast a large number in an industrial mold and have them educated in English composition and rhetoric. United States history, civics and government, commercial customs and practices, geometry and good morals, in addition to their special training in some branch of industry. By so doing, the colleges will receive a larger number of appli- cants for admission ; the engineering and technical schools will be able to get young men who are already trained in one or more of the engineering trades and know what they want before entering the college ; the manufacturers will have a larger supply of skilled and educated workmen ; the working classes will be better off in every way, and life for them will be sweeter and less of a daily round of drudgery and toil unmixed with everything which does not pertain to their work, and both the industrial efficiency and the social efficiency of the Nation will be improved, Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUMS 605 What I would urge upon all persons interested in secondary and technical education are: 1. That high-school graduates shall have had a sane training, free from all foolishness, frills, fraternities, and frequent frivolities, and yet full of the fresh joyousness of youth, intensive with hard study and harder play, and in which a memory-era rn of facts and fancies has not been made to take the place of a mind trained for use and for straight and accurate thinking. 2. That they shall have been recruited from all classes of society and have been given an opportunity for mental development, irrespective of their individ- ual differences due to parentage and early environment, but based on their native capacity, aptitude for study, and prospective occupation. 3. That all "snap" courses and poorly and imperfectly developed courses shall be either eliminated or valued at their true rating, so that four years of secondary training of acceptable quality and amount shall entitle the high- school scholar to his diploma, irrespective of the line or lines in which his work has been done. 4. That the student shall have made an honest effort to discover himself and to learn for what purpose he is in the world. The indefiniteness of the aim of many boys accounts for their inability to do anything and do it well; and 5. That the teachers shall have tried systematically to develop the child's capabilities and interests, intellectual, moral, patriotic, aesthetic, manual, and constructive. Now that the requirements for admission of our best colleges of engineer- ing and of our technical schools are in most cases the equivalent of the academic or classical department of the same institution, the high-school boy who decides to go to an engineering or technical school cannot be rightfully accused of hunting an easy way into college. When publishers of college textbooks boldly advertise that in a certain cosmopolitan textbook on physics ''the more severe course necessary to engineers is printed in smaller t)rpe," and when college professors of mathematics openly state that they have a higher standard for passing a man in the college of engineering than in the college of letters, it must be self-evident that the engineering college is calling upon the high- school teachers for their best material and choicest output, and that the college teacher and the high-school teacher are ahke responsible for the molding of the character and the mind of those who later will decide momentous problems in the movements of the armies of peace and of war. It is a fearful responsi- bility to decide the destiny and happiness of the lives of thousands of human beings, but the training in high school and college of the mind of the man who is to be the power for good or for evil in the community is none the less responsible. 6o6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM SPENCER R. SMITH, PRINCIPAL, WENDELL PHILLIPS HIGH SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL. The educational situation is one of great unrest. Recent utterances of students of social phases of life, the cry for the recognition of vocational subjects in college-entrance requirements, the demand for industrial and technical education, are but di^erent expressions of a cry for the freeing of our youth from the mummy cloths of tradition, that they may breathe the free air of present-day life. England, France, and Germany have heard the cry. What are the conditions ? 1. According to the report of the Commissioner of Education for the school year, 1905-6, there were in attendance upon the public secondary schools of the United States 0.88 per cent, of the whole population or 3. 118 per cent, of the estimate'd school population of 23,792,723 between five and eighteen years of age. Of these 11.82 per cent, were graduated and less than 4 per cent, entered the colleges or universities, while 8 . 6 per cent, claim to be in preparation for college. Should the curriculum of the public high school be constructed for the 4 per cent, who go to the university, or for the 96 per cent, who are dependent on the high school for their life training ? 2. In our largest cities there is a large and varying foreign element that must needs be adopted into our life and must be prepared for citizenship. The children of these people are in our high schools in large numbers. In the Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago during the school year of 1905-6 there were children whose fathers were bom in over thirty different countries, and this year the school counts about twenty-five. Does not this matter of nationality, with its consequent hereditary traits and tendencies, become an important factor in the development of a cosmopolitan high-school cur- riculum ? 3. The report of the United States Census for 1900 shows that of those ten years of age and over in gainful occupations in the ten largest cities 5 . 255 per cent, are in professional service (under professional service are included actors, architects, electricians, engineers [civil, etc.], government officials, etc.); while 25.656 per cent, do domestic or personal service, 29.918 per cent, follow in trade or transportation, and 38.412 per cent, are in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, (i) Does our curriculum fit the 95 per cent, in other than professional service? -or has it in mind the 5 per cent, only? 4. The college and the university control the high school. A cursory study of the index for fifteen and fractional years of the leading secondary educational magazine shows 214 entries under college-entrance requirements or some relation of the college to the secondary or high school. Then follow 173 entries under English — which no one disputes; this is followed by 160 entries under classics, including both Greek and Latin, while science must be satisfied with 98 entries, mathematics 66, modern languages 51, com- mercial education 21, civics 16, industrial education 3. The topic "Basis Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM 607 of an Efficient Education — Culture or Vocation" has 3 entries. The relation of the pupil to the school and the community must be satisfied with 16 entries relating largely to discipline and morals, 14 to athletics, 10 each to coeduca- tion, and high school and society, 5 to fraternities. School buildings in this day of the development of school architecture occupy 3 entries. 5. The Commissioner of Education in the report referred to above shows that 50. 24 per cent, of the pupils in our public high schools are taking Latin while but 8.85 per cent, take French and 20.96 per cent, take German, with no report for Spanish. Algebra — replete with theory and sterile in concrete- ness — occupies the attention of 58.05 per cent, of our children and geometry 28.50 per cent., while studying physics we find 15. 27 per cent., chemistry 6.52 per cent., physical geography 20.97 per cent., physiology 20.36 per cent. The biological science, so important in life and nature-study, is not honored with mention. History (other than United States) — {note the parenthesis!)— is studied by 42.39 per cent., while civics receives the attention of but 17.48 per cent. We find no statistics for the different vocational subjects and must be satisfied with the statement that 95,000 are pursuing commercial subjects in our public high schools, and that 50,595 were in manual and industrial schools, both public and private. 6. That some idea of the trend of secondary education in our cosmo- politan high schools today may be derived, a study has been made of the curricula of the high schools of fifty of the largest cities. No account is taken of commercial, technical and manual- training high schools in this report. CONSTANTS We find that the fifty require at least two years of English for graduation, of these 5 require two and one-half years, while 44 require three years and 38 four years of English. In mathematics 47 require algebra, while 41 require geometry and 9 require solid geometry — with 3 registering arithmetic for half of first year as required. In science 9 require physiology, 15 physics, 4 chemistry, 6 physical geography, 8 botany. Eighteen require United States history, 16 ancient history, while 6 name Roman history and 7 English history. Six require civics, 8 elocution one to two periods a week, and 1 1 require physical training 3 or 4 years twice a week. Nine require music once a week, and 12 free-hand drawing one to two times a week. While no public high school names Latin as a permanent constant, still as an optional with German or French or some other subject, as a constant in a given course of study, we shall find from two to four years of Latin effect- ively a constant in many of our schools. This is confirmed by the further fact noted above that 50 . 24 per cent, of the pupils in the public high school were studying Latin in 1 905-1 906. ELECTIVES Fifty schools offer Latin as an elective, either as an optional with another study, or elective by course or year, or as a general elective. Of these 4 6o8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondar offer but three years of Latin. Greek is offered by forty schools, 4 offer four years, 29 three years and 7 two years, and offered as Latin, either as a general, a course, an optional, or by the year elective. Forty-four schools offer German; 32 for four years, 9 for three years, 3 for two years; while 48 offer French, of which 14 offer two years and 17 each three years and four years, Spanish is offered by 18 schools from two to four years, optional four; 3 offer Spanish in the ninth and tenth grades, while 7 offer it in the eleventh and twelfth grades. Three schools offer algebra as an elective while 10 offer plane geometry in the second to fourth years, and 37 solid geometry in the third and fourth years of which 23 by courses. Trigonometry is offered by 43 schools, physics by 41 schools, chemistry by 48, physiology by 29, botany by 33, zoology by 37, physiography by 39. A closer examination shows that 10 schools offer but half a year in physi- ology, 7 a half-year in botany, 5 but half a year in physiology, and that with the exception of chemistry and physics which are confined to the third and fourth years, these sciences may be found as electives offered variously in any one of the four years as the schools may elect. Five schools offering two years of physics save the day. Query: Is the value of a science offered in the first year the same as that offered in the fourth year ? Is it a wonder that, in transferring, pupils discover differences, oftentimes to their sorrow ? In the historical studies we find the same chaotic condition. American, mediaeval, and English history may be taken in any of the four years and in several schools are offered as half-year subjects. Ancient history stands forth as a full-year subject and offered in the first, second, or third year in 38 schools; economics for a half-year by 30 schools. Psychology — save the day 1 — is offered in the fourth year only ; by 7 schools for the full year and by 2 schools for a half-year. In the vocational subjects we find the same conditions of chaos and dif- ferent evaluation. For example, the pupil may choose his school and thereby take his commercial geography in the first, or second, or third, or fourth year; and so with commercial law. Nine schools offer but half a year of commercial geography, and all courses in commercial law occupy half a year. Twenty- nine schools offer two years of bookkeeping and 16 one year, ranging from the first to the fourth year; while 9 offer one year in stenography, 28 two years, 4 three years, and 3 four years. In domestic science we find 7 schools offer- ing four years at one period a week; 2 two years, two periods a week; and 3 one year at three periods a week. When you consider that any or all of these subjects are either optional or elective by course, by the year, or is a general elective, you can see into what a delightful position one is placed who would attempt to bring into orderly form this chaotic mass. To say that botany or physiology, history, American, mediaeval, or English, or the commercial subjects may occupy a position in any one of the four years and have the same power of mental development or H Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM 609 the same quality of product is not only illogical but absolutely absurd. But here is a condition. 7. We are now led to another most vital condition, a condition that has caused much anxiety and has been the source of most violent criticism of the public schools: the elimination of pupils during the several years of our high school, especially in the first year or ninth grade. Professor Thorndike has just published through the Bureau of Educa- tion The Elimination of Pupils from School, in which he estimates that 27 per cent, of pupils entering the schools of 23 cities investigated continue to the ninth grade, 17 per cent, to the tenth grade, 12 per cent, to the eleventh grade, and 8 per cent, to the twelfth grade ; while 37 per cent, entering high school do not continue to the second year, 29 . 4 per cent, of second year do not continue to the third year, and 33 . 3 per cent, of third year do not continue to the fourth year. When we compare with those entering high school we find the final result in the fact that but 13 per cent, enter first year of the high school, 10 per cent, second year, but 5 per cent, enter third year, and but 4 per cent, enter fourth year. From the conclusions reached by Professor Thorndike I make the following quotation: The high school, which attracts so many, holds so few. Something in the mental or social and economic status of the pupil who enters the high schools is at fault. The fact that the elimination is so great in the first year of the high school gives evidence that a large share of the fault lies with the kind of education given in the high schools. One can hardly suppose that very many of the parents who send children on to the high school do so with no expectation of keeping them there over a year, or that a large number of pupils who complete the elementary-school course and make a trial of the high school are so stupid or uninterested in being educated that they had better be got rid of in the first year. A study has been made within two years of the causes of such elimination in the Chicago high schools. It was the purpose of the writer to make a personal examination of the data secured by the committee appointed by the Board of Education, but before he was able to take time for such study, Mr. Ralph Blount of the Robert A. Waller High School, a member of the committee, published some findings from the data received. This paper shows that 34 per cent, of the ninth -grade pupils either had dropped out or did not intend to return the following September. Mr. Blount's study leads him to believe "that failure in study is the major cause of leaving" — covered in many cases by "leaving ostensibly to go to work." With Mr. Blount's permission I am submitting a table (appearing on the following page) made by him, such table being "corrected by the aid of impressions not subject to tabulation, derived from ;he report made by the teachers." This is very interesting and gives much food for reflection and speculation. Of course the 9 percent, that move from the city, the 2 per c'ent. that are transferred are not necessarily of "the lost." The 3 per cent, that go to private schools are still in pursuit of training and about them we need not worry. Of those that fall by the wayside because of sickness, we have cause 6io NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Reasons for Leaving School IN Ninth Grade— Chicago High Schools Per cent. Loss Removal from city .09 Exclusive of number leaving be- ' Transfer to other schools .02 cause obliged to work, 28 per 1 Practically cent. , not Sickness ■15 Inclusive of number leaving because preventable Miscellaneous causes .04 obliged to v^ork, 44 per cent. ' Business colleges •03 Inclusive of number leaving because ^ \ Other private schools ■03 obliged to work, 72 per cent. 1 To work: Necessary .16 Exclusive of number leaving because ' Preventable Pupil's taste .08 obliged to work, 56 per cent. \ Failure .40 1 to think. Are we, through lack of study of ventilation and sanitation in the school and home, through ill-taught physiology and hygiene, through inatten- tion to the enforcement of the laws of health as we come into contact with these young people, through inattention to the physical condition of the child in his relation to his studies, in the smallest possible way responsible for this condition ? Can we assist the parents ? Or is this condition caused at times by the change of environment, too heavy, ill-timed, and ill-adapted studies causing nervous strain ? Time will not allow discussion of the relation of the elemen- tary to the high school in preparation of the young pupil for the great change to take place, nor of the facts underlying the passing into manhood and woman- hood, which if properly understood by the teacher would stop many harsh words, heartache, and consequent breakdown. The business college is credited with but 3 per cent., but account is not taken, of course, of those who step into business colleges directly from the elementary school. Those who would go to business college can be assisted and saved to the public high schools by more practical development of the commercial courses, by more wide-awake, concrete instruction, and by an attempt to acquire positions for those young people, who ought to be far better equipped than those who come from the hothouses. Why should not every city high school organize a bureau of employment, not only for those who may be graduated from its vocational courses, but for such as are unable to remain in school unless they are able to secure employment ? Why may it not be possible to secure positions for worthy young men for part time in our leading business houses, in minor positions as newspaper carriers, as messengers, etc ? May we not save a large number of this 24 per cent. ? The 40 per cent, that go down in the table as failures, what of them? What of the whole 34 per cent, of which this 40 per cent, is a part ? What of the 25,000 children between 14 and 16 in Massachusetts alone, who are either at work or are idle? And Principal Bogan of the Lane Technical High School of Chicago tells us that the last school census of Chicago revealed 8,000 boys and girls between 14 and 16, not in school and not at work. While here there may be one seeming incompetent, and there one so lazy that nothing can seemingly develop interest, try him — give him something to do; create a deeper interest; develop greater enthusiasm; form for him a more definite Department] THE COSMOFOLITAN HIGH^CHOOL CURRICULUM 6ii purpose in life. If we would learn *'to put the whole boy in school," "arouse all his native energy by offering a complete and blended expression of all his active intellectual and motive- powers through a long series of occupations — healthy and vigorous in body, clear in thought, and ready in execution." THE REMEDY "School is life," says Professor Dewey. The curriculum of the city high school should be typical of the city in all its interests and activities. With Dr. Dewey I believe that there should be no segregation but that we should have the wider high school because, as he says, The wider high school relieves many of the difficulties in the adequate treatment of the individual as an individual. It brings the individual into a wider sphere of contacts and thus makes it possible to test him and his capacities more thoroughly. The need is .... for a region of opportunities large enough and balanced enough to meet the indi- vidual on his every side and provide for him that which is necessary to arouse and direct, .... Our task is on the one hand to select and adjust the studies with reference to the nature of the individual thus discovered and on the other hand to order and group them so that they shall most definitely and systematically represent the chief lines of social endeavor and social achievement. So every city high school should first of all give that which the 96 per cent, of the earning population demand and then should offer the 4 per cent, its demand for college preparation. It is not necessary, here, to declaim the merits of the industrial training. Massachusetts and Wisconsin have taken steps in the inauguration of a movement that promises to be most effective. The National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, too, in its two great meetings and in its literature has developed a deep interest and has sought not only the sym- pathy but the active participation in its discussion and the organization of its plan, of the representatives of labor and of capital and of those interested in social work and in the training of our boys and girls. However, while it, as a rule, desires to organize these schools as a part of the public- school system, it does not wish them to be an inseparable part of the public school as now organized but rather a new organization, within the old. In speak- ing of the movement to organize separate agricultural high schools, Professor Davenport, Dean of the College of Agriculture, University of IlHnois, says, "We cannot segregate and make an educational cleavage at the line of occupa- tions except to the common peril." And Professor Frederick Bolton, well known for his work on the schools of Germany, sounds the alarm: A separate class of high schools must not be allowed to spring up. Just as sure as they do, they will breed social distinctions and cause stratifications in society. It has been our boast that children of all nationalities, occupations, and creeds enter our schoolroom doors and emerge together — American citizens If we wish to promote true democ- racy and avoid artificial distinctions we must see to it that \te have only one class of public schools and that including every subject worthy of consjdefation and open on equal terms 6l2 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary to every boy and girl in the community The one who argues for the establishment of a separate system of agricultural high schools, or separate industrial high schools is wittingly or unwittingly an enemy to our present high schools and to true democracy. Every city high school, then, should offer not only such studies as are needed as a preparation to professional life in its various phases but all such vocational subjects:— either commercial or industrial — as may be needed by the youth of the given city. This does not mean wide-open election but rather the development of a series of suggestive parallel courses of study similar to the St. Louis system but even broader in its scope so that it may meet the demands of the individual pupil in his particular environment. Superintendent Chancellor in his last book. Motives, Ideas and Values in Education, has struck the keynote, it seems to me, when he demands, as constants, play, nature-study, and the vernacular, with music and drawing as minor constants. In this connection I desire to emphasize the necessity of physical culture for our city-bred, yes, flat-bred boys and girls. No one should be excused therefrom unless physically disabled and each one should be obliged to take not less than two periods in the gymnasium a week ; daily would be far better than the two periods. Physiology should be a constant in this day of hygienic carelessness if not of ignorance. The Commissioner of Education reports 20 . 36 per cent, as taking physiology while 50 . 24 per cent, take Latin. Verily the physical ''know thyself" needs promulgation as well as the "know thy- self" of Socrates. To this I would add American history and civics. You will note that American history is omitted entirely from the report of the Commissioner of Education and that but eighteen of the fifty schools report courses in American history as constants and as an elective it is offered in connection with civics and in some cases is but a half-year subject, while civics in the Commissioner of Education report is interesting but 17.48 per cent. A short time ago I strolled over to the small park in which was situated the Douglas monument. Curiosity took me to the grated iron door in the base of the monument. I looked in upon the sarcophagus to read at its base: "jTe// my children to obey the laws and uphold the constitution" With the above facts before us, the irony of the situation is apparent. Further, bear in mind that methods of presentation should be more adapted to the present-day mode of life. The spirit of the modern should enliven the teacher of the text. Mr. Partridge of the New York Board of Education has righteously inveighed against the course in Enghsh masterpieces based on the college-entrance requirements. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle quotes him as saying: College professors select the literature to be read and studied. Burke and DeQuincy and Addison are not nourishing food for us. There is no natural selection of reading. It is 4bsurd for a college board to select the reading for all the schools of the country. The ft: Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM 613 effect of it is the absurdity of reducing the reading of literature to its lowest term. Instead of promoting a love for literature, our high-school experts have fallen into the ridiculous position of promoting a distaste for it. Why cannot our experts devise English studies that will cultivate literary appreciation ? Why need we be so afraid of finding out what a boy likes ? Our high schools fail of developing literary appreciation, and they fail because they have bound literature with a syllabus that insists upon an over-minute consideration of detail. The author of the pages given to the English course in the curriculum of Horace Mann School, part i, page 8, says: The English work of the upper two years is restricted both in subject-matter and in method of treatment by the College Entrance Board. The English Department of the school feels that to this extent its course in English is inferior to a course more liberal in subject-matter and less technical in methods. ''The trail of the serpent is over them all " — and the spirit of traditionalism prevails. Even in the mathematics of the high school — algebra and geometry — it is only recently that a tendency to concrete teaching has been shown. What boy has not balked at the ''fool's bridge," or at some algebraic theory ? Why can we not have more applied mathematics and not relegate "doing things" mathematically to the shop and to the technical school? Much of our high-school mathematics is like the whitened meat the fond mother offers her boy after she has sucked all the juice therefrom. Blessed be drudgery! Yes, when you can see why. It must not be that certain lines of study whether humanistic or scientific are alone sufficient for the development of the varying powers, but whether it is the aim to make our young men and young women so efficient that they will be able to take their places in a world that makes each pull not only his own weight but be a true helper in the crew to which he belongs, able to pull with the others. Time is not sufficient to develop the curriculum of a cosmopolitan high school. One person cannot do it. The report of the Committee of Ten marked a step in the evolution of the high-school course of study. Fifteen years have passed. The elective scheme has been tried. A new cry is heard. All honor is due this famous report and its makers; an enormous good has been the result. We are moving. Conditions are changing. Is not the time ripe for another commission, a commission of those immediately interested in public high schools, to collect data along the lines already suggested, and with this data in hand to develop a curriculum that shall meet the demands of the youth of today and thereby save to himself and to his generation many a boy who is relegated to the most menial task, when he might be fitted for the higher spheres of labor ? Then let us make our boast of universal educa- tion true by upbuilding every boy and girl. Let us make thoroly honor- able in the sight of all Gvtry position in life, because there is a light seen by all, a culture born not of mediaevalism but out of the present with its mag- nificent possibilities, a culture that recognizes that to carve a mantel or a chest, to construct a telephone system, to design a pattern for wall decoration, 6 14 • NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary to weave from raw material a copy of an Indian blanket in all its rich colorings, is as great as the skill needed to solve an intricate problem in algebra or to read the story of Odysseus from the original Greek. Not only is the skill equal, the amount of brain-force equal, but what is even more, an interest is often present that is in itself educative in value. This can be but a preliminary study. The problem is before us. Is not the day here — prophesied by Dr. Oscar Riddle of the University of Chicago: One day .... our educators will awaken to the fact that education bears some rela- tion to the creative labor of man and further that the productive citizen is demanding a school that is for him and for us, not for the progressive reincubation of mediaeval linguistic nest eggs which are so commonly the pride of the pedagogue. DISCUSSION Wells L. Griswold, principal of Rayen School, Youngstown, Ohio. — The question of educational policy which this country has up for discussion and if possible for solution today is that of education for efficiency. There is no pointed argument concerning the traditional high school. It is established and is here to stay. The shop practice which has limited the number of apprentices, the trouble which manufacturers have had in find- ing competent^ mechanics and foremen, combined with the difficulties which the schools have experienced in the attempt which this country has made to crowd upon all classes a liberal education, has resulted in a well-defined and justified public santiment for educa- tional opportunities of an industrial character. The question, so far as it affects secondary education, is, shall we have trade schools, industrial or technical schools, or shall we develop cosmopolitan high schools ? Undoubtedly the cosmopolitan high school should be encouraged. All high schools should be cosmopolitan, or as nearly so as the size of the community in which they are located will permit. That is, they should include in their program of studies all the sub- jects of the traditional school and in addition they should make ample provision for busi- ness courses, for manual training, shop work, domestic science, and for the elements of those trades which are characteristic of the local communities. The ideal must be to meet all the demands of their constituencies for secondary school training. In very large cities there may be room for trade or technical schools, or for Latin schools, but even then the best interests will be conserved if the cosmopolitan high schools predominate. In these general schools all classes meet on a common level. It is of great advantage to the children of the rich and ruling classes to mingle with those who come from the homes of poorer parents and it is of inestimable value to the children of the poor and uncultured to meet and mingle with those from homes of culture and means. If separate schools are provided for those who seek a general and liberal education and for those who wish to become industrial workers, the choice of occupation must be made at an early age, and often long before the pupil has had the experience to choose wisely. Many of those who come to profit most by education for culture and general power would have chosen an exclusively industrial training had they made the final choice at entering high school. In the cosmopolitan high school, courses can be selected in such a way that the boy or girl will ultimately find his place, and this can be done without limiting his opportunity of choice. This equal chance to choose the education which leads to greatest opportunity which is the heritage of the laborer's son, as well as of the child of fortune, must not be impaired. Industrial education and all education for efficiency must be provided for in this demo- cratic country. The problem of harmonizing education for culture and power with educa- tion for industrial efficiency and of giving an equal opportunity to all without ultimately impairing the power of the poorer classes to choose the best will be most wisely determined Department] THE COSMOPOLITAN HIGH-SCHOOL CURRICULUM 615 outside of very large cities by adding industrial and business courses to the high-school program rather than by establishing trade schools. Louis C. Monin, dean of Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, 111. — Colleges must necessarily look to secondary schools for their students; where else could they obtain them ? But they should not dictate to them in the matter of preparation. The trouble with pupils entering the Armour Institute of Technology is not a lack of knowledge but the lack of ability to apply what they know. They have not learned to think properly. Preparation is not so much in what has been studied as in how it has been studied. There should be greater uniformity in the subject-matter. At the Los Angeles meeting last year a commission of seven was appointed from the technical department with the hope that a similar committee should be appointed from your department to co-operate in formulating more uniform entrance requirements to technical colleges. We should get together on essential things. Let us have the broadest kind of high school. Call it what you may, only let it do well what it undertakes to do. E. W. Lyttle, inspector, New York State Department of Education. — The high school has before it a diiScult problem. It is required to do two things — to have two ends in view: the prepiration for college and the preparation for life. Doubtless numbers will be increased and b^ys will be kept in the high school longer by introducing industrial courses. Many leave schoDl, strangely enough, because they cannot afford the expense. In some schools it costs $50 or more for each graduate at commencement. Is not that a shame ? We need constants in our course of study. We should find out what these constants should be and than notify the colleges that they must be satisfied with tests in these sub- jects. Colleges, in a large degree, are responsible for overloading our courses of study. Paul Kreuzpointner, chairman of the Committee on Industrial Education, American Foundry-Men's Association, Altoona, Pa. — -I speak as an industrial man rather than as a professional teacher. And yet I speak as a teacher — a teacher of apprentices, journeymen, and messenger boys whom I have taught for a generation for the pleasure it affords me. A farmer cannot sow wheat, cotton, and sugar in the same soil by the same methods of planting and cultivation and expect uniformly successful results. This is what it seems to me your cosmopolitan high schools are undertaking to do. You stand in your own light, if you advocate the cosmopolitan high schools and expect through such schools to meet the demands of the times. Separate this work, classify the schools into classical and technical, with separate sets of teachers, take out manual-training schools, technical schools, and schools of commerce. They may be under the same roof but should be independent of each other. David S. Snedden, Teachers College, New York. — I want to go a step farther. The traditional system is eight years elementary and four years high school, making the pupil about eighteen years old when he graduates from the secondary school. A large part of the high-school boys come from the wage-earning classes. These cannot afford to keep their sons in school until they are eighteen years old. The course of work for such should be planned to enable them to complete it in two years of high-school study. A four-year course should be maintained for such as can afford to remain in school and for such as are going to higher institutions of learning. Sixteen years is about the age when banks and stores and industries wish to take boys and they would then find ready employment and would easily adapt themselves to the duties required of them. The question remains, What shall we give such boys for the two years they are to spend in the high school ? The first year's work ought not to be the same as for those who take a full four-years' course in preparation for college. And yet these two years need not necessarily be industrial; they might be made largely cultural. Gilbert B. Morrison, principal of McKinley High School, St. Louis, Mo. — I am very anxious to speak a few words in an effort to clear up some false impressions which 6l6 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary seem to have been made with reference to the cosmopolitan high school. A little review of the history of the high school in this country will tend to show how the present stage of secondary education, particularly that form which we call "cosmopolitan" such as the William McKinley High School of St. Louis, has come to pass. For a long time science had no place in the Boston High School, and when it was introduced, its pupils were not allowed to mingle with the aristocratic classes of the old school, and two auditoriums were built so that these two classes of students need not meet on socially equal terms. Prog- ress was slow because of the prejudice of the old school against this modern innovation, but gradually the new idea gained in favor. The same opposition, however, against the manual training and industrial education in all forms was encountered. At first separate buildings seemed to be necessary in order to have a free hand and to place the new experiment entirely in the hands of its friends in order to insure its success. But we are passing tha stage now and are entering upon a saner plan. Prejudice is removed and all interests are working in harmony. It is no violation of courtesy to make personal mention of the St. Louis School. Superintendent Soldan was a conservative man, guarding the school carefully against fads and fancies, and for a long time he opposed the introduction of industrial education, but on the Board of Education was C. M. Woodward, the "father of industrial educa- tion," and an earnest contender for the introduction of technical work in the schools. The results of these two contending interests, so ably championed on both sides, was the St. Louis idea of the cosmopolitan high school where all phases of industrial education and cultural studies are found under the same roof and the same management. We find by this method that we can more nearly meet the need of the individual pupil and can shift him from one course to another if he finds out, and we find out, that he has made a mistake in his choice. This shifting can be done without shock or loss of time in most instances, permitting him to remain in the same school and to retain his friends and associates, thus preserving the social unity, to my mind very much to be desired. I have been in St. Louis long enough to learn the merits of the school and to appreciate its advantages. The Board of Education is so thoroughly satisfied with the McKinley High School idea that the new high school, the "Louis Soldan School," which is to cost $800,000 is to be like it in scope and requirement. We can change courses of study, but buildings stand for all times. It is highly important then that when these great and expensive high schools are constructed, they should be properly equipped for carrying forward the work along lines that are likely to be permanent. I feel strongly on this question and express myself in strong terms because my convictions are strong. The principal of such a school need not be an expert in all things. Such a man is an impossibility. But he should be a man of good judgment who will select experts for heads of departments and exercise a wise guid- ance and supervision of all departments. This plan of differentiating between departments in the same school instead of differ- entiating between schools themselves will in its own time take care of the question of the establishment of industrial education, a demand for which seems now to be engaging universal attention. The addition of more shops, more processes, and a greater flexi- bility in pupils' courses enabling them to take more manual training and less academic work should solve the new problem of industrial education; while at the same time all the academic excellence of the present courses will be retained for those who wish to keep the highway to a general education. SCHOOL ATHLETICS: WHAT THEY ARE; WHAT THEY SHOULD BE MALCOLM KENNETH GORDON, ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL, CONCORD, N. H. Educators throughout the land are at last beginning to consider the athletic question in its true light, namely, as a great factor in education. We have Department) SCHOOL ATHLETICS 617 been brought face to face with conditions which, if allowed to run their course much longer, will of necessity produce positive harm to the youth of the country, to the college man, and, finally, to the social and moral standards of the nation. By an abnormal development of athletics in precisely the wrong channels, by placing them in a commercial position, and by sadly neglecting the great mass of boys for the benefit of a few, we, the schools in general and the colleges in particular, have now begun to reap as we have sown. It is an educational question, for whether we view it from the side of the child, the youth, or the man, we see in every phase of life the elements of early training, and if play is the inalienable right of the child, he should be given the chance to play, and he must be taught to play in such a way as to develop in him the qualities of leadership and manliness, otherwise it is not too much to say that our national integrity in moral, social, and financial ways is in danger of being lowered. Sport and athletics in America, I am sorry to say, are vastly different terms. Sport is play, not work. Athletics as practiced in general are too strenuous, too spectacular, and too exclusive. We are not an athletic nation — far from it. We talk athletics but there is too much " grand stand " and too little actual participation in games. Athletics should be a means to a higher end; we have reduced them to a commercial and advertising basis. The plan of using them as an invigorating influence on mind and body has not been worked out. Speaking generally, the harmonious development of all parts of the body alike has been neglected by the school; and the college has no power to correct the evil. CommerciaHsm, vast expenses of teams, multitudes of rules govern- ing play and ehgibihty of players have well-nigh ruined some of our best games, so that the masses cannot play them. The individual prizes and the false adulation — often of unworthy students — the developing of star athletics, the striving for records, and lastly the most serious abuse, the strenuous rivalry with other schools, have eliminated play from the life of most schools and have reduced athletics to a cut-and-dried work for the few who are expected to pose as champions for their school and to work as though eternity depended upon their winning. As a nation we strive for records, and only the few who approach perfection are athletic, and we do not, as a rule, play for the love of playing. We may be wildly excited over a great inter-collegiate contest where twenty- two men are struggling before the eyes of thousands of spectators, or we may be one of thousands to view a professional base ball game, but these spectacular performances with their enormous gate receipts do not make our people athletic, but on the contrary they debase athletics. We are not an athletic nation as compared with Germany, where, for instance, the annual Turn festivals at Frankfort produce 20,000 active athletes in the field and there is no grandstand. These men love the sport and they exercise for that reason. England is an athletic nation where the masses play cricket or football the year round and the women walk miles for the love of it. Every park and common is crowded, during the late afternoon and during the long twilights, 6l8 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary with the happiest peasantry in the world; they have learned the value of athlet- ics which we have yet to master. We may produce a star who can throw the hammer a few inches farther than their best man, but they can produce one hundred athletes to our one, when it comes to a count. They learn it young, and never having gone to excess they keep to it late in life. That inter-scholastic contests produce stars I admit, but when it is done at the expense of the great mass of boys, is it beneficial ? Ninety per cent, of the boys are expected to sit around and cheer in order to support their team. They march and sing at command, and their exercise is to cheer and yell for Alma Mater! These 90 per cent, also have to pay the enormous bills for coaching, training, and traveling, etc. This is their contribution to athletics. Sport is thus lost sight of: the winning of the game is the only end in view. The team must win. And the few poor fellows that compose the team are told that the honor of their school is at stake. They are coached to the limit of the rules and too often beyond the spirit of the rules, they are trained to the minute, bandaged, and rubbed. Is this play ? Is this sport ? Then add to all this nonsense the unwholesome notoriety in the papers, the coming in contact with the low sporting element, the temptation to unfairness in the excitement of fierce contests, and of commercialism in various ways, to say nothing of the physical harm caused by the strain of these contests between young boys, and especially between teams from day schools where the proper preparation is necessarily lacking, and we have a fair sample of our American school athletics. The foremost professional trainer of athletes of our genera- tion— Mike Murphy — said a few years ago that "more fine athletics had been spoiled than developed, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, by fierce school competition carried to excess." But if the nation as a whole is not athletic, a school which has the club system in good working order is athletic, because all the boys are competing naturally, not by compulsion, for if the facilities are adequate the multitude plays, and what is more pays only for what it gets; there are no idlers, no enforced marching or cheering, no notoriety, and no commercialism. In order to insure general exercise for all boys ample play grounds, skating rinks, and an adequate gymnasium have to be provided and facilities for rowing, all on a large scale; and a diversified system of games the year round must be presented so as to attract all boys naturally. The boy thus gets his exercise, but coupled with the development of his body are other requirements which must be suppHed, such as sportsmanship, healthy rivalry, unselfishness, and the training of character in general. These are developed in the multitude by local club competition, where every boy from oldest to youngest plays with his equals. Each boy should consider it his right to demand of a school the chance to play any and all games in pro- portion to his strength, and a school which does not give him this chance is not only faUing short in mere physical training, but is neglecting to grasp one of the most obvious and most important elements of character building. DepartmentI SCHOOL ATHLETICS 619 The game is a means of bringing out the best features of athletics. All will admit that its functions are lost when it is made a mere spectacular per- formance. Rules upon rules are evolved to prop it up, so that the game is no fun^ but becomes a formality and hard work. The blame for this may be justly placed on the colleges, whose graduate bodies have made the game a piece of business, but where schools have to win inter-scholastic contests, they too must bear part of the blame. Indeed, I firmly beheve that if fifty of the larger schools of the country should now adopt the club system in its entirety, the game would, to a great extent, assume its former and natural functions, for club contests improve the game because boys will play it for the love of the sport, and the series of contests lessens the importance of the winning and thereby develops sportsmanship. If the high schools of the country could acquire grounds sufficient for such a system then we should see at once the greatest athletic revolution, hundreds of thousands would soon be playing games and our country would not only become athletic, but by the broader development of the boys' characters we should see a moral and social improvement in the nation at large. The boy at play is in his natural element — so to speak. To deprive him of developing this side of his nature is to do him a great injustice. A boy is by nature cruel; by environment he is what the school makes him. While we consider health as the main end of athletics, we must not lose sight of the fact th^at in acquiring this health the boy must be taught to play for a higher motive than the winning of a prize. If we neglect the masses for the chosen few we fall short of our duty. We must give each and every boy the same advan- tages to play. This is not done where inter-scholastic contests are highly developed. A school should encourage team games such as football, baseball, rowing, etc., rather than allow the more individual games to have first place, for in team games a boy's character shows up in a truer way than in any other phase of school life. A boy of low moral character will not ring true in a team game and a selfish one seldom helps team work, which teaches a boy to work with his fellows and to fcrget himself. Profanity and unfairness crop out in games quicker than elsewhere. All these advantages and disadvantages must be followed up or checked. Teachers, not professional coaches, must be in the games with the boys. In playing with boys as an equal a man has open before him a field for influencing the boy of which one who has not tried it has no conception. The club system, where many teachers mingle with many teams, is here at its best, for not twenty or thirty boys but practically a whole school is taught the true value of the game and is developed in all other wholesome ways, and by the intimate relations between teachers and boys, the game, boys and teachers are helped and the school is doing its duty by its boys. Specializing in athletics, as in any other field, tends to narrowness. A boy is taught and coached along one line. His muscles are not developed equally. 620 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION ISecondary If he be a good jumper he is made to jump until he breaks the record and his sport is turned into work. Individual prizes are also a menace. The club system in a school takes care of both these dangers. A boy is interested in several branches of sport and is not likely to carry any one to excess, for the tendency is to develop an all-round athlete since one's fellows demand his service in many fields. At St. Paul's School individual prizes are few and little thought of in team games. Over one hundred boys row hard from Jan- uary to June, and the only outward reward is to have the names of the winning crews carved upon tablets which are placed in the gymnasium. The same is the case in football and hockey. Athletics if taught in the right way have a far higher end than a cup or medal. The boy's character is bound to be influenced by athletics. Our national tendency to get the better of our fellows is a worthy one so long as we all give the square deal, but when a boy is taught that a material prize is always before him and that the goal may be attained by fair means or foul, is it not natural for him to pursue the same tactics when, as a man, he enters the game of life, be it financial or social? During the formative years from ten to eighteen a boy is molded by his environment. Thus the school has this responsibility, not the college. Lastly, the fierce rivalry engendered by inter-scholastic contests is a distinct evil to which we can no longer be blinded. Leaving out its pernicious influence on the mass of boys who have to follow the team, such as idle asso- ciates, betting, rowdyism in various forms, and financial extravagance, this rivalry is harmful to the schools. Of course it produces elements of courage and if held within bounds it may do as much positive good, but boys are not men, they cannot be expected to withstand the temptations to which they are exposed. Where one team is coached to acquit themselves as gentlemen, win or lose, ten are allowed to go into a contest with little of this preparation and in the heat of conflict the desire to win is too much for them. The wild applause of their followers and the notoriety gained in the sporting columns of the press drive the contestants to extremes which kill sport, lower morals, and often permanently injure a good athlete physically. If this is not considered an important educational question, then we are blind to the development of the moral and physical side of our boys. The school is the only place to meet and correct the evil. The college cannot do it. Having been asked to outline the athletic system at St. Paul's School, I may be pardoned if I conclude this paper with a short description of the working out of the club system, by taking our plan at St. Paul's. I do so because, nowhere in the country, I believe, is there a system so complete and far-reaching, with traditions and associations which make it unique. To begin with, there are two boat clubs, the Halcyon and the Shattuck boat clubs, founded in 1871, each having separate boat houses at Lake Pena- cook, a lake three miles long, situated a mile and a half from the school. It is an ideal place for rowing and very beautiful. Each club has five eights on the Department) SCHOOL ATHLETICS 621 water and the ninety-odd boys go to the "Pond" as we say, in four-horse barges. Every boy in the school belongs to one club or the other, brothers and sons of alumni of course going into the club of the family, while the other new boys are chosen in order of size From the hour a boy enters a club his loyalty is never shaken. During the long winter about one hundred and fifty boys are rowing in the gymnasium and going through the various exercises, but after the ice leaves Lake Penacook the crews are sifted down to ten eights and substitutes. Besides these larger crews there are six fours of the Lower School training too, and these small boys row three series of short races on the school pond back of the gymnasium, so that we may say there are one hundred and twenty boys rowing from January to June. For all sports except rowing, the school is divided into three parts, and every boy belongs to one of the three athletic clubs. The Isthmian and Old Hundred clubs were founded in 1859 and the Delphian in 1888. Like the boat clubs the membership in these clubs is numerically equal, and sons of alumni go into their father's club. In football, hockey, and track games these clubs compete, and until recently in cricket. Each club has six regularly organized football teams in training all the fall. The entire coaching is done by masters who work strenuously for the clubs. No matches with schools could possibly produce more healthy rivalry and intense interest than the contests between the first elevens of the clubs. Each team plays a series of three games with its respective rivals, thus we have eighteen elevens playing in all nearly forty matches, and this does not include the various scrub games between houses, etc. This means practice every day for teams not in matches, and nowhere in the country will one see a more animated sight than that at the Lower Grounds when early in the season before the various squads are thinned out, over two hundred boys are working hard, to say nothing of many others who are kicking balls about, or playing tennis, or practicing on the track. I may say there are no idlers or spectators; all are doing something. If any one would see the club system at its best let him visit the Lower Grounds during October, and I think he will be convinced that for a large school, at least, the club system solves the athletic question. There is no material reward for all this work either. Only the first elevens of each club have their names carved in their club room in the Athletic House — an honor which the small boys look forward to, and the old boys look back with pride. Club spirit is so strong that every boy feels it his duty to play for his club, no matter what team he makes. Often sixth form boys are playing on third elevens shoulder to shoulder with third formers. The same general play exists in hockey. This, the grandest of all winter sports, is at its best in our climate. With over one hundred .days of skating, with our eight or ten rinks swept or planed every day, is it not natural for our boys to be enthusiastic hockey players, when they have but to step out of the gymnasium, or rather skate house, onto the ice ? The club system here 622 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary furnishes twenty-one or more regularly organized teams with their series of three games each; in addition to these games there are numerous matches between houses, dormitories, etc. In track games the clubs enter large teams for the Anniversary sports in June. The training for these games is done chiefly by the various captains and by several masters who devote much time to the clubs. The fall handicap games this year had 296 entries. These are valuable in bringing out material for the regular games in the spring. One may wonder how there is any play time left for other sports, but with the exception of the crews most of the boys are at the Lower Grounds an'd the eighteen or twenty tennis courts are crowded to excess while other boys play golf, canoe — there are sixty canoes at present — race hare and hounds in the fall, snowshoe and coast in winter, work in the gymnasium or play racquets and squash. Except for the first team contests in football and hockey and for the annual boat races there are no spectacular attractions. The boys prefer to play than to look at others play. All this goes to prove that the club system is a success at St. Paul's and our health record bears out this theory, for it is said that during the past thirty years St. Paul's has had a better health record than West Point or the Naval Academy where each student is supposed to be physically perfect. If it is admitted that the system produces in its results the greatest physical benefit to the greatest number, it is also true that it develops a high degree of sportsmanship and creates ties, among boys, that last for life. Often captains of opposing teams or crews are roommates. This makes no difference in the athletic struggle, but it tends to create that unique quality of generosity and good feeling that prevails when the contest is over. The system also develops that valuable characteristic — leadership, for the captains of every team are responsible for the success of their fellows, and when I say that there are all told seventy-three captaincies under our system, you may be sure that leadership and responsibiHty are widely developed as factors of a boy's education. An interesting fact is that a vast number of our alumni keep their athletics during after years. Their love of true sport imbibed while at St. Paul's stands by them, and St. Paul's is represented widely all over the country in the sports of those who have left college, and this is attributed to the school's policy of encouraging in the multitude a love of sport for sport's sake. DISCUSSION C. E, Emmerich, Indianapolis, Ind., read the report to the Board of School Commis- sioners of Indianapolis of a committee of which he was chairman, as follows: Your committee to whom was referred the question of athletics between the two high schools and also between our high schools and those outside the city, respectfully begs to present the following report: It seems to us that no one would question the value of well-regulated physical training, and also it seems that no thoughtful person would fail to see the evils inherent in the prevail- ing type of school athletics. Department] SCHOOL ATHLETICS 623 The defects of the present system may be roughly classified under three heads: (a) from the pedagogical point of view; {h) from the physical side; (c) from the ethical standpoint. Under (a) may be presented: 1. The value of athletics as at present in vogue is disproportionate to the cost in time of players and of teachers who supervise them. 2. The burden of managing the finances of the game is too great. 3. There is too much tension developed among the pupils in general before a decisive game, which results in inefficiency in studies. Under (6), the physical side, may be included: 1. Too few of the boys are actively engaged in athletics. General interest is centered in developing a team which will win. 2. Those boys who do take an active part in athletics are the ones who least need physical culture. 3. At present there is danger of serious injury to players, particularly in football, through the efforts of a rival team to cripple a good player in order to weaken his team that they may win. 4. High-school boys will not train properly and are frequently injured permanently by overstrain. 5. When trained at his best the boy of high-school age is too immature physically for some of the games as played at present. Under (c) — the ethical standpoint: 1. Athletics should develop games, not contests. 2. At present, teams compete with other teams over whose physical and ethical status we have no control. 3. Games as now played tend to create bad feeling between schools. Sport for sport's sake is replaced by the spirit of contest, and where large numbers are concerned the mob spirit may arise. 4. There is at present a tendency to estimate the quality of a school by athletic con- tests won. 5. The character of a portion of the following of athletic contests is of so low a type that it tends to demoralize the game. While this sort of following is small in numbers its influence is unduly great and is practically outside the control of school authorities. 6. The public generally looks upon a winning team as a successful team; hence, the coach is tempted to introduce questionable practices to develop a team which will win at any cost. 7. The hero worship accorded the prominent athlete by pupils, press, and public tends to give him an altogether false notion of his own real importance. 8. The earnings of the games constitute a temptation toward commercialism in sport. In view of these facts, your committee therefore recommends that after December i of the present year no more competitive games be played under the auspices of the school between pupils of the two high schools. Your committee also considers it inadvisable that games be played between pupils of our high schools and pupils of high schools outside of the city. The committee believes that it is advisable that pupils take part in the state athletic meet. While your committee is opposed to contests between different high schools, it is just as strongly in favor of all well-regulated classes or teams within each individual school. Boys in a large city need special outlet for their surplus physical energy; this fact school authorities should recognize. There is nowadays very little home labor. If neither the home nor the school provides physical recreation boys are likely to find in the streets the physical activity denied them at home or in school. This inevitably leads to questionable practices and uncertain morals. Athletics, within each school should be encouraged. The situation really demands, when we can afford it, that there should be a man in each high school whose whole time should be devoted to the physical welfare of the boys of the school. He should be some- thing more than a teacher of gymnastics; he should be in sympathy with boys and be able to bring out the best in them; he should supervise their gymnastic training and conduct their sports on the athletic field. Experience has shown that games within a school will increase active participation from 500 per cent, to 1,000 per cent. By proper classification on the basis of age, size, and experience, every boy can be brought into active participation in healthy games in which the spirit is one of emulation instead of strife. In the meantime each school should endeavor to meet the situation by its teachers giving such time out of school as they are able to spare for such purposes. The public generally must come to a realization of the fact that the city conditions have brought upon us new problems peculiar to this condition, which demand effective phy.sical training not only of a few but of all pupils. 624 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Louis P. Jocelyn, Ann Arbor, Mich. — It is better to control athletics than to abolish. In the public schools of Michigan we have complete control of athletic matters. A state league is formed governed by teachers and this has been very successful. No team can participate unless it has lived up to the rules. To be eligible one must have carried ten hours the preceding term and twelve hours the current term. No profes- sional coaches are employed. While coaches are hired they have no authority over the team, to arrange games, etc. The governing board have all authority and arrange schedules. Moreover a teacher always accompanies the team out of town and if a boy visits the saloon or otherwise corniucts himself in a disorderly manner he is removed from the team. At Ann Arbor we require all first- and second-year pupils and advise all the others to take gymnasium work. We divide the school into classes and have contests between these classes. Girls also have friendly contests among themselves. Mr. Giles, Marion, Ind., chairman of the State Athletic Association. — In Indiana we provide that a pupil shall carry fifteen hours both the preceding and current year. The state board of control has entire charge, and we can now say that athletics are clean. There is one exception that I would make to Michigan methods — namely, that of inter- class contests. Class spirit runs too high in small schools and is very objectionable. It is hard to control when fostered and you never know when you have it down. A club system is better. Other Indiana cities are in sympathy with the movement in Indianapolis, and are eagerly watching the outcome of the new arrangement. If successful that plan will be adopted in other Indiana cities. The development of class spirit leads to class rushes and class fights. Mr. Regard, Indiana. — There is danger when high-school boys travel all over the state in athletic contests. When not permitted to go under the name of their school they form independent teams and go on their own responsibility without the restraining influ- ences of a teacher. Two years ago I saw a team from a representative city marching through the streets and in and out of saloons stirring up the town and attracting every- body's attention. Teachers need to be on hand all the time and prevent such unseemly exhibitions. Mr. Cook, Hamilton, O. — Ohio too has had her troubles in inter-high-school athletics. The state is now thoroughly organized and matters are in hand. The state is divided in four sections: northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast. I am chairman of the southwest district. Our regulations provide that no team can leave town without some teacher. This, with other good rules, has been tried for the last two years with good results. Our boys under these restrictions have conducted themselves in an orderly man- ner. Everybody is required to be up on fifteen-hour-per-week work without the fads and frills. Athletics are in the high school to stay and they must be properly controlled. But I differ from some of you. I believe in inter-high-school contests. Class contests lead to conflicts, struggles, and disgraceful class rushes sometimes. All this is of course in imitation of the colleges as were the objectionable high-school fraternities which in this state are happily outlawed if the present law is not declared unconstitutional. C. E. Rose, Boise, Idaho. — I think out in Idaho we are fully up to date in athletic matters. The conditions outlined in the paper are largely ideal. Not one school in a hun- dred could care for physical training as St. Paul's does. But all such matters should be regulated as well as circumstances allow. Control is much better than prohibition. In our school we add some moral conditions to the requirements for the team. No one who smokes or drinks is eligible. , Spencer R. Smith, Wendell Phillips High School, Chicago. — In Chicago, we go Indiana one better and require that a pupil shall carry sixteen hours work in both past year and current year, to be eligible to the team. One year ago the control of athletics was Department) SIX-YEAR COURSE OF STUDY 625 taken from the league entirely and placed in the hands of the principals. Instead of the seven or eight games scheduled formerly hy the students, only three or four were arranged for. We allow but one game annually outside of the city. No prizes were offered. The game was played purely for sport. So far as I know both the faculty and the boys of the Wendell Phillips High School were satisfied with the plan. But other high schools refused to play us in the future on these conditions and we are forced to go back to the old regime if we are to play other schools. As principal of the high school, I desire to have these matters under good control. But I want to see a larger number'interested and benefited by physical training. For instance, in the Wendell Phillips High School only eighty out of one thousand seven hundred are actively interested in athletic sports. What attention should we give to the other one thousand six hundred ? We have recently planned for a field day for this large number. This last field day was the third we have had and from four to six hundred of the student body participated in these events. While what I am about to say may be considered a digression, still it seems to me to be at least an indirect outcome of our field day in its devel- opment of the proper school spirit. At the close of the class day exercises in June, 1908, with proper ceremonies, we raised the class flag together with the flag of our country. This was done with perfect sympathy of the lower classes and with no spirit or disposition to interfere on their part as the flag of 1908 was raised with "Old Glory." This is an effort to dignify the class colors. I believe that we should take athletics under our control for physical reasons. Pupils are not always honest in revealing their true physical condition and often enter a contest at the instigation of their fellows and sometimes even at the suggestion of their own parents when they are not in fit condition. REPORT OF BY EUGENE W. LYTTLE, THE COMMITTEE ON SIX-YEAR COURSE OF STUDY INSPECTOR UNIVERSITY OF STATE OF NEW YORK, CHAIRMAN In 1893, the Committee of Ten representing subcommittees of ninety, chosen for the most part from secondary and higher institutions, presented its report on secondary-school studies. So far at least as public high schools were concerned, that report was valuable mainly as establishing ideals, and ideals only for those subjects then deemed acceptable for college preparation. No report at all was made on such subjects as music, drawing, commercial, manual, and physical training. From that report we quote one sentence. " Any one who reads these nine reports consecutively will be struck with the fact that all these bodies of experts desire to have the elements of their several subjects taught earlier than they now are." Eleven years later, at the St. Louis Exposition, it became painfully evident that the United States was almost the only considerable civilized nation that prolonged its system of elementary education to eight or nine years. Since 1900 two of the most progressive nations of the world, France and Japan, have revised their national programs and both have virtually^limited the term of elementary study to six years. In 1905, at a meeting of the secondary department of the National Educa- tional Association held at Asbury Park, it was voted to appoint a standing com- 626 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary mittee on Six- Year Courses of High-School Study, of which committee Gilbert B. Morrison, principal of the WilHam McKinley High School, St. Louis, was chairman. That committee reported at Los Angeles in 1907 (see pp. 705-10, Los Angeles, Volume oj Proceedings). [Synopsis] The question of dividing the twelve years of the public-school course equally between the elementary and the secondary school presents a twofold aspect: The first is educational or pedagogic; the second is economic. On the pedagogical side, while not unanimous, the trend of competent opinion is strongly toward such a division. The reasons for a six- year course are: First, It would give the pupils the advantage of being taught by teachers specially trained for the different branches, the gain coming from the better teaching that results from the adaptation of the teacher to the work for which he is best fitted and for which he has made special preparation. Second, The departmental plan extended downward to the seventh and eighth grades would give the children the advantage of daily contact with several personalities, instead of that all-day association with one teacher which often breeds an abnormal psychic atmos- phere. Third, It would give the pupils the advantage of laboratories in which elementary science might be begun earlier than at present. Fourth, If in the high school, the manual training shops could be employed to start seventh and eighth grade pupils in this work without sending them ofif to another school in another part of the city. Fifth, The modern languages could be begun earlier and continued longer than at present, making it possible to learn the languages by natural and direct methods. Sixth, It would mitigate the present abruptness of the transition from the elementarx schools, and check the loss of pupils at this critical period. The object of a six-year course is not to save time but to secure better adaptation and more natural growth, fitting the pupils better both for the high school and for college. Seventh, It would cause more pupils to enter the ninth grade as it would remove what is now regarded by parents as a natural stopping-place. Eighth, Six-year courses would make the system more self-consistent as shown by experience in the schools of Germany and England. Ninth, It would give the pupil more time to prepare for college. Tenth, It would do much toward solving the problem of the outward extension of the course of study and the crowded curriculum. The economic aspect is not so favorable inasmuch as high schools are more expensive than elementary schools. But the difference in it would not be great. The economic objection will yield when the change is generally believed to be a necessity. The tax payers cheerfully provide the necessities at any cost. G. B. Morrison, Chairman Wilson Farrand Edward Rynearson J. H. Francis A. B. Graham Committee It is well to note that within the present year, Mr. J. Edward Swanstrom, for some time president of the Board of Education in Brooklyn, and later a member of the Board of Education of Greater New York, published in the Brooklyn Eagle an argument for the adoption of the six-year course of elemen- Department] SIX-YEAR COURSE OF STUDY 627 tary study to be followed by three years of work in the lower high schools plus three years in the upper grade or specialized high schools. In that article Mr. Swanstrom argues forcibly that his plan would not only increase the educa- tional efficiency of the schools but would be highly economical for the city of Greater New York. At least ten cities in the United States, for several years, have employed the proposed six-year division and believe it to be more economical. Working along the lines indicated by growing educational opinion, your present committee has decided as follows: 1. To outline what may reasonably be required of pupils at the end of the sixth school year as essential to a preparation for high-school work. 2. To suggest for the seventh and eighth grades a minimum practicable course of study based on the experience and practice of the civilized world, to consume perhaps 70 per cent, of the pupils' time and to advise for the other 30 per cent., those elective which the best pedagogic thought and practice approve. 3. To recommend further careful investigation in regard to fixing points for vocational differentiation in accordance with local conditions and individual characteristics. 4. To recommend that promotions be by units of work accomplished rather than by years, thereby permitting the shortening or the lengthening of the time in which the course, nominally of six years, may be completed by pupils of varying ability. I. WHAT SHOULD BE EXPECTED OF PUPILS AT THE END OF THE SIXTH SCHOOL YEAR AGE 12-13 ? A. Reading. — Pupils should be able to get the thought and express the thought in simple narrative prose and poetry, such as Robinson Crusoe and Paul Revere's Ride. B. Spelling. — They should be able to spell correctly 90 per cent, of the words com- monly used in their home and school vocabulary. C. Writing. — They should be able to write legibly and with fair rapidity. D. Composition. — (i) They should be able to compose and write a business or social letter, in conventional form, on a simple assigned topic that properly comes within the experience of children of their age. (2) They should be able to compose and write short descriptions and narrative on simple themes appealing to the natural interests of children and falling within their experience. E. Arithmetic. — (i) They should be thoroughly familiar with number combina- tions (i-ioo) in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. (2) They should be able to solve easy two-step problems in arithmetic involving fundamental operation. (3) They should be able to read and write readily integers and decimals to six places. (4) They should be able to solve easy one-step problems involving common and decimal frac- tions. (5) They should have some knowledge of percentage and its simplest applications to profit and loss and to simple interest. F. Geography. — They should have a general knowledge of (i) The oceans and conti- nents, their relative size and locations; (2) Of the principal countries, their peoples and products, with a somewhat detailed study of the United States and its possessions; (3) Of the great river and mountain systems, specially those of North America, South America, Europe, and Asia; (4) Of 50 to 100 of the principal cities of the world, their location, peculiar characteristics, commercial, industrial, and artistic features of -special interest; (5) Of the great trade routes. G. Other subjects. — With the aim of starting as many lines of interest as possible, pupils during the first six years, should have instruction in drawing, music, morals, ele- mentary science or nature-study, history, literature, calisthenics, constructive and illus- 628 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary trative hand work; but instruction in these subjects should be directed with the aim of developing habits of observation, power to think and power to do, rather than with the aim of imparting information of definite amount. II. SUGGESTED LIST OF STUDIES FOR PUPILS OF THE SEVENTH AND EIGHTH GRADES, PERIODS 30 MINUTES. Required subjects Periods weekly English, including spelling, literature, composition, grammar . . 6 to 8 Arithmetic with concrete geometry and algebra 5 Geography and history 5 to 7 Music 2 Drawing 2 Physical Training (required of those whose physical condition needs it as corrective; optional for others) ^ 2 Electives: Manual Training 3 Science 3 Foreign languages (for each one given) 5 It will be seen that the above list presents simply suggestions from which varying courses of study may be worked out, and correlated with courses now given in our high schools. Your committee makes no claims for infallibility nor for superior insight or foresight. It presents these suggestions as the results of a year's faithful study of the problems before us all. It invites the fullest and freest discussion on the part of all educational bodies during the coming year that we may all gain more light. It respectfully requests that the work of the committee be continued. E. W. Lyttle, Chairman E. W. Coy Oliver P. Cornman T. A. MoTT J. H. Van Sickle J. Stanley Brown John H. Denbigh CommiUee ROUND-TABLE CONFERENCES A. MATHEMATICS THE TEACHING OF ALGEBRA IN ITS RELATION TO THE PRESENT EDUCATIONAL TREND THOMAS K. MC KINNEY, PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS, WESLEY AN UNIVERSITY MIDDLETON, CONN. No subject more earnestly engages the attention of teachers of mathematics than does algebra. It is the most important as well as the most difficult subject to teach in the range of elementary mathematics. The difficulty to make the subject attractive has done much to hasten the change from the old regime of required mathematics in the freshman and sophomore years in college to the present elective system. The dissatisfaction felt by pupils « John H. Denbigh, Morris High School, agrees to the report with the single exception of that on physical training which he would require of all Department] THE TEACHING OF ALGEBRA 629 Ik was often shared by the corps of instructors. This situation, explicitly or tacitly recognized, has challenged the teachers and masters of algebra to consider anew the best presentation of the subject. The purpose of the discussion which follows is to point out certain forces which appear to be shaping the course of instruction in elementary algebra as indicated by recent texts. There is no attempt to make the discussion exhaustive nor to consider minutely details of arrangement or exposition. It attempts only to trace in merest outline the present situa- tion and to point out certain tendencies which have assumed sufficient definiteness to be significant as to the present trend in elementary algebra. Almost the whole of mathematics has been refounded in the last five or six decades. This has been done largely by European mathematicians in continuation of the work of Cauchy, Riemann, and Weierstrass. On the side of analysis, the wide and rapidly growing domain of function theory bears witness to the necessity and the power of precise definition and exact logic in mathematical thought. As a foundation for this theory it was necessary to reconstruct the number system, to make explicit the meaning and the limitation of the fundamental operations of analysis, to give accurate definition to basal concepts, and to make definite all notions relating to infinite processes, particularly the notion of limit. The first English treatise on algebra with which I am acquainted to show in a marked way the influence of this reformulation of the foundations of analysis is the Text Book 0} Algebra by Professor Chrystal (1886-89). I^ this treatise the operations of ordinary algebra are developed in conformity with the three so-called "fundamental laws" of alge- bra, as formulated by Gregory, DeMorgan, Hamilton, and others. In Part I is to be found, recast and rearranged, much of the matter in the ordinary college text. In Part II Professor Chrystal addresses himself confessedly to the task of preparing an appropriate introduction to "Infinitesimal Analysis" and, in particular, to the "Theory of Function," The textbook was followed after an interval of nearly ten years by Professor Chrystal's Introduction to Algebra, designed in part as a preparation for the reading of his larger treatise. The Introduction may be characterized by its careful reference of the operations of algebra to the "fundamental laws;" by its thoro treatment of equations; and by its early and extensive use of the graph. The feature here emphasized is the clear light into which it brings the principles of algebra involved in the several topics treated. As continuing this aspect of algebra the college text by Professor Fine (1905) may be mentioned. Its indebtedness to Chrystal is acknowledged. It aims to develop the theory of algebraic processes in an elementary manner but connectedly and rigorously. The first part is an elegant development of the number concept, which the author, with pardonable optimism, believes will be attractive to the college student. The second part aims to give a course in algebra, satisfactory from the theoretical standpoint, with a minimum depart- ure from the order and matter of the usual text. These texts have been mentioned with no thought of disparagement to the texts of other authors, nor is it intended to imply that the notable points of the texts referred to are con- fined to those just given. The purpose is to call attention to the trend in our texts of alge- bra to improve the statement and exposition of algebraic theory and these references are made to give definiteness and emphasis to this feature. Among elementary texts there is likewise strong evidence of a purpose to bring the development into line with the modern theory of algebra. While not every elementary algebra has been an improvement in this respect over all its predecessors yet we are jus- tified, I think, in saying that the advance along this line in the last two or three decades has been marked. The improvement in theory has enhanced the cultural value of the subject and added to its clearness and simplicity. But when the subject is given its ultimate simplicity and logical generality in abstract form it loses in attractiveness to the immatur9 mind. There is a strong and growing tendency to develop the concrete side of elementary algebra. This tendency is referred to in various phrases; such as "emphasizing the 630 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary practical side of algebra;" "correlating algebra with its principle applications in mechanics, physics, chemistry;" "developing the subject in close touch with the affairs of daily life, enriching its content, multiplying its relations, and adding to its human interest." It is not intended to say that these expressions refer to the same phase of this tendency but rather that it is the one tendency viewed in several aspects that gives rise to these several descrip- tions. This tendency has been accentuated by the great increase in the relative importance of the physical sciences in the secondary schools and colleges, in the last three or four decades. The complaint of physicists and chemists that students trained in the abstract symbolism of algebra so frequently failed absolutely in the simple concrete problems of elementary science was, in the main, well founded. This was recognized in some elementary texts by the addition of problems taken from mechanics and physics. The influence of technical schools has been in the same direction. They demand of the student a usable knowledge of algebra, questions of purely theoretic interest being subordinate. Pedagogical influence has re-enforced this tendency. It is insisted that algebra is abstract, its concepts and processes consequently possessing wide generality. And because of this abstractness and generality the subject is difficult for the young mind to grasp. Consequently from this source there is a cry for the particular, for the concrete, the inter- esting. Awaken first of all the pupil's interest in the subject by dealing with the problems in which he is concerned. To the same end has tended the movement for the correlation of mathematics and the elementary physical sciences. This movement has made itself pro- foundly felt under the leadership of Klein in Germany, of Perry in England, and of Moore in this country. In this connection may be mentioned the so-called "laboratory method." According to Professor Young (The Teaching of Mathematics, pp. 100-4) this method "proposes that the experimental origin of mathematics be fully recognized; that the student be led to feel the need of the mathematical tool through some material experiment he has made or thing he has done," It goes furtherand proposes "that mathematics and physics be organized into one coherent whole the most extreme form of the proposition being that the reorganization be so thoro as to recognize in the secondary school no distinction between mathematics and its principal applications." These several forces bearing on the teaching of algebra have influenced profoundly recent elementary texts. So far as my observation goes the indications are that these forces will continue to press in the same direction. These then are the two main doctrines influencing today the development of elementary algebra; the one emphasizing algebraic theory, the other, for various reasons, the concrete field with which algebra may concern itself. The dispute between the partisans of these two theories has been warm at times. In fact it has not infrequently seemed from the debate alone that the theories were mutually and absolutely exclusive. The earnestness of the debate may be taken as a measure of the estimated importance of the issues at stake. But in this controversy we have no interest other than to point that a process of adjustment seems to be in progress whereby the claims of opposing parties may be reasonably satisfied. This means, of necessity, some concessions by conflicting interests. The nature of this adjustment, as I conceive it, is on this wise: Formal demonstration for the beginner is reduced to a minimum. Not until he has acquired some familiarity with a considerable number of algebraic concepts and processes is the formal side of the subject to be emphasized. Principles and methods are unfolded and explained by means of simple concrete examples. These may be taken from arithmetic, or geometry, or the elementary physical sciences, or statistics. The essential feature is that they be such as to appeal to the interest and understanding of the beginner and as to illustrate and enforce algebraic principles. The sect, the graph and other devices may be used to visualize or to suggest algebraic relations and methods. In the solution and discussion of these problems the logical aspect of the subject is illustrated and emphasized, losing thereby something L Department] THE TEACHING OF ALGEBRA 631 in abstractness and consequent reach but gaining in sharpness, utility, and attractiveness to the beginner. On the other hand while the concrete side of algebra may be stressed for the beginner, it seems to be recognized that problem solving for its own sake, as an end in itself, is not the main purpose of algebra. A collection of problems, however interesting or useful, is not necessarily, ipso facto, a treatise on algebra. It is only as by proper devices they are used "to body forth" the theory of algebra that they assume their full role in ele- mentary work. An elementary algebra has just come to hand which develops the subject on the basis of the three so-called "fundamental laws" more nearly after the fashion of Chrystal's Introduction than does any other elementary text with which I am acquainted, and may, therefore, be classed with texts giving due prominence to the theoretical aspect of the subject. A notable feature of the text is the conscious effort to derive, illustrate, and enforce these "laws" and their immediate consequences in a concrete way. The illustrative examples are taken mainly from arithmetic and geometry, but the fact and the manner of their use exemplifies the point here emphasized; viz., the full and clear realization, whether the bias be toward the theoretical side or the practical that the best method of approach for the beginner is through and by means of the particular and the concrete. It is not here implied that this principle is new in either pedagogy or mathematics; it is the emphasis placed upon it which requires reference to it here. It is difficult to trace this adjustment in detail in recent treatises on elementary algebra, partly because it is worked out in different ways in different texts and partly because it is not permissible in a paper like this to refer to a text in which the adjustment is worked out in a particular way and thus avoid an extended description. There are some features, nevertheless, to which attention may be called. It must be premised, however, that the features mentioned do not appear for the first time in recent texts. Again, it is rather the emphasis laid on them which entitles them to a place in this discussion. 1. Algebra developed from arithmetic. — Much care is taken that algebra shall grow- easily and naturally out of arithmetic. Not only has algebra encroached on the old domain of arithmetic but the authority of arithmetic to lay down the rules for the combina- tion of algebraic symbols is recognized. Certain portions of arithmetic are worked over in terms of algebraic symbols to give the student confidence with the new apparatus. Further, the various operations in a solution already familiar to the beginner can be easily exhibited by means of a formula. The pupil is thus early led to use the apparatus of alge- bra with assurance and to feel that its purpose, in part, is to throw a clearer light on sub- jects with which he is already somewhat familiar. 2. Topics omitted or postponed. — Certain topics which because of their abstract char- acter are difficult for beginners, or which by their nature have little immediate application, are omitted or postponed. Slight stress is laid on the highest common factor by Euclid's method, factoring by means of the factor theorem, cube root and complicated surd and radical expressions, complex numbers, the binomial theorem with fractional or negative exponents. Elementary texts are to be found in which some or most of these are omitted. A wholesome influence has been exerted by the report of the committee of the American Mathematical Society on college-entrance requirements in algebra toward simplicity and a more rational arrangement of topics. 3. The equation. — In a recent text taken at random from the shelf and containing about six hundred pages, more than two hundred are devoted explicitly to the subject of equations. This does not include cases in which the equation enters incidentally. Yet this allotment of space is regarded by the author as so slight a departure from the estab- lished rule as to require no mention in his preface. It is greater, however,- than the average in American elementary texts. In one or two foreign texts examined this proportion is greatly exceeded. There is, also, evidence of a disposition to subordinate all other topics to the equation. This procedure readily permits the concrete side of algebra to become prominent from the beginning and disposes automatically of a number of vexed ques- 632 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary tions on the arrangement of topics and the extent to which they shall be developed. It is well adapted to a preliminary discussion to be followed by a treatment emphasizing more fully the formal side of the subject. 4. The graph. — The graph is recognized as an important aid in elementary algebra both in the solution of problems and in illustrating and enforcing the idea of functional relation. To the pupil it visualizes certain algebraic operations and suggests to him the close interrelation of algebra and geometry, thus aiding materially in the correlation of these two subjects. It has won a permanent place in elementary algebra. Not only so, but in proportion as the significance of the concept of functionality for elementary mathe- matics is more fully and clearly recognized, as it certainly will be, the graph is destined to play an increasingly important role in elementary algebra. 5. Correlation of algebra and physics. — To what extent correlation of elementary mathematics and the physical sciences will be carried out it is difficult to say. Whether some scheme such as that worked out by the committee of the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers will ultimately find favor, the texts examined do not permit us to predict. However, recent elementary texts on algebra, with rare exception, keep theory in close touch with elementary mechanics and physics. Five years ago just the opposite was true. The necessary definitions and explanations from these sciences occupy but little space. The increase in the number of interesting and useful problems is very great. The tendency, I conclude, is to admit them into good and regular standing, on the same footing as other problems, with only such remark as may be necessary for the explana- tion of the problems themselves. In conclusion, reference has been made to the report of the committee of the American Mathematical Society on college-entrance requirements. This report will bear careful study both for what it gives and for what it omits. Its guiding principle, as I infer, is: Teach fewer things, more fundamental things, in a more concrete and intelligible way. In the remark that the report should be revised every ten years an important principle is recognized: viz., that elementary subjects and desirable methods and correlations in ele- mentary instruction change with the progress of knowledge. Klein calls it the law of his- torical postponement, in consequence of which a domain which originally was certainly not elementary, nevertheless, by improved presentation, becomes in due course elementary. Obviously, too, elementary subjects may wane in importance both with respect to the theoretical aspect of the subject and with respect to utility in the practical affairs of life. The present tendency, I think, is to recognize this principle in the elementary instruc- tion in algebra, and to recast and readjust in the light of the knowledge and the needs of today. This is in harmony with the trend in other countries, in England, in Germany, and in France. Many, if not most, subjects and methods in algebra are easily understood in their simpler cases and applications. Whether the topics of algebra shall be taken in a conventional order and developed to the usual extent, or whether selection shall be made from a wider range with the limitation to what is really elementary in these subjects, and with a possibly increased interest and usefulness, is a question which authors of elementary texts, generally, seem to deal with somewhat gingerly. The situation is, however, worthy of study and there is, 1 believe, evidence of a tendency to examine it more exhaustively. DISCUSSION John C. Stone, associate professor of mathematics. State Normal College, Ypsilanti, Mich. — Today the high school is not merely a fitting school for college but a finishing school for a large mass of students that are to go out to take up the world's work. With this new concept of the function of the school and of the various studies of the curriculum have come the questions : "What is this study for ? What will it do for the student ? " That is, the present tendency in education is to make each study function in the life of the student — to make it lead to something. The old time school-master who shields himself behind u Department] THE TEACHING OF ALGEBRA 633 the screen of formal discipline or who yields to the demands of the examiner is fast becom- ing extinct. He will soon be classified among those of the tree-dwelling age or at least as a cave-dweller Yielding, then, to the demand of the times, some great changes have taken place in the teaching of algebra. On the side of the subject, there has been a growing tendency to make it scientific, to lay a foundation for it, to show how all the processes are but the work- ing out of certain fundamental principles. Thus, for example, the student sees that the four fundamental processes are based upon certain "fundamental laws of number," that all transformations of equations are based upon certain axioms, that new concepts of num- ber, or new kinds of number, arise when the narrower concept of the number known in arithmetic has been extended and generalized. Thus negative number arises from a generalization of the notion of subtraction, surds and imaginaries from generalization of certain other processes, etc. The greatest improvement, however, has not come about by an attempt to make the subject scientific, but from our study of the child, a knowledge of the laws of mental growth, and our new concept of the function of the school. The matter in any subject is now looked upon more from the standpoint of the student than from the su'bject, and even our teaching of mathematics is beginning to conform itself to psychological laws. We are making our algebra grow out of our arithmetic. In fact, at first it is but literal arithmetic. The first work is developed more inductively. We are making greater use of concrete material. We are leading the student to see the meaning of what he is doing and its use in work that is to come — the formulae of the industries, the sciences, and in the statement of problems. To make the work concrete and attractive — to make the subject function with the individual and thus make it a course that may be justified by our present standards, I fear that some have overemphasized the problem side of the subject. I do not believe that the power to solve problems is the greatest aim of the course in elementary algebra. Few problems that arise in the world's work require an algebraic solution or are even made simpler by it. We are seeking rather to form a habit of thinking in general numbers. The solution of a problem, it is true, furnishes drill in using general number in analysis, and in the statements of the relations that exist among the magnitudes involved, but they are a means, not an end. The power to interpret fully the meaning of the general numbers of a formula or of an identity is of greater value than the power to solve a problem. Teachers and writers of textbooks err, too, in conceiving that the cry of the scientist that the pupil can not use his algebra when he comes to the physical sciences may be stilled by the insertion of problems from those sciences. We are not seeking to make automatons by drilling upon problems of a certain class that may arise in certain courses, but are seek- ing rather so to develop the habit of thinking in general number that the conditions of a problem may be expressed in symbols, or that the formulae of the sciences may have a real meaning. To develop power to use algebra in the sciences then, does not demand prob- lems from that source, yet, as a drill in the interpretation of general number and symbols, the formulae of the sciences furnish splendid examples. Such formulae help us to avoid the danger of allowing the general number to become the very special number, x, y, or z. Problems, of course, have their use in bringing about this power to use general number, and if they are of the right kind they are full of interest. The first requisite of a good problem, however, is that it be concrete — that is, that the student is able to image the magnitudes involved and express the relations existing among them in terms of general numbers and symbols. As a matter of interest and value they should largely be problems of which someone, somewhere, at sometime, might reasonably wish to know the answer, and not those of the "hide-and-go-seek" order that still characterize our textbooks — problems, the answers of which must be known before the problems can be made. In conclusion, then, we may say that we are seeking to make algebra function in the life of the student — give him power to interpret broadly the general number in the formulae 634 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary met in the industrial world and in science, or to use it in analyzing a problem and stating the relations among the magnitudes as a conditional equation. Besides this, we are so to teach the subject that it may have a certain cultural value by leading the student to see the limitations upon which certain laws depend, and the result of generalizing other con- cepts. THE TEACHING OF GEOMETRY IN ITS RELATION TO THE PRESENT EDUCATIONAL TREND WILLIAM BETZ, EAST HIGH SCHOOL, ROCHESTER, NEW YORK A few months ago the principal of a well-known normal school said to me: "The teaching of geometry has become stale. Something must be done to put new life into it." This remark struck the very keynote of the present reform movement. That one has a right to speak of a reform movement in the teaching of mathematics, must be evident to any but a very indiflferent observer. Nor is this agitation in favor of better teaching con- fined to our own country, and its effects are felt in colleges, universities, secondary and primary schools, with almost equal force. It is unnecessary to recite, before an audience like this, all the details of its origin and progress. Many of those here present could do that more impressively. It is sufficient to say that since Professor E. H. Moore's memor- able address, in December, 1902, on "The Foundations of Mathematics," an ever increas- ing number of teachers have become actively interested in the pedagogy of mathematics. This is proved by the large number of associations of teachers of mathematics and science organized within the past five years, and by the numerous papers and reports published in that time. A vigorous battle has been going on between the radical and the conservative schools, between individualism and dogmatism. By this time the smoke of battle has cleared away sufficiently to warrant a diagnosis of the case and, perhaps, a prognosis for the future. Now, at the very outset, it is proper to ask: Is there any real need of a reform move- ment ? For, to justify its existence, we must be able to point out sufficiently weighty causes. This, I think, can easily be done. Aside from the general reason of progress in every department of human thought and activity, some four or five additional factors are contributing to the state of affairs we are now considering. 1. In the first place, modern industrialism, with its demand for tangible success, has led to a great outcry for more practical school work. There is an increasing contempt of "mere theory." This feeling finds its expression in the establishment of trade and tech- nical schools such as this beautiful city has the privilege of possessing. Geometry, as usually taught, furnishes a welcome target to the utilitarian educator. As a result, there is a growing fear that we may drift too far from the ideal of liberal culture and that the direct bread-winning power of a subject may be made the sole criterion of its usefulness. 2. Our large cities, the natural centers of industry, are also becoming great centers of population. Naturally, the struggle for existence is becoming keener. Many parents are now sending their children to the high school to fit them, in the briefest possible time, for a more comfortable life than they themselves enjoy. This has made the high-school population more diversified than ever before and the demands imposed upon the schools have gfown more numerous from year to year. For the first time in history, secondary education is truly democratic. But it cannot be denied that the assimilation of so much raw material from homes giving no cultural impulses, and of so many students having no intention of entering higher institutions of learning, is one of the most serious problems of the high school. 3. More far-reaching than these changes of ideal and environment have been certain revolutions in school curricula and methods of instruction. The natural sciences have risen from comparative obscurity into great prominence. Their inductive method of investigation is considered by many as the great panacea for all our troubles. The influ- ence of the laboratory method is undeniable. It is reacting, for example, on the teaching I Department] THE TEACHING OF GEOMETRY 635 of history and the languages. In so far as it insists on self-reliance and definiteness of results and is productive of greater interest, it is excellent. But it lengthens school hours, calls for costly equipment, and demands much outside work on the part of pupil and teacher. 4. It would be diflficult, moreover, to overestimate the effect of the "new education." Its fundamental precept that all work must be arranged psychologically and adapted strictly to the child's power of comprehension, is eminently sound. But it has also given us the enriched curriculum and the doctrine of interest which replaces all objective standards by the subjective attitude of the child. Unquestionably this means at once a distinct ad- vance and a very real source of danger. The complaint is not infrequent that in many cases the young are learning to depend too much on the inspirational powers of the teacher, that all real difficulties are carefully avoided, and that the very aim of all true education — to develop a strong character and to create self-activity and initiative — is thereby defeated. During the past five years we have heard much of the social function of the school. A prominent professor kindly informed us that until exercises in spelling, mental arithmetic, and formal grammar should have become merely incidental and subsidiary, the high- water mark in teaching would not have been reached. It is exaggerations of this sort that rob many otherwise excellent ideas of their legitimate influence and place upon them the stigma of the faddist. 5. Last, not least, I must refer to the molding power of recent researches in the domain of pure mathematics. The labors of men like Pasch, Peano, Veronese, Hilbert, Klein, Russell, and others, are making it clear that the subject of rigor in geometry is one of extreme delicacy. It appears that our text-books are full of hidden assumptions and that their usual boast of rigorous presentation is ludicrous. Standing in the very midst of this whirlpool of conflicting forces and tendencies the conscientious teacher of mathematics feels vaguely, though instinctively, that his subject is in need of repair. His feeling is one of unenviable uncertainty. The new situation makes great demands on his training. He does not know how to steer clear of Scylla and Charybdis, how to modernize and revitalize his subject in the face of the many obstacles that beset his way, not the least of which is represented by the inexorable requirements of examining boards. Is there any way out of the difficulty ? As in all similar cases, a compromise would seem to be the natural outcome. Perhaps, by noting first the readjustments that have already taken place, we may secure a clearer vision of our future course. The old inflexible schedule of studies is giving way to a more liberal curriculum. This is a direct outgrowth of the doctrine of interest and of the new function of the high school as the people's university. Here alsO lies a great danger. Mathematics is one of the "hard" school subjects, and when it i's placed in competition with other easier and more attractive subjects, the pupil naturally follows the line of least resistance. As a college president happily phrased it, he " abandons the Jerusalem of the calculus for the Jericho of economics." It has become a witticism that water does not flow down hill as smoothly as the delighted student picks his way through a long list of electives. In this connection the following passage, taken from the third report of the Association of Mathematical Teachers in New England (Boston, 1906), will be of interest: "That pupils and their parents are not awake to the importance of mathematics was shown conclusively by questions put to the principals of the Boston High schools in which the elective system is in force. In the English High and in the Roxbury High 25 per cent, of the entering class are taking no mathematics whatsoever. In the South Boston High 28 per cent, of the pupils have not made a year of algebra or geometry. In the Girls' High 53 per cent, of the first-year pupils, in selecting their studies,- chose to take no mathematics— 287 out of 544 girls; and in the East Boston High 165 out of 239 pupils in the entering class, or 69 per cent., are studying no mathematics." Of far greater interest and importance are the efforts that have been progressing for some time to modify the compartment system in the teaching ot mathematics by which 636 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary algebra is placed in the first year, and geometry in the second. While he is studying geometry, the student promptly forgets his algebra, and during the third year he loses both algebra and geometry. Then, in the fourth year, we try to revive his interest by going over the same ground a second time. There is a great waste of energy in all this. I cannot regard the introduction of "non-preparatory" courses as a complete solution of this difl&- culty, even if such courses were possible in all schools. The various correlation and fusion plans advocated so far have not been tested suffi- ciently to warrant their general adoption. In 1902, Professor E. H. Moore designated the unification of pure and applied mathematics as the fundamental problem. Mr. John C. Packard, a year later, predicted the formation of a new subject known as "everyday mathematics," by the fusion of physics, manual training, algebra, and geometry. This constitutes the very heart of the Perry movement. The practical realization of this scheme proved more difficult than was anticipated. So far as I know, it has been tried only in schools of unusua! equipment, and even there has been only moderately successful. One impartial observer, after a careful inspection of the schools where this sort of correlation seemed to work particularly well, reported that the good results were due not to the plans as such, but to the consummate skill of the teachers who, in his opinion, could have made almost any plan a success. Mr. F. T. Jones of University School, Cleveland, expressed himself similarly a few years ago. The most significant utterance on this point is Professor G. W. Myers' report in The School Review^ October, 1907, to which I must refer. Although these experiments have not produced the results expected of them, they have by no means been useless. They have shown the teachers of mathematics their limitations, have awakened an interest in applied mathematics, and have greatly enriched our problem literature. More promising than these forms of external correlation have been certain more recent attempts to secure a closer internal union of the various branches of pure mathe- matics. These efforts are still confined to a few high schools and colleges. So far as it is safe to draw conclusions from a very limited experience, the indications are that here lies our only hope of overcoming the compartment system. I trust that I have now established the necessity and the actuality of a reform move- ment in the teaching of mathematics. We must proceed to consider what will be the prob- able outcome of the struggle so far as geometry is concerned. It is safe to say that what- ever changes will occur, they will all be in the direction of greater interest, more applied work, and fewer technicalities. It is also certain that the teacher of geometry must revise his aim, readjust the subject-matter, and modernize his methods. The one-sided theory of mental discipline, in the elementary course, must go. The over-insistence on discipline for its own sake has done incalculable harm to the interests of mathematics. It is well that we are beginning to realize this. The report of the New England Association mentioned above contains this lament: "The general impression is abroad that mathematics is of little practical value, and the result has been its neglect and the consequent loss of mathematical power on the part of the pupils." Ours is not the calm repose of the Greek philosopher. Our civilization craves action, and a subject that loses contact with life is doomed. It is a mistake to suppose that the high school can distinguish sharply between rational geometry and intuitive geometry. Their separation at this stage of the pupil's development is neither possible nor desirable, as Professor Jofin Dewey has pointed out. In fact, what is rational geometry ? The content of this conception is far from absolute. Says Pro- fessor Moore: "The teacher is teaching the subject for the benefit of the students, and it must be admitted that beginners in the study of demonstrative geometry cannot appreciate the very delicate considerations involved in the thoroughly abstract science. Indeed, one may conjecture that, had it not been for the brilliant success of Euclid in his effort to organize into a formally deductive system the geometric treasures of his times, the advent of the DepartmentJ THE TEACHING OF GEOMETRY 637 reign of science in the modern sense might not have been so long deferred. Shall we then hold that in the schools the teaching of demonstrative geometry should be reformed in such a way as to take account of all the wonderful discoveries which have been made — many even recently — in the domain of abstract geometry ? .... To make reforms of this kind, would it not be to repeat more gloriously the error of those followers of Euclid who fixed his Elements as a textbook for elementary instruction in geometry over two thou- sand years ago ?" Let us be perfectly honest about this matter. Let us give up that meaningless pretense of teaching rigorous geometry to boys and girls of fourteen or fifteen. Is it not true that we are trying to crowd into a single year more material than the young student can possibly absorb ? Think of the many definitions, the 160 propositions, the numerous corollaries and originals called for by the usual course. We can secure a mechanical repetition of these things, but do they become part of the pupil's mental arma- ture ? Should we not eliminate all that is not absolutely essential ? I know of no better criterion for this process than Professor Klein's definition of ele- mentary mathematics: "In all domains of mathematics those parts are to be called ele- mentary which can be understood by a pupil of average ability without long continued special study." In the light of this eminently sensible definition, advanced by one of the greatest of living mathematicians, we can afford to omit those things which experience has proved to be of little or no value. There is a growing conviction that to this class of material belongs the whole subject of limits and incommensurables. Many secondary teachers, both here and abroad, have long been of this opinion. For information on this point, I may refer to the reports of the New York High-School Teachers* Association, of the New England Association, and the Central Association. It is a great pleasure to note that even the colleges are indorsing this view. In a paper published in School Science and Mathematics Professor H. E. Hawkes of Yale University says: "During ten years' experience in teaching geometry to students who have been in general carefully prepared by the best of teachers, I do not believe I have met a dozen who understood the theory of limits. This is not the fault of the students, nor of the teachers, nor entirely of the textbooks. The difficulty lies in the fact that we are trying to do some- thing that can't be done From every point of view that I am able to take, the theory of limits in elementary teaching seems a failure. If both secondary and college teachers suddenly discover that they agree on this point, the rest is simple." Professor G. A. Miller writes: "It has become the fashion of textbook writers to call especial attention to the rigor of their presentation. Fortunately these claims are generally unsubstantiated. There are few things that would give more definite proof of the perfect unsuitableness of an ele- mentary textbook than the fact that every step in the presentation was rigorous." The time gained by such omissions could be devoted to the more significant topics, and would enable us to introduce at least a few interesting and valuable applications. The young student should not be expected merely to review formulas and recite theorems discovered ages ago. He has a perfect right to ask what it is all for. Fortunately, the geometry teacher, if he will take the necessary pains, need not fear this inquiry. The desideratum seems to be such a judicious mixture of theory and practice that complete oblivion will settle on the definition according to which "mathematics is the science in which we do not know what we are talking about and do not care whether what we say about it is true." Now I grant that the elimination of nonessentials is a serious matter, if left entirely to the judgment of the individual teacher. Each teacher is more or less of a hobbyist. I therefore suggest that the various provisional syllabi now at our disposal be submitted to a new committee of ten which is to work out a national geometry syllabus. I do not see why such a syllabus, if compiled with the greatest care by representative men, men in close touch with the colleges and the secondary schools, should not exert the same unifying influence that has characterized the publications of former committees of the National 638 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Education Association. This national syllabus should be revised periodically, possibly every ten years. It should contain a carefully graded list of theorems. It should also give a discussion of disputed definitions, terms and symbols, and should offer advice as to methods of procedure. This brings me to my last topic. More seems to have been written in the past five years on the pedagogy of mathematics, than during the preceding five decades. This is very reassuring. When many prominent mathematicians can devote so much of their energy to the interests of elementary mathematics, better times are surely coming. It is encouraging that we are gradually seeking emancipation from textbooks, that the teacher really teaches. The genetic method and the laboratory mode are receiving their due amount of attention. There is an attempt to make the pupil a discoverer, to replace the reproductive attitude by a creative spirit. We are securing a better balance between oral and written recitation. Text-books, too, are improving in arrangement and quality of material. In short, there is progress all along the line. In conclusion I would say that the present situation, more than ever before, demands a real teacher, a teacher of broad scientific and pedagogic attainments, who, in spite of many unavoidable disappointments, knows how to preserve his optimism. Never -in the history of the world have the opportunities for sound training been greater, never has the absolutely unique importance of mathematics been more generally recognized, nor has there been more mutual sympathy and co-operation. Many years ago an ardent admirer of our noble science, a romantic poet now almost forgotten, wrote these admonishing and inspiring words: "The true mathematician is an enthusiast, per se. Without enthusiasm, no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathe- matics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians." DISCUSSION Richard S*. Beardsley, Englewood High School, Chicago, III. — The success of a course in geometry depends greatly upon the interest and encouragement the pupil receives during the first two weeks. I well remember when I first began to study geometry how hard it was for me to see just what the author was aiming at, and how my classmates remarked that a great deal of effort seemed to be wasted on proving various statements that anyone could see were true. As an illustration, you probably remember that some textbooks on geometry start out with the proposition that all straight angles are equal. Half of the beginning pupils who attempt to prove that proposition will miss the point of the argument on account of their liability to confuse the straight angle with the straight line. It is my opinion that the first demonstrations in the textbook should be those dealing with the equality of triangles. However, before the proving of theorems, I should have my pupils do a good mam things in the way of drawing and construction. Mr. Squeers told Nicholas that after a boy was able to spell and define "winder" and "clean" he went and "cleaned the winder." So I should have my pupils learn isosceles triangle, equilateral triangle, right triangle, acute, right, obtuse, reflex angles, perpendicular, parallel, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, by drawing them neatly on the board with a ruler and then labeUng them. Then they might well be put in more permanent 'form on paper or cardboard. This construction work gives the pupils much necessary information and starts them into their course with enthusiasm. I might add at this point that instruction in spelling at this stage would save many a painful twinge when examination time rolls around. An excellent teacher at the Englewood High School tells his pupils at the beginning of their work that geometry should teach them many things concerning the relations of lines and angles, etc., and that it also should teach them a method of proof. By the time his pupils have had him as teacher for a half-year, they realize the truth of his statement. The same man told me that he believed that the probleihs of construction which art- Department! THE TEACHING OF GEOMETRY 639 usually placed at the end of a book or chapter of theorems might very well come at the beginning of the chapter, or else right along with the theorems to which they are most closely related. The subject of incommensurables and limits I should omit from the first year's work or postpone until the chapter on regular polygons, which is studied during the last quarter of the year that is devoted to plane geometry. I wonder if any of the teachers assembled here ever had any difficulty teaching their pupils the proposition that if two variables are always equal and each approaches a limit, their limits are equal. The best and simplest proof I know of is given in Milne's Academic Algebra. In their values the variables are but one. A variable can approach but one limit, hence it is the common limit of the two variables. I should indeed be glad to own a national geometry syllabus, and I should not consider it any infringement upon my liber- ties. I should be glad to know what the best teachers consider essential. Mr. Betz says that he does not approve of the fusion, in the high school, of the various courses in pure and applied mathematics, and I agree with him. I feel that fusion would lead to confusion. I also approve of the closer union of the branches of pure mathematics, so that the student may have his attention called constantly to the essentials of each sub- ject. One of the criticisms aimed at the present school curriculum is that we lack in con- centration. But by occasionally bringing into the geometry magnitudes of a, 6, or m units, the pupil will learn to apply his geometrical knowledge and review his algebraic and arithmetical rules at the same time. To do so may make a lesson less prosaic and anchor some useful fact in the pupil's mind. As in other subjects, the success of a course in geometry depends more upon the teacher than any other circumstance. It is in the teacher's power to make geometry as dry as E^zekiel's valley of dry bones. On the other hand, the teacher has the opportunity to put vim into the work, to keep every pupil busy thinking and doing during the whole lesson period, and to interest them in hunting for new and original proofs. Enthusiasm is a very pervasive quality; and if the teacher shows activity and spirit, it will be readily reflected in the attitude of the pupils toward their work. The principal purpose of this great association of teachers is to create and preserve a spirit of enthusiasm. I came here hoping to do my little part. I shall carry away much more than I brought. As each individual in a bed of live coals helps to keep its neighbors in a glow, so may we encourage each other to do our work next year with new zeal. Fletcher Durell, mathematical master in Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, New Jersey. — Two movements or tendencies are noticeable in current secondary mathe- matical education: (i) the movement which demands that such instruction be more "practical," i.e., confer a greater and more direct bread-winning power on the pupil; (2) a demand that mathematical truths be imparted in a way to give greater cultural value, this latter taking the special form of a demand for greater precision in mathematical definitions, and greater rigor and generality in mathematical demonstrations. These two tendencies are but local manifestations of general movements at work throughout educational practice and study as a whole. People at large are insisting more and more emphatically that secondary and higher education give the pupil a greater, or at least a plainer and clearer "direct bread-winning power." The latest expression of this view is the demand for a system of agricultural high schools throughout the land, distinct from the public-school system as a whole. It is also insisted that education have a not less, but greater, cultural value. Voices are raised in warning that by changing education into something mainly technical we shall lose more than we shall gain. Make the pupil a man, say they, before you make him a workman. Teach the child how to make a living, but at the same time do not fail to teach him how to live. The problem before us as teachers of secondary mathematics, therefore, is the same 640 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary as that before the educational world in general; viz., to develop each of the above tvi^o functions of education in a more explicit and povirerful form, and if possible to combine them closely. The suggestion I would like to make is that, in order ultimately to make education impart both of these classes of utilities in the time at our command and without greatl}- increased expense, in ways adapted to various callings and situations, it is important to make a thorough study of the principles of utility, with a view to the discovery of more- fundamental and inclusive ones than are now in current use. We need principles of utility which include narrow concrete utilitarian values and broad humanizing values as special cases. For instance, we usually think that we are teaching an important practical appli- cation of geometry when we teach the pupil to use the properties of similar triangles to measure the height of a tree by comparing its shadow with the shadow of a post of known height. Yet how many of us, or how many of our pupils who have learned the above process, have ever had occasion to measure the height of a tree, steeple, or other object by this method, or have ever earned a loaf of bread by so doing ? On the other hand, there is contained in the above illustration a principle of utility of fundamental and omnipresent importance but one which scarcely ever receives explicit attention. This is the principle of the value of an adapted auxiliary quantity in measuring another quantity or in obtaining any desired result. This principle is constantly used in the logical and cultural side of mathematics, as well as on its technical side; as also in cul- tural life and technical work of all kinds. Other like principles of utility, which seem to be of more fundamental significance in education than prevalent ones, might be mentioned, but enough has been said, perhaps, to make clear what I have in mind. A philosophy, science, and art of utility and prac- ticability are desirable before some of the current experiments in education are carried too far. Perhaps mathematics, because of the explicitness of its concepts, the exactness of its methods, and its freedom from entangling relations, is the best starting-point and experi- ment-ground for such an investigation. B. FOREIGN LANGUAGES OBJECTIVE AIDS IN TEACHING MODERN LANGUAGES ERNST L. WOLF, 'TEACHER OF GERMAN, WILLIAM MC KINLEY HIGH SCHOOL, ST. LOUIS, MO. The reform movement, which for more than forty years has been the subject of dis- cussion at meetings of this character, has, in my estimation, exercised a most beneficial and wholesome influence upon the theory and practice of teaching modern languages. Breymann's Bibliography of the Reform Literature contains more than two thousand titles of books and magazine articles which appeared in print between the years 1876 and 1905, not counting the reviews, and replies, and not counting the papers presented at teachers' conferences, countless in numbers. This cannot be surprising to those who realize the importance of the subject. "Die ganze Menschheit erst ist der wahre Mensch," says Goethe ("The whole of mankind only is truly man"). There is not a nation in the world but has a lesson to teach us well worth our learning; there is not a problem confronting the human race today, at the solu- tion of which superior minds in all civilized countries are not working. The merits of the reform movement would be inestimable even if it had not accom- plished anything else but to arouse the teachers from the lethargy into which they had fallen, and to save them from stagnation and from slavishly following the path on which tradition was leading them. DepartmentJ OBJECTIVE AIDS IN TEACHING MODERN LANGUAGES 641 As a result, we have now a different aim before us, viz.: a practical mastery of the foreign language, a mastery which, as far as possible, should approach or resemble that of the mastery of the mother-tongue; we now aim at teaching our pupils to speak, to write, and, above all things, to read books, as they read books in their mother-tongue. Pronunciation is taught systematically thruout the course, particularly in the beginning; a new science, that of phonetics, has been put in the service of the teacher. Charts, representing the organs of speech and their position in producing the different sounds, facilitate the teaching of pronunciation. . Our ideas in regard to the teaching of grammar have been modified. We no longer study grammar for its own sake as a "men- tal gymnastic," but only as a means of better using and understanding the written and spoken language, as a means to an end, an indispensable one, but not as the end itself. Grammar is no longer the queen dominating the course from beginning to end, but it has been assigned to the useful but, relatively, modest position of a house maid. The ability to use the foreign language is no longer looked upon as a matter to be despised; in fact the colloquial part of the language is taught before the literary. Reformers have taught us that the real intrinsic difficulty in learning a foreign lan- guage lies in having to master its vocabulary. This may sound like a truism. But reform- ers, rightfully, claim it as a new discovery. Great attention is now given to the foreign country and the history of its people, their manners and customs, their ideas and ideals, their government and their institu- tions. In selecting reading matter, this aspect receives most careful consideration. In connection herewith objective aids of great variety are used. They materially assist in restricting the use of the mother-tongue to a minimum during the foreign-language reci- tation. It is this latter proposition which has caused the fiercest struggle because it is least understood. We may look upon translating from four different view-points, viz,, as a method of teaching English, as a mental discipline, as a test for comprehension, and, finally, as a method of teaching a foreign language. Reformers admit that the comparing of two languages is an excellent practice in English for the advanced student in college, but not for the schoolboy; they point to the Greeks and say " Greek literature takes such a high place in the world's literature, but the Greeks knew nothing of the practice of translating;" reformers say "You cannot teach two languages at once, any more than you can teach swimming and walking upon stilts, at the same time." But translating is also an excellent mental discipline; reformers admit it, adding, however, that their way of teaching affords equally fine opportunities. Most reformers accept translating as an aid to comprehension and as a test for com- prehension, provided, it is not made the rule but the exception. Translating, however, as a method of teaching is, generally, rejected by reformers. The first reason advanced is "Translating cannot be the aim of instruction." The pupil 'should learn to read in the foreign tongue as in his own, i.e., to take in the gist of a sentence without paying much attention to the individual word, as he reads English books, he should learn to associate the foreign word with the thing for which it stands as a symbol. But this demand is not new. In the report of the Committee of Ten, appointed at the meeting of the National Educational Association in 1892, the committee demand that "ultimately the student should be enabled to read French and German without the interposition of English." Bagster Collins, in his book. The Teaching of German in Secondary Schools, says, "The I importance that translation has assumed in modern language work is, to* a great extent, traditional; the method of teaching the ancient languages was slavishly copied;" and, [at some other place, he says, "We wish the technique of translation to fall 'into disuse as isoon as possible, for, if practiced too long, it will ever be a hindrance to his really know- ling a language." Professor Grandgent says, "You will find that during the last year the greater part jf your instruction can be imparted in the language you are studying." 642 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Professor Edward S. Joynes says, "It is clear that our students should learn to read without translation. No one has ever read any foreign literature who has read it only through a translation — his own or any other. No reading is adequate until it can be under- stood at first hand, and in the form of the original." I believe I may consider this first objection of the reformers against translating as well supported by safe and sane testimony. Translating cannot be the aim of instruction. The second argument against translating is "Translating is an art, altogether too difficult to be practiced by school children, and possible only to those who have a ready command of both languages." Translation is the most convenient way of explaining the meaning of a text, especially if the text is provided with a vocabulary. But is it not an illusion to assume that with these vocabularies, an essential part of the work is done by the student ? Are these vocabularies anything but a new variety of the old familiar interlinear translations ? A translation must give the whole truth of the original and nothing but the truth; it must at the same time be idiomatic English — that is to say, it must not read like a trans- lation. Assuming this to be attainable by our boys and girls — how about harmony and modulation and • hythm ? Translation, when fairly adequate, implies an almost equal command of the two lan- guages. And even a good translation always remains open to criticism, because few English words embrace the full meaning of the corresponding foreign equivalents, so-called equiva- lents; no matter how good a translation, there always remains something that is untrans- lated, because it is untranslatable. Men who have penetrated deep into the spirit of the great writers and into the nature of language study, have given their verdicts against the advisability and even against the possibility of translating. Wilhelm von Humboldt, poet, scholar, statesman, friend of Schiller and Goethe, wrote "Translating appears to me to be absolutely an attempt to solve an impossible task; -for every translator will see his boat wrecked on one of these two reefs : either at the expense of good taste and of his native tongue, he will adhere too closely to the original, or, at the expense of the original, he will adhere too closely to the peculiarities of his native tongue. A medium is not only difficult but downright (geradezu) impossible." Measuring a language by the standard of another must lead to disastrous results, and reformers have only reached the logical conclusion, when they keep the two languages isolated. The third reason against translating is this, "It is not economical." To establish a permanent association between the foreign word and the object represented by it, must, it seems to me, be the aim constantly before our eyes. How can we hope to attain it if we spend one-half, perhaps more, of our time in teaching our students to do precisely that which prevents their ultimately establishing this association. On the other hand, if instruction is carried on entirely in the foreign language, the student will learn German or French during the full recitation period. Professor von Jage- mann has figured out that the amount of German a student will hear in each recitation over and above the text itself, during the school year, is equal to from one thousand to two thousand pages of reading. It is hardly necessary to dwell at length on the character of translations offered by our pupils, if they are honestly obtained. It is neither German nor English, and "think- ing in this hybrid tongue day after day must be educationally demoralizing." But fortu- nately, translating can be avoided and, herewith, I have reached my last argument against translating, i.e., "Translating is unnecessary; something better may be put in place of it." Das ist die klarste Kritik von der Welt, Wenn neben das, was ihm missfallt, Einer was eigenes, bess'res stellt. — Geibel. Language — as I have said before — must be associated with the ideas of which it is the Department] OBJECTIVE AIDS IN TEACHING MODERN LANGUAGES 643 expression; from the very beginning this habit must be cultivated. It is easy enough to see how it may be done with the elementary and concrete part of the vocabulary by objects, models, actions, pictures. The vocabulary of the classroom, the common acts of school life, the use of the senses, almost all adjectives and their comparison, numerals, all classes of pronouns, prepositions, and a large number of verbs may be acquired by object lessons. The thing and the word, if suflficient practice is given, call each other up as readily as a ball rebounds from the cushion of a billiard table. The younger the student the more he is, naturally, interested in the concrete: the greater his interest, the greater will be his attention, the more readily his memory will retain what he has learned. But these exercises also afford ample scope for the practice of declensions and conjugation. When the vocabulary of the classroom becomes exhausted, we must take recourse to models and pictures. The variety of models and pictures now offered by the European publishing houses is so great that I must refrain from enumerating any. When the habit of question and answer has become familiar, we may apply it to any text read. There are those who speak slightingly of all conversational exercises, claiming that the ability to speak a foreign language is an accomplishment of little value. The capacity to express one's thoughts freely and directly in another tongue demands considerable intel- lectual activity; the effort to attain it affords far more "training" than excessive occupation with grammar; but the value of conversational exercises as a means of instruction is far greater; in a minimum of time they give a maximum of practice. Furthermore, the beauties of literary style can only be felt by their distinction from the talk of everyday life. Can anyone appreciate the simple grandeur of the language of the English Bible, who does not know how English-speaking people commonly express themselves ? It is not saying too much if it is affirmed that the literary language is to a certain extent a dead language. As already indicated, by asking questions on the text, the teacher can assure himself whether the student has understood its true meaning or not; but this will not suffice; pictures will materially assist him in explaining the unfamiliar words; they take the place of a dictionary. These pictures, however, serve another purpose, viz., they create the proper atmosphere in the class room. The mountain scenery of Switzerland, the feudal castle, its exterior and its interior, the pictures of the Swiss people — on exhibition before you — will at once put the class that is reading Tell in the proper attitude of mind. I had well-founded hopes, at the time when I accepted the honor of appearing here before you, that this exhibit would be more complete. Mr. Rathmann, the assistant superintendent and director of the School Museum at St. Louis and the New York im- porters, Lemcke and Buechner, were intensely interested in the exhibit and proniised me their most liberal support. Unfortunately, however, the place of this meeting had not been decided upon, and, consequently, it would have been unwise to provide for an exten- sive exhibit. Otherwise, I might have been able to show you charts for pronunciation, models and pictures representing an elementary vocabulary', maps and charts and pictures of geographical and historical character. There is not a person of note, not a place, not a building to which any historical interest is attached of which not good, even artistic, pictures at a reasonable price may be obtained. Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that, hard as we may try, we cannot succeed in excluding English from the minds of our students; furthermore, that it is not impossible that the direct association may be established after the text has been translated. By the further treatment of the lesson in German, English may be made to recede more and more, many assert. I also admit that translating may be legitimately resorted to as an occasional aid to comprehension, or, as an occasional test of comprehension. Personally, I always feel I am committing a crime when I use English in my work, and that I might have avoided it if I had possessed greater skill. The last word on the subject, however, I am well aware, has not been spoken. Teachers all over the world are bending their efforts toward the solution of the problem, and I trust the day is not far aM'ay when we shall feel, in this country, as one of the members of the 644 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary Modern Language Association of England felt, who concluded his remarks at the last January meeting with these words, "Let it suffice to say that the members present were with very few exceptions thoroughly in favor of the reform method and that the reformers realized once more how much their methods and their aims were misunderstood, and vowed that they would shout them from the housetops until even the deaf should hear." THE POSITION OF GRAMMAR IN LANGUAGE-INSTRUCTION ADOLPH KROMER, TEACHER OF GERMAN, SOUTH HIGH SCHOOL, CLEVELAND, OHIO Up to about the third quarter of the last century grammar, as a rule, occupied the center in all language-instruction. To master a foreign language was to master its gram- mar and in the study of a foreign language the part of speech was the basal unit, not the sentence. The elements were given, the whole was to be created largely by mechanical composition. The result was the conglomeration of words into often meanixigless sen- tences. The resultant of such instruction was rather the understanding of the laws of the language than the power of using the language readily. Now in the last quarter of the last century there began a movement with new ideals, new aims. A mighty contest between old and new followed. We are still contending, but we are able to distinguish clearly lasting good results of the victorious new movement. And one of these is the changed position of grammar in language-instruction. The living language is now the direct aim, no more merely its ingenious mechanism. The living language, at least to a reasonable degree, is to be mastered. No longer does it suffice simply to have a deep insight into the structure of the foreign idiom — the new movement emphasizes the ability to master it. Before, knowledge of the language was emphasized. Now, the ability to use it. Is this position justifiable ? Who should doubt it ? Systematic education lies between two boundaries. The one boundary is formed by a line of developed forces, abilities and natural appetencies. This line is the basis of instruction. The other boundary is formed by the aim of education. Instruction and education move from the former toward the latter. Intelligence and experience, quickened by the congenial warmth of the human heart, deter- mine the materials and the means best suited for the realization of the aim of education, as well as the sequence of their presentation. Viewed in this way one thing seems to be particularly striking, being in sharp contrast with the older method; namely, that the teacher, the. bearer of that intelligence, is the central figure. In giving the teacher this position the modern language movement shows that it is conscious of the truth which Quintilian expresses so tersely: " Viva vox alit plenius.'^ While this position is not directly connected with thq theme in question here still it gives valuable hints, and forms a b.asis for likewise valuable inferences. But let us return to the given basis of instruction. The appetencies mentioned here are natural desires to know, to do, to master. These desires are directed toward units, or things that appear as units, not toward component parts that, too, are not directly objects of sense perception. So in language, the learner will never ask to be taught gram- matical phenomena. The learner will ask to be taught Latin, German, etc. Nor does he come without a feeling of competency in this matter. Unconsciously, he bases his demands on the natural power of assimilation through vivid impressions. Thousands have acquired language by sheer force of assimilation. Our country in this matter presents a fine object- lesson. Neither can grammatical knowledge be set down as the direct aim of education. The knowledge of grammar cannot be and is not directly used in life; it has no direct connection even with real life; it cannot be made an ultimate aim. To know only the grammar-side of the language is to know nothing of its beauty, or of its wealth Department] THE TEACHING OF ANCIENT LANGUAGES 645 But to use a language correctly, intelligently, fluently will ever be a sign of real culture. And grammar can only in so far be important as it is able to help the learner to these qualities of language. It never is a conditio sine qua non — it will always be an important means to a greater end. This new method of acquiring the language is eminently practical. It does not over- look the necessities of everyday life, nor the simplicity of everyday language. But there is no desire here to emphasize these two things especially. Will it be further necessary to state expressly that the structural knowledge of the new language is to be gotten inductively ? Hardly. But would such a course be practical ? Certainly. The deductive method of language-instruction retards acquaintance with the simpler language forms. Grammar and the live language, at least as far as material and aim are considered, become too independent of each other; the logical aspect of language receives too much attention; translation is too widely resorted to, rather as a means to make gram- matical rules clear than to give fluency, correctness, and naturalness to discourse in the new idiom. ' The inductive method avoids these drawbacks of the older method by placing connected discourse before the learner. Forms of words are recognized as means of thought-expres- sion, even the meaning of the word becomes clearer in the light of its proper context. Translation is restricted to a wholesome minimum. The psychological nature of lan- guages receives its due of attention. Since grammar is based on language units, sentence, paragraph, stanza, story, etc., it can not lose its connection with the language-material. This, again, means that only the necessary amount of grammar (frequency and import- ance determine necessity) be presented. This method of instruction is in keeping with the ways of nature itself. Born into a multiplicity of things, we come through analysis to the proper insight of them. One thing more calls for special mention: the reform-movement never accomplished its work by a break. The coherency of things remained established. TWfe reform is simply a new order of things, a new articulation of materials, a shifting of emphasis. There were times when the cry "Away with grammar" could be heard in large assemblies, but the conservative element remained calm. The stern sense of duty checked the fever of mere innovation, and made the finding of a rational basis and a natural method possible. So in the new order of things, grammar no more holds a dangerous monopoly. Neither natural appetencies nor sane teleological reasons would admit of it. Facts, that each new day presents, give their approbation for the new secondary position of grammar. The reform movement has greatly benefited language-instruction. II. THE TEACHING OF ANCIENT LANGUAGES BY MODERN METHODS W. L. CARR, HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF LATIN AND GREEK, SHORTRIDGE HIGH SCHOOL INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, The modern ideal in the study and teaching of ancient languages is scientific simplicity. It was a desire for simplicity that began over a generation ago to produce our now uni- versally-used first books, annotated texts, and selected vocabularies, supplanting the bare texts and unabridged lexicons with which our grandfathers began their study of the classics. Simplicity, concentration, definiteness, the elimination of nonessentials are the themes of numerous articles in the professional journals, and many books even are being issued, dealing with different phases of the subject, such as vocabulary or syntax, but all pointing in the same direction. The authors of the hundred-and-one First Latin Books now on the market agree in their desire to secure simplicity, even if they fail to agree in any other respect. 646 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION [Secondary But all attempts at simplification, to be efifective and not result in mere superficiality, must be based on scientific principles. Text-book makers and class-room teachers must see to it that their short-cuts square with the facts and must not be carried away with a laudable desire "to make the rough places plain." Genuine scholarship and the scientific point of view are needed, and needed in beginners' work as well as in university courses. In this scientific age a rational statement of the facts of a language in our textbooks and a scientific attitude on the part of our teachers will aid greatly in keeping the classics in favor along side of the laboratory sciences. And a true scientific attitude will not only secure a greater respect for our work, but is the only means by which the much-to-be-desired simpli- fication can be successfully effected. True scholarship and effective pedagogical method do not conflict. The results of historical and comparative study in philology have already aided greatly in the simplification of language study. For example, the recognition of Sanskrit as a sister language of Greek and Latin in the great Indo-European family has practically solved the complicated problem of the Latin ablative, by showing its threefold nature. The classification of ablative constructions as separative, sociative, and locative is implicit in all modern grammars and should be more widely employed in all elementary work. The problem placed before the student in his first year is purely linguistic. This is only slightly less true in his second and the succeeding years of secondary Latin or Greek. Antiquities, history, and even literary appreciation are not of first importance. These are incidental and may be obtained in more economical ways, while the chief aim should be a conscious study of language for language's own sake — for the sake of clearer thinking and a more intelligent use of one's own mother tongue. In this paper, therefore, I shall deal only with some of the purely linguistic problems, more particularly syntax, though I am not unmindful of the excellent results of historical, archaeological, and antiquarian studies, by which work in the classics has been so greatly enriched. More particularly still, I shall consider the problem of case and mood construc- tions in Caesac, the first real foreign-language reading undertaken by the vast majority of our pupils. The taking up of Caesar is the young scientist's first "field trip" and his first opportunity to test the knowledge he has gained in the first year's work. And it is just here that the most skilful guidance is needed to save him on the one .hand from the notion that language is a purely mechanical and artificial sort of thing, to be worked out by the puzzle method, or, on the other hand, from the equally fatal idea that language is abso- lutely lawless and he had best consider the whole affair a guessing contest, first and last. The question is, "How much syntax shall be taught to pupils in Caesar ?" My answer is, "Teach all there is there, hut no more." Whatever else will result from a detailed study of a given author, such as I am here suggesting, the pupil will be shown what constructions to learn, and the teacher will be shown what not to teach. At this point in his work the pupil knows or should know a case form when he sees it. He knows or should know that a nominative case is used either as a subject or predicate. , Can he be helped to an equally sure knowledge of the only slightly more difficult uses of the other cases ? The chief danger is that he will become confused and needlessly alarmed. I have had pupils and teachers, too, for that matter, estimate the number of different case constructions which the} rather expected to find in a given book of Caesar as high as 150. It is just here that an out- and-out laboratory method, namely an observation of the facts presented in the text being read, a classification of those facts, and deductions therefrom, is a plan which the writer has found most effective with pupils who have already gained the elements of a language. The exhibition and preservation of these classifications in chart form has served to make the work more definite and concrete. Such a treatment of case constructions as is herewith presented (see table, p. 647) furnishes the pupil with all the grammar necessary for case constructions in the passage under consideration, and furthermore, what has been found sufficient for any such passage, with only minor changes, will be found sufficient for all the pupil's work in the language. With the forest thus cleared of imaginary foes of unknown Department] THE TEACHING OF ANCIENT LANGUAGES 647 < g o V3 Sj > ft < l-H o U s I I 2 " S-s II rt 3 S 5 5 ^ Q O ui vO »^ ^s ^ a o 0 ^6 (U O 5 -S K II o s.l^ , a S o in (u p p ^ — u o ' 1 ft ■ tn M a O «.£ "1 Q P in vo tJ .2 ^ 1^ Ul ft o % .§ » g b .-s 1^ - I 5< « M 3 rt.ti -3^ ia S C5 U2 ' JN. ^ I— I •s C/2^> /-v HS ^11 I I I I I I I I M I I II I e8 w N fo "* in\0 00 O>0 M coioO\« fo aj fli_: iJ A i-i i £ .3 .S « o s •§1 ^ <^ >^ rt l^H3.a S i2