NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES Proceedings OF THE SIXTY-EIGHTH ANNUAL MEETING HELD AT * COLUMBUS, OHIO JUNE 28'JULY 4, 1930 VOLUME 68 The National Education Association 1201 Sixteenth Street N. W. Washington, D. C. MEMBERSHIP FEES AND PUBLICATIONS OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION The National Education Association has three classes of membership: 1. The $2 membership entitles one to all the privileges of membership and to receive The Journal of the National Education Association for one year. (9 issues.) 2. The $5 membership entitles one to all the privileges of membership and to receive for one year (a) The Journal of the National Education Associa¬ tion; (b) the annual volume of Addresses and Proceedings ; (c) the Re¬ search Bulletin; (d) occasional bulletins and reports. 3. The $100 life membership entitles one to the publications and privi¬ leges of the $5 membership for life. Several departments of the National Education Association have separate membership fees and issue department publications. Membership in the Na¬ tional Education Association is a prerequisite to membership in any Depart¬ ment of the Association. The payment of one of the membership fees of the National Education A ssociation does not include membership in any depart¬ ment having membership fee. The membership of the departments which issue publications follows: 1. The Department of Superintendence — $5 membership entitles one to receive for one year (a) The Y earhook of the Department of Superin¬ tendence, which includes a list of members; (b) the Official Report of the Winter Meeting; and (c) the N. E. A. Research Bulletin (5 issues). 2. The Department of Elementary School Principals — $3 membership en¬ titles one to participate in the work of the department, to receive its bulletins issued in October, January, April, and July, and the N. E. A. Research Bul¬ letin (5 issues). The April number of the Bulletin is a yearbook containing approximately five hundred pages. 3. The Department of Secondary School Principals — $2 entitles one to active membership and to receive its bulletins issued in January, March, April, May, and October. The March number is the proceedings of the annual meeting. 4. The Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction — $4 mem¬ bership entitles one to active membership and to the Journal of Educational Method. 5. The Department of Adult Education — $2 fee entitles one to membership and the Adult Education Bulletin. 6. The Department of Social Studies — $2.25 entitles one to membership and to the Historical Outlook. The American Association of Teachers Colleges (a department) publishes a yearbook which goes to institutions paying a membership fee of $10. The Department of Classroom Teachers, which has no membership fee, also pub¬ lishes a yearbook which sells for $1.50. The volume of Addresses and Proceedings may be purchased by non¬ members for $3. Membership fees of the National Education Association and its depart¬ ments and inquiries concerning all publications should be sent to 1201 Six¬ teenth Street, Northwest, Washington, D. C., except for the Department of Secondary School Principals. These should go to Mr. H. V. Church, 3129 Wenonah Ave., Berwyn, Ill. [2] FOREWORD This book records the 68th annual convention of the National Educa¬ tion Association. It also includes the report of the Department of Superintendence Convention held in Atlantic City last February and that of the American Association of Teachers Colleges (a department) held at that time. A few of the other departments also hold their meetings at the time of the winter convention. Th is volume contains the first record of two new departments — the American Educational Research Association and the Department of Super¬ visors and Teachers of Home Economics. Both of these groups begin as de¬ partments with a background of real accomplishment in their previous work as separate organizations. July 26 was an eventful day in the history of the National Education Association for on that date the cornerstone of the new headquarters build¬ ing was laid. The addresses in connection with the occasion are printed in the rear of this book. (See page 1100.) Suggestions from members relative to the content or form of the Proceed¬ ings will be welcomed. Joy Elmer Morgan, Director, Lyle W. Ashby, Assistant Director , Division of Publications. Division of Publications. [3] Membership of the National Education Association Count made December 31 each year 1907 1917 1922 1924 1926 1927 1928 1929 Alabama . : . . 55 64 708 1,016 1,142 1,150 1,331 1,635 Arizona . 20 37 1,107 1,669 2,095 2,186 2,262 2,524 Arkansas . 17 33 327 442 765 -■ 810 857 876 California . 249 432 9,592 15,213 17,924 18,497 19,486 20,887 Colorado . 75 140 3,820 4,284 4,450 4,582 4,663 4,620 Connecticut . 58 102 1,319 1,770 1,986 1,997 2,051 1,893 Delaware . 9 13 343 752 802 756 721 759 District of Columbia. . 47 96 595 1,949 1,449 1,432 1,370 1,276 Florida . 16 33 320 1,051 2,225 2,819 2,651 2,490 Georgia . 50 74 231 459 671 645 1,909 2,713 Idaho . 21 48 497 621 950 1,049 1,050 988 Illinois . £20 733 7,475 8,961 9,303 11,253 11,197 12,045 Indiana . 128 207 3,137 4,437 6,439 5,315 5,902 6,457 Iowa . 93 185 5,944 3,536 3,313 3,342 3,342 3,218 Kansas . 84 195 1,399 1,890 2,696 2,789 3,020 3,256 Kentucky . 60 85 431 543 1,244 1,321 1,362 1,428 Louisiana . 42 54 932 1,026 906 770 636 807 Maine . 32 51 2,105 1,867 1,782 1,643 1,769 1,696 Maryland . 55 94 529 1,567 1,371 952 882 1,592 Massachusetts . 332 366 10,696 6,197 5,415 5,646 6,340 5,191 Michigan . 139 251 7,466 8,977 10,311 11,256 12,230 13,652 Minnesota . 145 103 2,281 2,704 3,800 5,773 7,518 5,805 Mississippi . 16 38 156 273 312 274 361 560 Missouri . 216 512 3,234 3,176 3,186 2,973 3,219 3,287 Montana . 21 60 337 333 313 612 886 985 Nebraska . 71 114 2,651 2,721 2,602 2,376 2,313 2,331 Nevada . 4 19 310 562 684 778 753 783 New Hampshire . 30 38 625 557 460 431 454 337 New Jersey . 198 280 3,427 4,269 6,488 7,173 7,678 9,080 New Mexico . 13 33 384 319 286 354 430 536 New York . 948 1,230 10,031 9,973 9,278 8,666 10,315 10,522 North Carolina . 23 62 323 430 634 716 854 1,066 North Dakota . 42 83 497 584 508 517 588 556 Ohio . 349 534 8,383 9,881 14,587 16,785 19,490 23,850 Oklahoma . 23 95 1,252 1,477 1,565 1,801 1,781 1,880 Oregon . 19 154 1,041 2,288 2,877 2,816 2,794 2,770 Pennsylvania . 325 535 6,279 10,423 17,650 18,459 19,316 21,206 Rhode Island . 32 47 215 322 474 319 371 336 South Carolina . 22 31 89 484 614 633 635 1,168 South Dakota . 40 51 785 1,066 1,188 1,198 1,288 1,269 Tennessee . 31 60 615 869 1,126 1,115 1,457 2,215 Texas . 48 138 1,089 2,049 3,726 4,997 3,469 3,440 Utah . 30 66 2,879 1,678 2,093 2,562 2,842 2,994 Vermont . 30 40 398 432 330 417 450 370 Virginia . 40 88 1,082 1,480 1,717 1,79.4 2,015 2,010 Washington . 68 144 3,413 3,334 5,465 6,399 5,625 4,778 West Virginia . 24 114 736 1,810 2,729 2,603 2,513 2,602 Wisconsin . 160 277 3,316 3,428 3,826 4,062 4,228 4,368 Wyoming . 12 22 1,271 1,198 1,133 1,206 1,146 1,100 Alaska . • • • 93 105 163 161 161 171 Canal Zone . 3 2 95 107 65 65 Hawaii . 1,168 1,827 2,506 2,593 2,624 2,573 Porto Rico . 27 67 64 79 86 338 Philippine Islands . ,, , , 519 221 59 83 110 117 Virgin Islands . • • • • 10 123 108 105 56 11 Foreign . . 205 140 164 168 203 223 199 4,982 1 1 8,466 118,032 138,856 170,053 181,350 193,145 205,681 The next official count will be made December 31, 1930. Will it be 215,000? We can reach that goal by a little extra effort.. Let every school, city and county already 100 percent maintain its record next year and let those which have not yet reached the 100 percent goal increase their membership by at least 10 percent. How This Book is Built The conventions of the National Education Association are great congresses which bring together a wide variety of interests. This vol¬ ume reflects those interests. Persons who use it will save time by form¬ ing a picture of its contents and arrangement. The opening pages cover the speeches before the General Sessions at the Columbus meeting. These are followed by the reports of the Association’s active committees. The addresses and minutes of the National Council of Education are next in order and are followed by addresses and minutes of the Association’s departments. The closing pages are devoted to records and information pertaining to the Association since its organization in 1857. The volume as a whole represents the efforts of hundreds of persons engaged in all branches of education activity. Summary of Contents Addresses Before the General Sessions.. . 17 Reports of Committees . 169 The National Council of Education . 199 The Department of Adult Education . 249 The Department of Business Education . 275 The Department of Classroom Teachers . 293 The Department of Deans of Women . 309 The Department of Educational Research . 331 The Department of Elementary School Principals . 333 The Department of Kindergarten-Primary Education . 367 The Department of Lip Reading . 391 The Department of Rural Education . 402 The Department of School Health and Physical Education . 501 The Department of Science Instruction . 529 The Department of Secondary School Principals . 543 The Department of Social Studies . 597 The Department of Superintendence . 607 The Department of Supervisors and Teachers of Home Economics. . 771 The Department of Supervisors and Directors of Instruction . 773 The Department of Teachers Colleges . 801 The Department of Visual Instruction . 911 The Department of Vocational Education . 931 Associational Records and Information . 955 [5] x \ ' , ' - 1 - i/ . CONTENTS GENERAL SESSIONS COLUMBUS ADDRESSES Ideals in American Education — Thompson . 17 What the Schools Can Do in Character and Religious Education — Sutton ... . 24 What the Home Can Do in Character and Religious Education — Condon ... . 32 What the Church Can Do in Character and Religious Education — McDowell . . 37 Address of Welcome — Cooper . 41 Words of Greeting — Thomas . 42 Words of Greeting — Clifton . 43 Words of Greeting — Collicott . 43 Vital Values in Education — Pyrtlc . 44 Education for World Community — Dengler . 48 Greetings — Wins hip . ' . 54 Alaska, Our Last Frontier — Karnes . 55 Through the Looking Glass — Reeve . 58 International Goodwill, a Natural Outcome of the Social Studies Curriculum for the Early Elementary Grades — Rudy . 64 Looking Forward — Thomas . 67 The Teacher’s Job — Callahan . 68 The Philippines in International Education — Osias . 71 How to Promote International Education — Soper . 75 A Redefinition of the Concept of Equality of Opportunity in Education — Stray er . 78 The International Point of View as a Vital Value in Education — Progress with Teachers — Allen . 82 The Handicaps of Limitation — Hall . 87 Education for World Improvement — Siders . 91 The Schools of Hawaii — Aitken . 92 The Art of Living as a Vital Value in Education — Hall . 95 Thumb Prints — Clark . 97 Educating Everybody for Living — Samuelson . 103 The Enrichment of Adult Life — McBrien . 108 Laying the Foundation for the Enrichment of Adult Life among the Problem Youth of Chicago — Dolton . Ill The Revival of Personality — Lindley . 115 The Great Adventure — Jones . 121 George Washington Bicentennial Celebration — Grant . 126 Education for Political Service — Owen . 130 The Porto Rican People — Padin . . . 130 The Responsibility of the Public to the Schools — Bradford . 133 Symbols or Experience — Sealock . 136 The Teacher and the Child — Barnard . 141 Creative Activity Vital to the School Program — Barbee . 141 Educational Obligations of the Broadcaster — Robinson . 145 The Use of Radio in the Development of International Understanding — Lambert . 150 Progressive Teachers — Givens . 152 Recognizing and Developing Creative Ability in the Individual Child — Hale. . 155 Pioneering Again — Cooper . 156 The Heart of America — Finley . 163 . m 8 National Education Association REPORTS OF COMMITTEES Report of Committee on Appointment of Delegates and Kindred Questions — Proposed Changes in Bylaws — Threlkeld . 171 Report of the Committee to Cooperate with the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools — Newbold . 175 Report of the Committee on the Economic Status of the Teacher — Norton ... . 179 Report of the Committee on Enrichment of Adult Life — Alderman . 181 Report of the Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education of the National Education Association and the American Medical Associa¬ tion — Wood . 184 Report of Committee on International Relations — Woodward . 186 Report of the Legislative Commission — Finegan . 188 Report of the Committee on Resolutions — Preble . 191 Report of Committee on Retirement Allowances — Force . 195 Report of the Committee of One Hundred on Tenure Problems — Rowland. . . . 195 THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EDUCATION Historical Note . 200 Suggestions Relative to the Functions of the National Council of Education — Bagley . 201 An Analysis of the Qualities or Traits of a Desirable Citizen in a Democracy like the United States — Pearse . 205 Education for the American Youth — W oil . 211 Education and the Five Year Plan of Soviet Russia — Counts . 213 The Future of Education in America — Bagley . 218 Fifty Years of American Education, 1880-1930 — Anderson . 225 Study of Traits Desirable in an American Citizen — Preliminary Report — Pearse . 226 An Appreciation of the Work of the National Council of Education — Pyrtle. . 232 The Spirit of the Old Guard — Carr . 232 The National Council of Education — Yesterday and Today — Pearse . 233 The Place of the Council in the Business of Education — Finegan . 235 The Council in the Nineties — Kirk . 237 Secretary’s Minutes . 239 DEPARTMENT OF ADULT EDUCATION Historical Note . 250 The Research Program in Adult Education — Norton . 251 Research in Adult Education — Charters . 251 Some of the Objective Values Resulting from a Program of Adult Elemen¬ tary Education to the Adult Student, to the Day School Program, and to the Pre-School Child — Morriss . 257 The Leisure of Tomorrow — Morgan . 269 Report of the Secretary . 270 DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS EDUCATION Historical Note . 276 Personnel Work in the College of Commerce and Administration of the Ohio State University — Reeder . 277 Standardization: Preliminary Steps, Suggestions, and Recommendations — Hull. . 280 Contents 9 The Necessity of Closer Relations Between Business and the Schools — Beck.. 281 Evaluating Business Education by Business — Kyker . 283 Will a Practical Office Training Department Ever Be Developed? — Ely . 285 Vital Values in Commercial Education — Garbutt . 288 Typewriting — A Subject to be Taught — Reynolds . 289 New Trends in Commercial Teacher Training — Studebaker . 291 Secretary’s Minutes . 292 DEPARTMENT OF CLASSROOM TEACHERS Historical Note . 294 An Appraisal of Agencies for the Development of the High-School Teacher In Service — Merits and Weaknesses of College Summer Schools and Other Cultural Agencies — Barnette . 295 Selfgovernment and Selfmastery — Allen . 296 Special Education as a New Department of School Administration — Doll.... 297 Needs in Rural Education Today — Syron . 298 Problems of the Rural Teacher — Bing . 298 Secretary’s Minutes . 303 DEPARTMENT OF DEANS OF WOMEN Historical Note . 310 The Emotional Factor in Human Adjustment — Bagley . 311 The Training of Teachers for Character Education — Rankin . 319 Help High-School Deans May Give to College Deans — JV ells . 326 Institute: Necessary and Usable Records for the High-School Dean — Hayes.. 329 DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Historical Note . 332 DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS Historical Note . 334 Arithmetic: Its Value in our Schools — Scott. . 335 The Importance of a Reading Program to the Schools — IV hit e . 335 English and Its Value to Our Schools — Cassell . 337 The Distinctive Contributions of Geography in Education — Parkins . 339 Vital Values in Elementary Education — Pyrtle . 340 Vital Values in Education — University Point of View — McKoion . 342 Vital Values in Elementary School Libraries — Lathrop . 346 Vital Values in Education — Superintendent’s Point of View — Borden . 3 53 Vital Values in Education — Thompson . 358 Secretary’s Minutes . 362 DEPARTMENT OF KINDERGARTEN-PRIMARY EDUCATION Historical Note . 368 What Educational Principles Will Guide Teachers to Appreciate “Vital Values” for Children in the Kindergarten-Primary — Bode . 369 Helping Children Enrich and Gain Ideas — Wright . 375 Vital Values in Creative Expression — Mathias . 376 What Technics in Teaching Suggest Vital Values in Helping Children Gain and Improve Skills in Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic — Monks.... 378 How Vital Values Are Gained Through the Educational Insight of the School Architect — Hacker . 383 10 National Education Association Vital Values in Kindergarten-Primary Education as Viewed in the Kalamazoo System and Steps Toward Their Accomplishment — Drake . 389 DEPARTMENT OF LIP READING Historical Note . 392 The Importance of Early Discovery of Impairment of Hearing — Means . 393 Hard Of Hearing Children Should Not Be Segregated — Schulman . 393 The Value of Scientific Hearing Tests — Royce . 395 The Hard Of Hearing Adolescent — Russell . 396 Lip Reading of Vital Value to the Hard Of Hearing — Bryant . 397 Lip Reading — An Important Factor in the Rehabilitation of the Deafened — Ken field . 398 Secretary’s Minutes . 400 DEPARTMENT OF RURAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 402 Contributions of Country to National Welfare and Character — Taylor . 403 Critical Situations Confronting Country Life Today — Brunner . 405 Contributions of American Country Life and Rural Education to World Advancement — Jones . 409 The Organization of Farmers and Rural-Urban Cooperation — Landis . 411 Leadership and Rural Adult Education — Willard . 414 A Research Office and Rural Education — Cooper . 416 An Enriched and Adapted Curriculum — Hulsizer . 420 Standard Preparation and Supervision for the Teachers of Farm Children — Heyl . 422 Inherent Contributions of American Farm Life to the New Education — Finley . . 423 Fact-Finding as a Foundation for State Leadership — Taylor . 426 Leadership in Improving Educational Opportunities for Country Children — The Rural High School — Heffernan . 430 Leadership in Teacher Training in Service — The County Institute — Swenson. . 433 The County Institute — Washburn . 434 Pioneering in New Fields — Radio in Rural Schools — Harrison . 434 Industrialization and Its Influence in the Organization of Rural Teacher Training in Normal Schools and Teachers Colleges — McGuffey . 437 Rural Teacher Training in the Industrialized East — A Concrete Example — Russell . 438 A Concrete Example of Rural Teacher Preparation in the Agricultural Mid¬ west — Bieri . 440 Teacher Surplus and the Increasing Responsibility of State Teachers Colleges for the Preparation of Rural Teachers — Cook . 442 Is Progressive Education Procedure Practicable in the Small Rural School? — Harvey . 448 Progressive Practises in Washtenaw County, Michigan — Anderson . 452 A Progressive School Uses Its Environment — Howard . 454 A More Integrated Type of Classroom Activity — Cleverdon . 457 Integration of Art Work with Other School Subjects — Stackhouse . 460 A Health Program in a One-Room School — Kaufman . 463 Progressive Education in Small Rural Schools — Dunn . 466 Character Education Projects — Smit filing . 475 The Consolidated School’s Contribution to Progressive Education — Drummond . 479 Supervising Activity Programs in Rural Schools — Haver . 483 Contents 11 Instructional Aspects of the Consolidated School — Williams . 487 Provision for an Activity Program in a Rural School — Mossman . 492 Secretary’s Minutes . 498 DEPARTMENT OF SCHOOL HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 502 How Best to Administer the School Health, Physical Education, and Recre¬ ation Program — Broome . 503 What Is the Best School Health Program and How Best to Administer It? — Wood . 507 Problems in School Health Education and Their Solution — Oberteuffer . 509 A Modern Public School Physical Education Program — Nash . 512 What Place Should Girls’ Athletics Have in the Physical Education Pro¬ gram? — Rex . 515 The Need for School Health Education — Patterson . 517 Educational Recreation for the Use of Leisure — Rogers . 518 An Educational Physical Education Program for the Elementary Schools — Yaw 519 Safety Education in the Elementary Schools — Stack . 520 What Should a School Health Service Program Be? — Kerr . 523 Secretary’s Minutes . 527 DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 530 What Improved Service Does the Elementary Teacher Have the Right to Ex¬ pect of Leaders in Nature and Science Education? — Palmer . 531 Vital Values in Science Teaching — Gruenberg . 533 Trends and Investigations in Teaching Procedures for High-School Sciences and Some Possible Values — Watkins . 534 DEPARTMENT OF SECONDARY SCHOOL PRINCIPALS Historical Note . 544 Some Forgotten Viewpoints for Reorganizing the Secondary School — Mc¬ Cormack . 545 The Place of Technical Courses in the Reorganized Secondary School — Bogan. 550 The Meaning of Graduation in the Reorganized Secondary School — Beatley . . 553 Financing Secondary Education — Mort . 555 Junior College in the State’s Program of Education — Jones . 559 The Junior College in the State’s Program of Education — Zook . 560 Standards and Freedom in the Schools — Holmes . 564 The Cry, More Education for Less Money: One Answer, the Cleveland Cur¬ riculum — Connor . 567 Some Aspects of Vitalized Reading for Junior High Schools — Stratton . 568 The Junior High School and the Secondary School Curriculum — Cox . 571 Articulation between the Elementary School and the Junior High School — Taylor . 575 Articulation between Junior High School and Senior High School — Burton... 578 Articulation between Senior High School and the College — Kadesch . 580 Articulation: Some Fundamental Purposes and Its Ideals — Briggs . 581 Integration in High-School and Junior College Curriculums — Newlon . 587 Terminal Courses in High Schools and Junior Colleges — Oppenheimer . 589 The Organization and Administration of the Four Year Junior College — Sexson . 591 12 National Education Association Teacher Load in the Junior College — Bush . 593 Curriculum Organization in Junior Colleges — Koos . 594 DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL STUDIES Historical Note . . 598 Education Theory Versus the Integrity of the Social Studies — Kohl . 599 The Direct Versus the Indirect Approach to Social Objectives: History and the Social Studies in the High School — Connor . 601 A Study of Social Judgments — Morgan . . . 602 Racial Elements in American History Textbooks — Carter . 603 A Basis for the Selection of Materials in Social Studies Teaching — Ellis . 604 Our Continued Neglect of Health Values in the Social Studies — Shryock . 604 Minutes of the Secretary . 605 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE Historical Note . 608 The Opening of the Exhibits — Cody . 609 The Spirit of Life — Niebuhr . 610 Greetings from New Jersey — Elliott . 618 Presentation of Gavel — Boyer . 621 Education in the Spirit of Life — Cody . 621 Friendliness in Pupil-Teacher Relationships — Joynes . 626 Friendliness in Teacher-Superintendent Relationships — Dorsey . 629 Friendliness in Relationships between Public and Parochial Schools — Ross.... 633 Friendliness in School-Community Relationships — Stetson . 639 Modern Politics — Owen . 643 Modern Business Looks at Secondary Education — Jewett . 649 Education Moves Forward — Cooper . 656 Achievements of American Education — Instruction — Judd . 664 Achievements of American Education — Organization — Logan . 668 Achievements of American Education — Administration — Edmonson . 672 Achievements of American Education — The School Plant — Engelhardt . 678 Achievements of American Education — Personnel — Glenn . 682 Achievements of American Education — Finance — Ballou . 685 Achievements of American Education — Public Relations — Blair . 690. Sixty Years of Progress — 1870-1930 . 694 The Use of Leisure — Suzzallo . . 695 The Anticipation of Future Needs — fVilbur . . 702 Presentation to Dr. Albert Edward Winship . 709 Presentation to Cora Wilson Stewart . 709 Educational Advance through Research — Stoddard . 710 Supervision and Research (Report of the 1930 Yearbook Commission) — Cook 716 The Newspaper Aids the School — Finley . 718 The Home Aids the School — De Valliere . . 724 Social Agencies Aid the School — West . 728 The School’s Debt to Its Friends — Jessup . 737 Enriching Human Life through the Fine Arts — Damrosch . 741 Closing Ceremonies . 743 Conference of Superintendents of Schools — Glenn (presiding) . 745 Aims and Methods of Character Training in the Public Schools — Charters . . . . The Measurement of Results in Character Education — Freeman . 751 Character Education in the Regular Curriculum — Threlkeld . 759 General Discussion — Meek . 766 Contents 13 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERVISORS AND TEACHERS OF HOME ECONOMICS Historical Note . 772 DEPARTMENT OF SUPERVISORS AND DIRECTORS OF INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 774 The Objectives of the Third Yearbook — Morrison . 775 Supervisory Problems from the Teacher’s Viewpoint — Simpson . 778 Supervision from the Standpoint of the Supervisor — Bamesberg er . 780 Probable Next Steps in the Progress of Supervison — Burton . 781 Teaching as an Applied Science — Freeman . 78+ Teaching as a Fine Art — Bagley . 789 Elements Common to All Good Supervision — Bush . 791 The Organization of Supervision in Large City Systems — Dondineau . 794 The Supervision of Arithmetic — Caldwell . 796 Coordination of the Work of the Principal and the Supervisor — Lake . 797 The Supervision of Secondary Education — Eikenberry . 797 Supervising the Social Subjects — Fair . 798 Minutes of the Secretary . 799 DEPARTMENT OF TEACHERS COLLEGES Historical Note . 802 Minutes of the Secretary . 803 Standards for Accrediting Teachers Colleges . 807 American Association of Teachers Colleges — List of Accredited Institutions — 1930-31 817 How Can We Regulate the Supply and at the Same Time Improve the Quality of Candidates Legally Available to Enter the Public School Service as “Novice Teachers”? . 820 A. What Are the Basic Facts and Conditions Which Have Significant Bear¬ ing upon the Solution of This Problem? — Suhrie . 820 B. How Can We Induce a Satisfactory Percent of the Best Potential Teach¬ ers to Undertake Preparation for this Service? — Burk . 828 C. How Can We Set Up Defensible Policies and Work Out Effective Pro¬ grams for the Selective Admission of Entrants to Teacher-Training Institutions? — Myers . 835 D. How Can We Effect the Early Identification and the Certain Elimination of Students Distinctly Unpromising as Prospective Teachers? — Adams 838 E. How Can We Establish and Maintain Qualitative Standards for Gradua¬ tion and for Provisional Certification? — Sherrod . 845 Changing Standards — Evenden . 848 Correspondence and Extension Work — Evenden . 852 University Extension — Bittner . 858 The Standardization of Health Service in Teachers Colleges and Normal Schools — DelVeese . 860 The Computation of Teaching Loads in Teachers Colleges — Donovan . 867 Health Service in Teachers Colleges — Dearborn . 871 Credit Administration in Teachers Colleges — Linton . 875 The Status of Correspondence Courses — Mallory . 878 Unit Costs in Teachers Colleges — Magee . 885 Some Phases of the Training of Faculty Members of Teachers Colleges — Phelps . 889 The Commonwealth Teacher-Training Study and the Curriculum — Charters . . 897 What Are the Most important Recent Contributions in the Field of Elementary Education? — Horn . 904 Membership last . 9Q8 14 National Education Association DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL INSTRUCTION Historical Note . 912 Report of the Committee on Research and Guidance — Knowlton . 913 Progress of Visual Instruction in the United States from 1923 to 1930 — McClusky . 914 The National Academy of Visual Instruction — Dent . 916 Minimum Standards for Creative Learning as a Vital Value in Visual In¬ struction — Sigman . 919 Training Teachers to Recognize Vital Values in Education — Spencer . 920 An Experimental Study of the Teaching of Spelling — Zyve . 923 Museu(m Service to Education — Toothaker . 924 Visual Aids Helpful in the Wise Use of Leisure — Making Living a Real Art — McFarland . . 926 Minutes of the Secretary . 929 DEPARTMENT OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION Historical Note . 932 Public Education as Affecting the Adjustment of Youth to Life — A Discus¬ sion of the Recent Publication of the National Industrial Conference Board — Meredith . 933 Meeting the Educational Responsibilities in a Mining District — Davis . 934 The Spirit of the Master Craftsman — Dennis . 936 Vocational Training as a Part of a City Educational Program — Hartley.... 938 The Shop Teacher as a Counselor — Lee . 939 Vocational Interests of Farm Boys — Stewart . 941 Home Economics Interests of Home Economics Girls — Lunn . 943 Vital Values in Industrial Education — Miller . 945 What Home Economics Is Doing for the Employed Girl — Kauffman . 946 Some Objectives in Vocational Education in Agriculture — Smith . 949 Character Development through Vocational Education — Howard . 951 Vocational Training in Aeronautics — Spaulding . 953 ASSOCIATIONAL RECORDS AND INFORMATION Act of Incorporation . 957 Bylaws . 962 Calendar of Meetings . 973 Officers for 1929-30 . 975 Officers for 1930-31 . 980 Committees for 1929-30 . 986 Minutes of the Tenth Representative Assembly . 999 Minutes of the Board of Directors . 1025 Minutes of the Executive Committee . 1036 Minutes of the Board of Trustees . 1044 Report of the Auditors . 1062 Report of the Treasurer . . . . . 1077 Report of the Budget Committee . 1080 The Secretary’s Report . 1090 Second Life Membership Dinner . 1099 Laying the Cornerstone of the New Building . 1100 Report of the Necrology Committee . 1109 The Tenth Representative Assembly . 1118 Table of Publications . 1141 Index . 1143 General Sessions After the Atlanta Convention in 1929 it was thought that the next few cities to act as host to the Association would have an extremely difficult task to equal or approach the entertainment and local plans worked out by Atlanta. But Columbus did it — and so efficiently that to the casual observer it appeared easy. Courtesy luncheons and air rides, an inspiring and spectacular pageant, a reception by the Governor of Ohio, and a magnificent flag drill partici¬ pated in by several thousand school children were among the many delightful features furnished by the teachers and citizens of Columbus and Ohio. The general sessions were held in the Columbus auditorium. The educational exhibits were held in the basement of the same building. The theme of the Convention was “Vital Values in Education.” In addition to the general sessions and the depart¬ ment meetings, the following groups held meetings as scheduled in the program : American Association of Visiting Teachers, American Classical League, Conference on Education by Radio, Conference of High School Teachers, National Conference on Stu¬ dent Participation in School Government, National Council of Geography Teachers, National Council of Teachers of English, National Federation of Modern Language Teachers, National Congress of Parents and Teachers, National Geographic Society, National League of Teachers Associations, National Organiza¬ tion of Supervisors and Teachers of Home Eco¬ nomics, National Vocational Guidance Association, School Garden Association of America. IDEALS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION WILLIAM O. THOMPSON, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS, OHIO THE writer of the Book of Proverbs in the 29th chapter, the 18th verse, uses these words, “where there is no vision the people perish.” The word translated “vision” in this proverb is one of several so trans¬ lated. The particular word, however, in this text carries a rhetorical imagery taken from the customs of kings who only admitted to their presence those whom they were ready to favor. The word was especially appropriate in connection with the vision of the prophet who, as the word signifies, spoke for another. In the case of the prophet, as an official, we are accustomed to say he spoke for God. The proverb accordingly from every point of view sug¬ gests the future as a determining factor in the program of life. We frequently say that the north star determines the location and direction of the streets in our cities. For the moment we imagine that these directions are determined by some local landmark, while as a matter of fact it is the stars in then- courses which direct the surveyor’s compass. It seems not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that some vision of the future or some mental picture of a future may be a determining factor in the human program as it finds ex¬ pression in the dust and heat of a great city. The opinion may here be sug¬ gested that near-sightedness is oftentimes a great hindrance in seeing things as they really are or in seeing them in true perspective. The vision aids us in both particulars. There is no greater fallacy than the one implied in the tendency to make a purely local issue of important human experiences. Many people these days are philosophizing on Einstein’s theory of relativity in a way Einstein never thought of but nevertheless quite valuable in re¬ sults. The native provincialism of people everywhere fades away when they contemplate themselves as human factors, as part of a great world program. This contemplation of our wider relationships aids us in the drudgery of life and puts a new color of hopefulness into much that we do. If the human race is ever to be liberated to enjoy the happiness of freedom, it will be when some great vision or series of visions illuminates its thinking and gives a new significance to human conduct. The writer of the Proverbs, cited above, seems to have felt that in the absence of a great and illuminating vision, life was reduced to such a monotonous treadmill as to rob it of all its finer qualities. This is spiritual death. To think of the human family plodding around like beasts of the field or insects in the forest is to put us on a level of hopelessness and despair. It is the outward look, the upward look, the intellectual and spiritual vision that cheers us on the way and makes human achievement actually possible. How, then, shall we express these American ideals for our purpose? I venture the following suggestions. [17] 18 National Education Association The Public Welfare The constitutional point of view in our American life has been an increas¬ ingly broad interpretation of what we speak of as the public welfare clause. In a real way we carry in our minds the consent of the governed as a kind of limitation upon what might be excessive power in the government. We have come steadily along in the belief that governments do not exist simply for their own sakes or for the demonstration of great power. The pomp and display so characteristic of kingdoms, empires, monarchies, and thrones all seem foreign to the American mind. We seem to find the justification of government in the needs of the people, not in the convenience of kings. A constitutional government, quite properly, is one of simplicity. Golden crowns, highly colored vestments, an elaborate array of expensive symbols of authority, either ecclesiastical or governmental, may on occasion serve for parade purposes but in the American mind all these are symbols of a faded authority. It smiles as the parade goes by and inwardly remarks, “What fools these mortals be.” The makers of such a constitutional government view with a smile the memory of a divine right of kings. These parades of a worn out authority are less effective than amusing. On the other hand a constitutional government finds its highest justifica¬ tion in that type of public welfare which guarantees both civil and religious liberty and puts its emphasis upon the sacredness of human life together with those inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our inspiration for education arises out of this conception of government and of citizenship under it. The patriotic point of view' — This conception leads one to say that the inspiration to education arises out of our patriotic point of view. This may be suggested as a corollary from our theory of political science. A constitution is primarily a political document having to do with the fundamental princi¬ ples of political science. It inevitably follows, therefore, that the patriotic point of view and the sound interpretation of political science puts educa¬ tion primarily in the horizon of governmental appropriations. This funda¬ mental conception of education lies at the basis of public welfare. The func¬ tion of government is primarily that of public welfare. This is ample war¬ rant to say that a constitutional political science makes education the funda¬ mental issue of government. It is this conception of public education that has fired the imagination of American people from the very beginning. They have steadily moved away from the conception that education is in any im¬ portant sense a private affair. It is a great enterprise in the interest of the public. Even here the efficiency of the individual is regarded as a contribution to the public welfare. The old theory of the police power of the state as expressing the functions of government is a mere memory. The modern generation rarely, if ever, hears anything about the conception of the police power of the state ; only lawyers and courts become familiar with that figure of speech. Even there the American mind insists that the police power of the state shall have the public welfare in full view. General Sessions 19 This larger conception of education in no way interferes with the right of private initiative but will always insist that every process of education shall be free from the taint of treason or the teaching of principles or fallacies destructive of the inherent rights which government is set to pro¬ tect and maintain. Our government, therefore, clearly envisions the idea of mass movements in great causes like education while not destroying the minor individual efforts of the private school or the private foundation. The great tide, however, of American thought finds its expression in public welfare rather than in private direction or control. A democracy such as ours carries as its great ideal a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This puts every popular movement, whether in education or other fields, under the direct and final control of a government that justly represents the people. Here is where education finds the basis of its permanence. The ideal of American political science inevitably makes edu¬ cation a public concern. The local point of view — In 1859 when Congress in obedience to public sentiment had passed what is now known as The Land Grant Act providing for at least one college in each state in the Union, President Buchanan inter¬ cepted with a veto based on the theory that education was exclusively a state problem. The debate around that principle was keen and decisive. The bill was again passed and signed during the Civil War by the great martyr of democracy. Men, then as now, seemed to think that certain great na¬ tional issues could be diverted and referred to the states. The development of life under our constitution, the rapid changes in the organization of business and the methods of transportation have all tended to emphasize the common interests of the American people regardless of their geography. No man today is able to measure the good or the ill that would come from an illiterate belt of any extent in our country. New England is quite sure of the unmeasured and immeasurable benefits of her contribution to American life because of superior intelligence and her devotion to higher education. These things constitute part of the great vision that has carried the Ameri¬ can people on in the expression of American life. The federal government today enters every store in the remotest portion of our land. It touches the welfare of the most obscure and least known citizen. This comprehensive attitude of the government toward its people renders impossible any theory of final control and of absolute authority upon the great issues of American life as a local issue. The nation is not interested in developing a provincial point of view. It is rather interested in developing an American point of view with a neighborly conception of all our international relations. The Social Point of View All of us are familiar with the frequent occurrence of this conception in some form. The social order, the socialized schools, the socialized recitations, and a score of other phrases have arisen out of the conception of education as a great social force. This recognizes the fundamental principle that the human being is fundamentally social. He is a part of a social organization. 20 National Education Association He is born into it and cannot escape from it. The most and the best that he can do is to exert his energies for the protection and maintenance of what is good, the elimination of what is evil, and the better adjustment of all forces for the development of a social order where human rights and human liberties may have free play. In the presence of this problem we recognize the anti¬ social forces as expressed in all forms of selfishness, in the multiplied forms of crime, the spirit of lawlessness which is only a form of selfishness and in the general tendency in limited circles for fashionable or wealthy people to prove themselves anti-social by making personal convenience and personal pleasure the standards of conduct and citizenship. The persistent issue, therefore, before any democracy is the development of a social order under social control. Education is here the central force unifying the people in their social and educational ideals. The school is always, therefore, the organized effort for the social control of the citizens under the inspiration of an intelligent conception of the functions of government, the duty of the individual and the social advantages accruing to a society under such ideals. A democracy of necessity tolerates many things it cannot approve. There is always a minority, often vociferous beyond its importance, urging the private point of view as a substitute for the public or social welfare. One is often impressed with the way an individual point of view is substituted for the social point of view. In a recent article in an American magazine one gets the impression that everybody who goes to Canada is possessed of an insatiable thirst and a determination to deal with that thirst effectively. It is possible that such a point of view prevails in what may be termed the sporting circles, but for a hundred years thousands of our citizens have been going to Canada and would resent the idea that their transportation was guided by unpatriotic or even selfish motives. I recall that in the days of the Civil War people who went to Canada found it necessary to demonstrate that they were not refugees from civic duty. It is not quite true to our perspective to carry the vision of thousands of travelers seeking a cooler clime with but one common motive ; namely, the legal gratification of a de¬ sire which seems to be under social disfavor in the land of the free. This protest, if protest it be, against a social order having the welfare of the mil¬ lions at heart cannot fail to find a strong resentment in the minds of good citizens who for sufficient reasons apart from the gratification of appetite make their journeys to a friendly neighbor on the north, during the heated term. There is nothing essentially new in this struggle for a better social order. Education, as every teacher knows, has had a continual combat with local prejudice, selfish points of view, and private ambition. These democratic variations, oftentimes vices, are as thick as blackberries in a fruitful season. About the best thing that can be said of education is that it has never sur¬ rendered its social point of view and that there always have been enough prophets in the land to sound the clarion call for education as the great unifying force for family and social life. Under the general description of politics in education or the sectarian control of public schools and similar General Session's 21 phrases the public is continually warned against the malignant influence of any theory that substitutes private ambition for public social control. There is ample justification, therefore, for the social view of education as express¬ ing the complete conception of public education. The Personal View of Education All education must, of course, find expression in the individual. A permanent democracy requires an intelligent, wellinformed, welldisposed citizen as a unit of government. AH ' others may be classified as disturbers rather than supporters. Education is interested in developing citizens who will function as supporters of government. It is idle to think of a social order apart from government. Law is written in the very nature of things. The universe is filled with it. Human society cannot be divorced from it, even though there may be many family rows and much social disturbance. The law remains long after the dishes have been broken, the furniture destroyed, and the riot quelled. These are not governments. They are the outbreaks against government calling for the police power of the state. The importance of the individual in such a social order will be measured substantially by his intelligence, his patriotism, his courage, and his educa¬ tion for efficiency as a citizen. In this matter it is well to remember that the point of view current in America is, frankly, that of Main Street. America believes in the multitude. She has a profound respect for the exceptional leader. The patriotic admiration for such men from Washington to Hoover, from Fulton to Edison, from Cyrus H. McCormick to the Wright Brothers, from Alexander Hamilton to J. P. Morgan has found a grateful expression of appreciation on every hand. This expression of appreciation of leadership and the interest in men who achieve this leadership is a cheering inspiration for all of us. It does not interfere, however, with our concept that the average man living on Main Street, either from choice or necessity, may still carry in his heart the most cherished ideals of American education and citizenship. He may not express them as well as some ; he may not have a publicity agent : he may be content to mind his own business rather than that of his neighbor. In the last analysis, however, this same citizen on Main Street will be found the stabilizing force against the eccentricities and vagaries of the segregated minorities liv¬ ing in fashionable clubs or in the more secluded circles of the intelligentsia. This latter class are the people who advertise their own idealism and com¬ ment upon the commonplace thinking of the majority. We need not dispute any of these statements nor need we be controled by them. They are part of the program of a free democracy. However, there are those who very seriously believe that education should confine itself more to the development of leaders. This is a most tak¬ ing and captivating conception. Recently we have been subjected toa friendly but adverse criticism to the effect that our -American educational processes are wasting disastrously the intangible resources of the potential brain power of the youth. The English system is set up as a contrast because it puts its 22 National Education Association emphasis on the importance of leaders rather than upon the importance of the multitude. A system of competitive scholarships is the incentive held out before the English youth to attract them through competitive examinations to an intellectual leadership. This is the point of view quite natural to any system of government where the caste system prevails even in a modified or very mild type. Some years ago in looking up the list of titles in England beginning with the first citizen, the king, I followed down' through the various ranks until either the sixty-third or sixty-fourth when I found a gentleman. In those days he was a long way from the top. I cannot express my happiness in the belief that in America he always has been at the top It is interesting to note that in countries like India where the caste system has gone to the limit there still remains a considerable class of favored men whose education has been everything that the Orient or the Occident could provide. Eastern and western civilization have met in the favored sons of India. Meantime the people have suffered under the contest between a non¬ resident government and a resident idealism. The dictatorship of Italy has found expression in a milder way of the same caste idea. The essence of the Soviet rule in Russia is the dictation of the central authority and the sub¬ mission of the peasant. American ideals find no place in our social order or in our government policies for the type of education that insists on the educa¬ tion of leaders to the neglect of the multitudes who from necessity may live on Main Street. The sneers that come from certain intellectual circles dur¬ ing the commencement weeks of our high schools and colleges are unworthy of intelligent men educated in free institutions. In support of this conception let it be said that no civilization ever perished for lack of brains. They have perished because there was no vision. No civilization will long endure that fails to get into its vision the conception of an educated and somewhat glorified humanity. In summing up briefly the several points of view of this address let us make clear the three principal issues. There is the first point of view of public welfare which includes our governmental activities, involving all problems of taxation, administration, standards of service, and other ad¬ ministrative conditions surrounding education. The basis of all this activity lies in the constitutional conception of public welfare. The government exists because public welfare is its greatest achievement. A government of mere police power would in these days produce little short of anarchy and dis¬ order. The helpful service of the government in practically every area of hu¬ man life should be freely recognized as the best reason for its existence. The school teacher represents more in government than could possibly be con¬ ceived under the theory of a policeman’s club. The second consideration is the social point of view. In this, education is identified with the sum total of all the interests of organized society. Where- ever social issues arise education should direct public sentiment so as to bring about the social control of society as a whole. This social control is involved in our struggle with crime, lawlessness, disobedience, and the selfish activities of organized endeavor. We are now witnessing a situation as to unemploy- General Sessions 23 ment unparalleled in our history. The improvement of mechanical devices, the enormous development of the productive powers of the country with no corresponding increase in the science of distribution or consumption present an array of idleness disconcerting to every thoughtful mind. The truth, it must be confessed, is that our education has not yet penetrated organized business as it may be compelled to do later on. The fundamental economics on which our present business structure has been erected is now seriously attacked as not being in conformity with the new developments, both of production and of business methods. The school is but one factor in this social situation. Every city has its local issue. The country at large must proceed with a propaganda of education in right thinking. The propaganda of special interest or supression will not meet the situation. When America knows all the facts involved her leaders will be rapidly developed. Already, be it said with some enthusiasm, many of our best known leaders in manu¬ facturing, in commerce, and in banking are striving for a comprehensive view that will enable the government of the United States to function more effec¬ tively in the interests of public welfare. Our progress in inventions, in the development of machinery, and in the technical phases of science has been so rapid and farreaching that we have been unable to adjust modern business to these new features. While this process of adjustment is in progress there will be much suffer¬ ing and deprivation. The American ideal as to citizenship will not permit for any length of time an indifference to these fundamental principles. Education from the lowest to the highest range is challenged now to make a contribution to our day and generation in the presence of issues of the greatest magnitude ever presented to any people. The sensitive state of mind and conscience developed through education and the increasingly ethical interpretation of Christianity have made it impossible for the American people to neglect the issues arising out of poverty and unemployment. On these matters statistical tables do not reveal the whole truth. These issues are even more acute in other parts of the world. They go to the heart of the social order and the aims of government. The threat of revolution that endangers the stability of organized society, as in Russia, may well lead us to ponder upon the obligation of educated people to develop a social order where public welfare for the millions will receive the most earnest con¬ sideration. Nothing short of a free discussion among enlightened and sym¬ pathetic circles will approach the changes in demand due to the cyclonic changes in the methods of modern business. The fact that we have immense wealth at the top is not a complete answer or proof that progress, such as it may be, is headed in the right direction. If leadership has any such place in American life, as we all believe it has, then the ethics of citizenship requires this leadership to bring us toward the light. This generation calls for an earnest and patriotic effort through what the great Apostle of liberty called the “renewing of our.minds” to meet the task of harmonizing the efficiency of machinery with the public welfare. Our American ideals developed and sustained in part by our education must come 24 National Education Association to grips with the practical situation of the masses. The supremacy of the Constitution as the basic law of the land, the importance of law as the expression of the legislative will of the people, a citizenship that respects the rights of both life and property are principles essential to the enjoyment of our most highly prized rights — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the blessings of civil and religious liberty among the free people. The undergirding of this precious heritage will be found to be the happy union of education and religion. These forces sustain the ethics of our citizenship and reveal the vision without which the people perish. WHAT THE SCHOOLS CAN DO IN CHARACTER AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION WILLIS A. SUTTON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ATLANTA, GA. I wish that for a little while we might think and see with our mind’s eye the twenty-four million children to whom you and I and the teachers of this nation minister. I wish that we might forget that we are assembled to think about the technical problems of education, important as they may be, and think about the individual lives of the children of* this nation. Our greatest trouble as teachers is that, in the maze of our machinery, we some¬ times forget the object for which we are teaching. If I seem to make fun of some things that seem very near and dear to our hearts as teachers, I hope you will understand that it is not because I do not believe in the progressive things in education, but because sometimes in our lives we need to come back to those things that are really and truly fundamental — and when I say “fundamental” I do not mean reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the things that go to make up the character of our people. America was obliged to think of things first. The forests were to be con¬ quered, the timber was to be cut out, the land was to be reclaimed, the In¬ dians were to be driven back — everything in America made us think of the material because it was there and we had to grapple with it. America has now reached the point where her mind, for a period at least, should be taken from the material. A man who is at the head of one of the greatest interna¬ tional organizations in the country said to me one day, “Sutton, the thing that is wrong with Georgia is that Georgia thinks in terms of things and not in terms of people.” I carried that thought home with me and I said, “Is it true?” I considered what we think of — stocks and bonds, real estate, land, and all the things we have accumulated ; I thought of their value, and I went into my statistical reports and found that we had accumulated in the 200 years of Georgia’s history only four and one-half billion dollars, a paltry sum ; that we had three and one-quarter million people ; that every one of those three and one-quarter million people, even if you counted it in money, was worth at legist $20,000 during a period of twenty or forty work¬ ing years ; and that those people at $20,000 a piece w^ere worth in the neighborhood of seventy billion dollars. Yet we think more in terms of the few paltry billions it has taken us 200 years to accumulate than we think General Sessions 25 of seventy billion dollars worth of human life. For a moment will you not think with me in terms of the human soul, eternal values? I think of what we challenging people who are past forty are forever saying to our young people, that they are too fast ; that they are immoral ; that they do the things we think all wrong. It is my firm conviction that the American youth of today between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five years is better than any American youth has ever been in our 300 years of history. When you speak of character as being fortitude, courage, integrity, and uprightness, the generation that we have just trained and sent out into the world was put to a test possibly as no other generation ever has been before. It went across the sea. When we called for courage, courage was there ; when we asked for fortitude, it was there ; when we asked for integ¬ rity, it was there; when we asked for life, they freely laid it down. In the business of this 'world the schools have not failed. The youth of this land, engaged in business, has done away with all cut¬ throat competition of the days gone by. There was a day when the purchaser never expected to pay the marked price of an article, nor did the storekeeper expect to receive it. He priced it high, and then dropped, getting as much as he could. The youth of the land today has established a condition in busi¬ ness that the world never reached in all its history before. I wish I could tell you what the schools have done already in the realm of attaining character in the churches. I make this statement about my home city — and I believe you could make it about yours — that there are more young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five engaged in every line of church activity today in proportion to population than ever before in all history. So I would like to speak about what we have already done in the building of the character of the young men and the young women of this nation. It is strange to me, and yet it is true, that the very things for which we condemn youth the most are the things that make it most worthwhile to live in this generation. We say youth is fast. But speed is the essence of this generation and unless youth is fast it cannot live in this generation. I would like to see you going out to your great airport and standing there by one of your air machines as they turn the propeller slowly around and say, “Don’t turn it very rapidly; be very cautious about how you turn this propeller ; let us rise very gently and very slowly from the earth and be very cautious about what we are doing in this flying business.” We would never rise! The great, fast-running fruit express had brought to me from Florida and Georgia, from California and from the uttermost parts of the earth the things that I ate for breakfast and dinner today. The essence of this generation is speed. Watch the stars and planets as they move in their spheres and ask them: “What is the essence of life out there?” It is speed. Yet you mothers and fathers sit around when a boy or girl gets in an au¬ tomobile and say, “Go very slowly, be very careful ; you may have an acci¬ dent.” A few folks will get killed, of course. What of it? It amounts to but little so far as the on-going of the world is concerned. Of course, I don’t 26 National Education Association want to be one of them, but at the same time the question of speed is the thing that makes up the life of the youth of this generation. He must be speedy to live in it. We extol the great quality of freedom, and yet because we have freedom in the schools and freedom of action between the boys and girls ; because we have freedom on the street ; and because we have frankness and openness we challenge it and some of us say: “Let us go back to the good old days.'’ I don’t want to go back to the good old days. I am glad I live in this day and that this boyhood and this girlhood has freedom. We talk about freedom of thinking and reasoning and yet we come to that boy and that girl who is thinking and who is reasoning, put our hand upon him and say, “Halt!” The very thing that makes him worthwhile to live in this generation is the very thing, for the most part, that you and I condemn. I would love to talk about how this youth has learned in our schools the spirit of cooperation and these other great things. As a teacher may I say this to you, don’t forget this one ideal — we are not here as a group to criticize one another, to find fault with what we say, but to gain a little bit of inspiration that out of this great assembly, with these continuous meetings together, we may go back with our dynamos and our batteries all charged and ready to make that further assault on the forces of evil and bring out of these boys and girls the things that are best in their lives. I never shall forget the night I decided to be a teacher. I wobbled about until I was twenty-three years of age deciding what I was going to do and what I would be. My father was a letter writer. I wish more fathers were letter writers! I have a letter from my father 103 pages long. I treasure it as I do few things in my life. It was written in April, 1903. He wrote me this letter and in it he said, “Son, you have decided once to be a lawyer; another time to be a preacher ; another time to be a farmer. You must decide on what you are going to do. You cannot hesitate longer.” I read it over and he had an argument for every single profession I had thought of. I remembered how we had walked about in the cotton fields and I had seen him reach down and pull cotton that was high as his head up to him and cut the bolls and I thrilled and said, “Oh, I want to be a farmer.” Then I thought of what I could do to help clothe the people of the world. Then I went to a country town and went across the bridges of what I thought were enormous creeks, and I determined to be an engineer and an architect. Then as he carried me to hear Bob Toombs and Alexander Stephens and those men who are great in Georgia’s history, I said, “I must be an orator.” We had a little library of some 500 books; I read them all; and I said, “I am going to be an author; I am going to write a book.” All through my life I recounted the things I had desired to be and how I had hesitated. I had never seen a great picture that I did not want to paint it; never in my life had I seen a great building but I didn’t want to build it. There I was with my father’s letter and I must decide what I was going to do. I laid that letter down in a chair and knelt as I had been taught to kneel to pray. General Sessions 27 Like a flash right out of Heaven, whether in answer to prayer I know not, there came this thought: “You can do every single one of those things; you can be the lawyer, you can be the preacher, you can be the artist, you can build the bridge, you can span the great beams of the architect, you can do these very things, every one of them.” How shall I do it? “Just be a teacher. Just be a teacher.” I stand here tonight fifty-one years of age, and speeding across the Atlantic is Bobby Jones, my boy, coming back to his homeland as champion ; four of my boys are in Paris and have alreadv exhibited more than one hundred of their works of art; others have written books ; the inventor of television, or one of those inventors working with it now is one of those same boys. I wish I could tell you about them tonight ! What is this thing we call character? It is a very changeable thing. Good character is not the same in all generations. What was good character a thousand years ago might make me a reprobate tonight, and what may be good character today might make me an ingrate fifty years from now. What is character ? What is the thing you and I are trying to talk about ? Character is first of all an inherited thing. I am speaking tonight like my father spoke. I am using my hands like he used his. I can see him in myself in a hundred things I do. Many of the things I think I never sat down and reasoned out. I inherited them. And we people in the south rather believe in blood you know. Character is not only force and power that we inherit. It is in this physical makeup of mind. If I had time I would go into the differ¬ ent processes that go to make character in what we call the correlation of eating and feeling that impels me to action ; this thing that I call my emo¬ tion, my working-out ; how that thing is affected by the food that I eat ; how it is affected by the health that I enjoy; and how it is affected by these glands that make up the core, the permanent sources of my personality and my inspiration. What can the schools do? They can see that every child in America has at least a fair chance with a vigorous, healthy body, and that out of that healthy body there may evolve as one of the great forces in making character, a great, strong, likable life. What can the schools do? I think of youth in this auto-intoxicated age. The schools can bring that steadying power to the youth. No youth is better than the one we have and yet that is not as good as it ought to be. I say to every boy if he is not better than his daddy, he is criminal. The girl who is not better than her mother, not gentler, sweeter, nobler, truer, is no less criminal. The world can only be better because one generation is better than the last, and our boyhood and our girlhood must be better than our mothers and fathers. So I am not content with the achievement we have brought out. Youth is intoxicated — no doubt about it — auto-intoxicated. It is no wonder that it is so. Suppose I could have taken the finest man who lived in this city and put him to sleep forty years ago, or even twenty years ago — had taken him out of his old buggy or his old carriage and then had 28 National Education Association let him sleep for twenty years. Then suppose I lifted him into one of our automobiles or flying machines. He may have been a judge, but he would have jumped out. That is exactly what youth has done today. In all the history of the world, not just five, ten, fifteen, or twenty thou¬ sand years, but hundreds of thousands of years, and millions of years, we have become accustomed to a certain pace in life and all of a sudden youth was jerked up out of that pace and put into this great maelstrom of modern life. It has unsteadied him. What we need to do in the schools is to give a steadying power to life. I read David Copperfield when I was twelve years of age and waded through 1200 pages to get to that critical moment when David went down on his knees, touched the fingers of Alice and told her he loved her and received her reply. Oh, how I exulted over that part! My boy goes to the moving picture show and sees everything from the beginning of the world until today in forty-five minutes and sees it all wrought out. What a change ! My forefathers lived just above Augusta, Georgia, when the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July, 1776, and on the 26th day of August they received that wonderful news. If it had been signed yesterday we would have heard of it before it happened. So here we are in the midst of a world like that. We were brought into it so quickly that youth needs adjustment. How are we going to give him that adjustment? We are going to bring back those things that are primitive in his life. The Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls, the Y. W. C. A., the Y. M. C. A. are going to do it. So are the boys and girls who camp, hike, and go by the stars. If I had my way every boy and girl in the whole of America would attend a camp, get between the ploughshares, and learn something of the primitive things of life. In the school we have to see that this thing is done. The schools must counteract the influence in life that is disturbing the youth of our land. What can the school do? It can continue its activity program. Learning is not stimulating activity but activity does stimulate learning. If we could go into our schools, as many of us are already doing, and see that this child, whether in the kindergarten or senior high, has, as a part of that work, the doing of the thing we are studying about, that he has the initiative, that he has the opportunity to plan and to work out the things that he studies, it would mean much more rapid advancement toward the goal we seek to accomplish. My boy has become so enthusiastic about Egypt because he has lived out the life of Egypt in the sixth grade that he reads every book that touches upon Egypt, every advertisement. He reads a thousand times more because he has made the tools, laid the stage, acted the play, and worked out the plan of the whole of Egyptian civilization. As he goes along in his activity program, as he becomes interested, any idea of evil or wickedness stays out of his life and his interest centers in the thing he is doing. Character grows as a result of it. I believe in religion, I believe in the church, but one of the things that has been the greatest drawback in the General Sessions 29 building of character has been the fact that we have been content to say, “I believe, and, therefore, I am saved.” We may believe all we please but salvation comes through a man’s own initiative and thinking and adaptation of his life into the doing of the thing that he believes and thinks. I believe in repeating the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and memorizing beautiful poems, but the average teacher thinks he has taught character when he has done that. What that teacher needs to do is to make the opportunity for the right kind of choices, and the right mental tests, and make the opportunity to let that boy and girl work out with his own hands and in his own mind the thing that makes character on the inside. I am not so much concerned about what the child learns. I am tremen¬ dously concerned about how he learns it and the effect of that learning on the inside of that boy or girl. That is the greatest thing, I think, in the building of character. What can the school do ? The school can bring out of this activity program one great idea. It can learn a great lesson — that schools cannot educate children by themselves. We only have them five and a half to six hours a day, we only have them some 800 hours in a year, we do not get them until they are ruined or made, and then we turn them loose in the most formative period of their life. Still we think we can educate children! The school can not do it alone. The home is educating the child, the church is educating the child, the community is educating the child. The most amazing thing today in all America is that superintendents of schools will wait until a certain Monday in September and call together forty little children and put them under the care of a teacher who has never seen the mother, the grandmother, nor the great-grandmother, who has never seen the house in which they live, does not even know whether it is an apartment house or a dwelling, has never seen the backyard or anything of their environment, and say to that teacher, “Take these children and educate them.” How in the name of common sense can they do it? It cannot be done! What that teacher can do is to say: “I am going to do my part,” and every teacher in the city of Atlanta, I am thankful I can say tonight, has not only cooperated, but one hundred percent will say, “I will visit one hundred per¬ cent the children of my school and my class during what we call Normal Week and learn the background of those children.” What can the school do to make character? It can put its hand in the hand of the father and mother and say: “I am going to work with you.” I say to my teachers that if there are forty-five children and forty-five mothers come to them, each one as mad as a wet hen, take courage, it is a great thing because they are at least interested. Get in touch with the home life of the child. That is what you teachers can do. See that each child has a job. See that he gets a job at the home, see that he has a job in the school. Any teacher in America who has a child without a specific job in the classroom ought to close the door, resign, and quit. The child is not going to do anything unless he realizes there is some 30 National Education Association specific thing to do in cooperation with his teacher, that “that is my job.” When I was six years of age I was assigned a job of separating the cows and the calves at home. If I did it well I got sugar in my milk; if I didn’t do it I was denied sugar three days. It was an obvious situation. There were many negroes, any of whom could have separated the cows and the calves better than I, but my father and mother knew I needed a job. When I was seven I was assigned the job of picking up chips ; when I was eight milking was added to it ; when I was nine, feeding the hogs. I had responsibility. What the school can do is to encourage the child to have a job and to work. I have said very little about lying, swindling, and cheating. Why? I do not believe in talking about them. If a man tells young folks how bad they are and what other folks are doing, some kid is going to be sitting out there and saying, “By George! Aren’t those young folks having a good time! Here I have been behaving myself but I am going to get out and do it!” It is bad psychology, poor suggestion. Put him to work. Get his interest. Give him an activity program. The school can teach the child character through the most beautiful thing there is in all the world. Have you ever watched a little baby in a cradle at six weeks old pick up his hands and commence to play with his clothes, or watched him on the floor as he commenced to play? Have you ever watched a colt gamboling on the green, or a kitten playing with its mother’s tail? Haven’t you learned that the greatest thing in the world in the making of character is the free play life of the child? Teachers need to get on the football field, the baseball field, with the boys and girls, and in some par¬ ticular thing, not only show interest but take part, and they will always get cooperation. May I tell you just one story? I know you will be interested because everybody is interested in Bobby. Bobby Jones came into my class the first day. I asked him to decline tuba. I was teaching Latin. He folded his arms and looked out the window. I said, “Decline tuba .” He didn’t say anything. I said, “Decline tuba.” He still folded his arms and looked out the window. When the class was over, I said before they went out: “I will not put a zero down against Jones today. He is an intelligent looking chap; there must be something wrong that he didn’t know his lesson. I will give him another chance.” And as he went out I said to him, “Bob, I am not going to keep you in but I would like for you to come back here and talk to me about your Latin this afternoon or some other afternoon this week.” He came back that afternoon. I said, “I am mighty glad to see you back here. What are you interested in ?” He said, “I am interested in golf.” We sat there and talked about golf for fifteen or twenty minutes and his eyes just literally glowed. When we got through talking I said, “Bob, why didn’t you say something about your Latin lesson ? I would not have asked you and embarrassed you if I had known you were not prepared.” General Sessions 31 He said, “To tell you the truth, I came here to your high school because I thought you didn’t have Latin, and then my father found out you did have Latin. I said, ‘It’s all right, you can send me to class but I never shall open my mouth,’ and I never shall.” I said, “Couldn’t I go by and ask your father if he wouldn’t let you drop Latin ?” He said, “I will be mighty glad if you will.” I said, “I will go by and talk a little golf to him and then ask him to let you drop your Latin. But then,” I said, “it is rather a shame about your daddy. I don’t know whether he would let you drop it or not. He evidently hasn’t got much sense from what you said.” “Who said my daddy hasn’t got much sense?” “You did.” “How?” “Just a minute ago, you said you were fourteen years old and your father was thirty-eight and you just told him you were not going to take Latin and you wouldn’t do it, and of course a man thirty-eight years of age ought to have more sense than a boy of fourteen years old. It is just too bad.” He said, “I’ll take your Latin.” It was his interest in golf — he was occupied in playing and it was the interest that I was willing to show that accomplished the result. The teacher that can enter into the play interests of the child always meets with response. May I close with this last thought — what can the school do ? The school can show the incarnation of character. That is the biggest thing in all this world. I never have any trouble believing in incarnation. There are some things in the Bible I can’t get along with very well, but I never have any trouble about that because I never believed anything I didn’t see any economy in. You can talk to me about the Ten Commandments and they do not mean much, but when I see somebody live the Ten Commandments and when I see somebody who lives the Sermon on the Mount, it strikes home. Be more careful in selecting teachers. I have examined over one hundred questionnaires sent out by over one hundred cities in America, and they give ninety-two percent to the teacher’s training, to the teachers college, to the teacher’s experience, to the teacher’s summer studies, and eight percent is given to the teacher’s character. May I say this to you, that the school has the greatest opportunity to build character it ever had in the history of the world, if you as superintendents will select those men who have character and who live it, and who in their heart of hearts have implanted the thing they want that boy or girl to have. These are the things that the schools can do. Look out and lift up your eyes to the twenty-four million children and let us say as teachers of this land that that boy or girl whom I have for forty-five minutes, even for half a year, shall receive from me that inspiration of life and example that will flow out and be contagious and will live and be glorified in him. 32 National Education Association WHAT THE HOME CAN DO IN CHARACTER AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION RANDALL J. CONDON, FRIENDSHIP, ME. I come before you tonight without any preparation except a deep convic¬ tion born of all the years since I can remember that the home is the most important educational institution in America or in any other land. I subscribe to all that Mr. Sutton has said about the importance of the school, and I am grateful for the opportunity for these forty years and more to have been connected as a teacher and superintendent with the work of helping develop character in young people. Beyond the work of the school lies that of the home, and if it is not well done, then the school shall do little to develop the right kind of character in the boys and girls who are sent to us from the homes that are weak and inefficient in their parents. A hundred years ago Frederick Shafer said in his Education of Man , ‘‘Only the quiet, secluded sanctuary of the home can give back to us the welfare of mankind.’’ And a little earlier Thomas Jefferson said, “The waters shall ever be what are the fountains from which they flow.” These two fundamental statements are as true today as they were a century ago. I come to you as the representative of the homes of America, representing the great organization of a million and a half parents and teachers, to pledge to the schools the cooperation of the homes of America in the one common task in looking after the welfare of the children, in making clear that edu¬ cation must be based upon religion, and that morality and the development of fine character and worthy citizenship is the greatest piece of work, the most necessary thing in which the schools and the homes can engage. Let me read you this letter from Thomas Jefferson to Martha, the older of his two children, after the mother had died. I visited his home at Monti- cello several years ago. I made a pilgrimage that I might see the home in which this great man lived, the home he had created as an expression of himself, the home in which his children had been nurtured. He retired there from the Presidency, rich in the experiences of life, to play with these chil¬ dren and grandchildren, to live with them in order that he might help teach and shape them for their part in a great American Democracy. Somehow I felt the spirit of the great sage of Monticello, somehow I felt the benediction of the man who had lived and wrought there. When the mother had died and these two girls were left to him, this letter was written while he was the representative of America to the Court of France. i You must assume the responsibility of a mother. When she arrives, she will become a precious charge in your hands. The difference is in your age and your common loss of a mother will put that responsibility off on you. Teach her above all things to be good because without that we can neither be valued by others nor set any value on ourselves. Teach her to be always true. No vice is so mean as the want of truth, and at the same time so useless. Teach her never to be angry. Anger only General Sessions 33 serves to torment ourselves, defeat our friends, and alienate their esteem. Teach her industry and occupation to useful pursuits. I will venture to assure you if you inculcate those in her mind you will make her a happy being in herself, a most estimable friend to you, and precious to all of earth. In teaching her these disposi¬ tions of mind, you will be the more fixing them in yourself and render yourself dearer to all your acquaintances. Practise them then, my dear, without ceasing. If ever you find yourself in difficulty or doubt how to express yourself, do what is right and you will find it the easiest way out of the difficulty. I read the letters, hundreds of them, that Thomas Jefferson wrote to his children who were at Charlottesville while he was in Philadelphia and while he was in France, breathing the spirit of companionship, asking them to w’atch the coming of the birds, to report to him when a certain bird arrived there, and he would let them know when that bird sang its note at Philadelphia, asking them to inform him when the crocuses came up and the daffodils, and he would tell them when he first saw them coming through the earth at Philadelphia ; entering into their life in every way. I would say what the home can do is for the parents to live with their children ; to have fine ideals of service but to enter into their understanding that the children and parents together may live their life. I believe the home is the greatest educational institution in America because it is a living institution. The school work even at its best must be somewhat formal ; the church even at its best may somehow do some of the preaching, but formal teaching and preaching is never likely to result in those fine qualities of character that come out of living, and living with older people, making sacrifices. Oh, I am grateful that as a boy back in an humble home in Maine it was necessary for me to undergo hardship, undergo something of sacrifice, to enter into the spirit of that family and do it under a mother who loved her children so much that she reproved them when they would go worng, and she called them back to their line of duty and of reverence and devotion to God. These things I remember with great¬ est satisfaction, and now in the sunset of life it is one of the great joys of my life that I can spend these years in that same home in which I was born, and that I can still feel that mother love and that influence. As the sun shines in through the western window at eventide, I think of that mother love, and how when the evening came the family would gather about the great family Bible and as the mother read to us from the Word of God, we all knelt while she commended our souls to God, and never a day was so busy in that home that first of all we did not kneel with that mother while she asked God’s blessing and gave thanks for the day. In the twenty-five million homes of America I wonder how many of them are lacking the kind of life and teaching that will send their children into the schools prepared for the instruction which the schools shall give and receiving them back from the school to reinforce and unite with them in doing those things which make for life and service. I rejoice that in the countryside there are still these devoted homes which are assuming the responsibility for the rearing of children. 34 National Education Association What can the home do? The home can assume its full responsibility and if it shirks that responsibility there is no other institution under our form of life and government that can make up for its deficiency. The National Con¬ gress of Parents and Teachers stands ready to unite with the teachers of America, combining the home and the school, that together and with that partnership we may work out this problem of saving America, because parents and teachers are working together for the salvation of the children. I don’t know that I ever had any tribute or recognition which came to me in all my life that seemed more precious to me than a sentence that my little daughter dropped when she was leaving home after having graduated from college. She was going from Cincinnati to New York to engage in the student secretary work for the National Young Women’s Christian Asso¬ ciation. One of our directors said to her, “Well, Catherine, I expect your mother will miss you very much when you are gone.” She said this, “Yes, but I think Father will miss me just as much for when we are together all our work becomes play.” That little daughter now has a home of her own and just a year ago there was born into it a little boy, and I received the message that Randall Condon Foster had come upon the 3rd of April. I had expected him to be a girl. I had had no idea and I was so surprised when I saw that name attached to him, for I had never thought that my daughter would name her baby, if he came, for her father. I believe that we need to begin very early with these children. They may not understand all we do but as the years stretch on there will come something of our teachings and the meaning of the things that we do to them and for them that will have a tremendous influence upon their lives. Last April 2nd, just the day before my grandson’s birthday, I left for the West to take part in the state and national conventions of the parent-teacher associations, and I took a half day in the morning and went up to their home that I might celebrate with him and his mother and father, his first birthday, a one-year-old boy, rosy-cheeked, smiling and happy, facing the future with all its possibilities. He had his first breakfast that morning sitting at the table with the grown folks. He sat in his high chair. I watched him while his mother gave him his bath before breakfast. We had the same breakfast, starting out with orange juice. I drank mine from a glass and he from a bottle — it took him a little longer to drink it than it did me, and that is about the only difference. Then we had the same cereal. And we had a happy time together sitting there. After his breakfast he went back to his little crib and he was standing in it reaching up looking at me, and in the lapel of my coat was the life membership button of the National Education Association. He reached up to it, and wanted to take it off. I said, “Would you like to have one, little chap?” And he smiled back. I said, “I think it would be a good thing for me to give you for your first birthday present.” I went on in the afternoon to Washington and the first thing I did was to go to Mr. Crabtree’s office and say, “I want to take out a life member¬ ship in the great National Education Association for my grandson, Randall General Sessions 35 Condon Foster. You may send him his certificate, but please give me an emblem of life membership for I want to wear his and I will give him mine.” Then I went upstairs one flight further to the office of the National Con¬ gress of Parents and Teachers and said, “I want to make my grandson, Randall Condon Foster, a life member of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. You may send to him his certificate of membership but give me his emblem of life membership, the key, that I may send mine to him and that I may wear his, for I want the inspiration that comes from his youth, and I would like somehow to transmit to him, if I could, something of the experience that goes with the emblem that I have worn.” Now his father told me that a little later he had received his first research bulletin from the National Education Association and he added this, “He has already begun to devour it.” Bishop McDowell says I ought to send him a questionnaire! I am writing him a letter that 'his mother will read to him when he becomes a little older when I have probably passed off the stage, saying to him from my experience what it means to be connected with these two great national organizations that have in their keeping through the school and the home the welfare of America, and hoping that somehow this early act of his grandfather’s will have an influence upon his life in the years to come. I am not particularly concerned whether he should be a teacher or not — that is for him to decide. If he has the ability, the quality, and inclination I hope he will cast his life along the lines that I am sure will give the greatest satisfaction, but in whatever field of work his future years may be cast I want him to realize that in this Association are great opportunities for serv¬ ice, for citizens as well as for teachers, and that parents and teachers alike must conserve the schools and homes. These are some of the things that the homes can do for children, starting early, loving them, for that is the most fundamental thing in school or in home. In my little hometown is the schoolhouse my mother taught in 79 years ago, and she was a mother then. She left her little boy with a grandmother and she took the little girl, five years old, by the hand and led her for a mile and a half along that country road to teach in that little brick schoolhouse. Then I went to it to school and later while I was in college I taught there, and it has very precious memories. Meantime in the process of consolidation the little school was abandoned and it looked very shabby. The bushes had grown up about it, the windows were out, the roof was beginning to fall in — the brick walls alone were intact. They hadn’t changed in 79 years, for they were built upon one of the Maine granite ledges. Somehow it seemed to me that this ought to be saved. So I asked the town one year at the town meeting whether they would authorize the school committee to sell the schoolhouse and they voted to authorize the school committee to sell the schoolhouse to the best advantage. Well, I offered the school committee what I thought was a fair and reasonable price for the building for the use 36 National Education Association 1 wanted to put it to and then as long as I had seen there was some value in it, somebody else thought it would make a good garage and he offered quite a good deal more, and somebody else thought it would make a good oil filling station and he offered still more, and somebody wanted a tearoom and she offered still more, and then the test of the school committee was this. They said, “The town has authorized us to sell this to the best advan¬ tage. If Randall Condon wants this as a memorial to his mother, a teacher- parent, and to preserve it for our town as a community center, it shall be his.” And so we restored it. We shingled it and had a fireplace built in the end of it, and my brother made fireside seats where people could gather and sit in comfort, and he and I together built one of the old-fashioned desks just as they used to be in the country school, as a memorial. Then we painted the floor and Mrs. Condon made chintz curtains to hang in the window with a view to prettiness, and then one day just before we were going to dedicate it for the community welfare, for the homes, for the parents and for the children, because that was why I had bought it, I was painting the blackboard, the same blackboard upon which I had learned to subtract two from four, and probably found the answer to be three ; the same blackboard upon which, when a college lad, I had taught the children to spell c-a-t and then discovered how foolish it was and rubbed it out and found it just as easy to teach them the word cat as it was to teach it c-a-t, cat — the same blackboard, and I was puttying up the holes there to make it look a little bit smoother, but I came to one place in it I didn’t putty up. Because as I was looking through it I came to these words, or these letters, written by some child who had come to that blackboard — “1-o-v-”, and no more. I am not sure whether the teacher caught him at that point and stopped him or whether he thought that was all that was necessary to spell the word. Any¬ way, I left “1-o-v” on that blackboard as the symbol of what every school and every home in America must have if they are to teach character and religion in the light of life that shall function in terms of character and citizenship. Then we gathered the children and parents together on one beautiful bright September day. The children sat about the floor, the grown people sat on the chairs, and the little girl five years old that my mother had taken with her to school had braided an old-fashioned rug and it was on the floor just in front of the fireplace. There was one of the older boys, a year or two older, who was there, and I gave him the privilege of lighting the fire on the hearth of the fireplace, and we came away from the schoolhouse not only with the embers burning in the fireplace and the hearth, but with a warm glowing in our own hearts, a feeling that somehow we had exalted life and service, community welfare, parents and teachers, school and home, and that out of it all should come a finer and better type of American citizens, with kindness in their hearts and with gentleness in their lives. Sometime ago, I wrote this tribute to my mother and if I may I will read it as a tribute to all mothers: General Sessions 37 To my mother, who taught her children the deep things of life — duty, honor, truth, courage, faith, hope, love of home and of country, reverence for God, for every country and for all His loyal creatures obedience and devotion, sincerity and simplicity, patience and perseverence, selfdenial and selfreliance, kindness and help¬ fulness, contentment while striving to attainment, joy in service and satisfaction in work well done. With a culture not learned in school, for her island home afforded but little in the way of schools, but with that richer culture that comes from companionship with a few great books, from communion with God and Nature, and from a life well lived, to difficulties faced and to problems solved with unconquered and unconquer¬ able spirit she taught us by what she did, to do, and inspired us by what she was, to become. And only so shall the parents or teachers of America develop character as they teach children to do by what they do, and inspire them to become by what they are. WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO IN CHARACTER AND RELIGIOUS ED.U CATION REV. WILLIAM F. MCDOWELL, BISHOP, METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C. I am rather vitally related to the school teaching business. My father taught school in this state when he was fifteen years old and earned the money for the first pair of boots in our family. Prior to that we had gone barefoot or worn brogans. He married an Ohio school teacher. For a limited number of years I was the nominal head of a university in Colorado. My first word is going to be one of criticism. I do not like this audience. I do not think it is well made up for the discussion of these three topics — What can the School do? What can the Home do? What can the Church do? I would have four topics, shorten each address, including my own, and I would have had the audience made of four groups, all packed together so that you couldn’t tell which was which, and I would have had one group made of teachers, one group of distinguished parents who are not teachers, and one group made of ministers of all kinds of churches, and one group made of editors of all kinds of papers. I would have raised, in addition to the three questions we are speaking of, a fourth question — What can the Press of America do to help make the character of America? First of all I think the church can, and should contribute to this influence for the making of character an amount of understanding which I fear they are not contributing. I do not believe, and I may now confess the sins of the body for which I speak, that we have quite an adequate understanding of the problem of character making in modern American life. I doubt if we quite understand the difficulties that attend public school teaching. We can con¬ tribute if we will an amount of understanding that does not exist. That is my statement to the church that is not primarily here but is onlyherebecause many of you belong to it. In the contribution of this element of understand¬ ing on the part of the church you can make a large contribution. 38 National Education Association My second suggestion is that the churches can make a large contribution in the way of appreciation. If I were asked to name the first quality that I would require in a teacher it would be an accurate sense of the value of a child, of every child, and especially of the young child. The churches can help in contributing that sense of appreciation of the value of childhood. A new word has come into our modern speech. It is that term personality. My judgment is that one great revelation of religion that lies just ahead is the revelation of the value of human personality — something of an understand¬ ing of human life as Jesus Christ thinks of it. I do not mean we are going to take an idealistic view. That is not it. Human nature is not precious because it is perfect. It is precious because of what it may become. It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. It is that sense of the value of personality which, speaking in terms of education, would mean a drawing out of the personality, making all possible of it. The church must help to make that emphasis to an extent to which it has not done. The church, in the next place, can make a very genuine contribution as to the uses of truth. There are a good many uses of truth. There is the scientific use ; there is the purely practical use that we witness in invention ; there is a very real commercial use of truth. In that very characteristic American story, Silas Lapham , written by an Ohio man, the late William Dean Howells, the hero of the story defined education as the training of a man in the power to exploit the community for his own benefit. That is to say, he taught man so that he could work the community. Everyone who has thought accurately, whether he lias thought deeply or not, knows that that is not the highest use of truth. One who has thought seriously of truth, as it applies to human nature, knows that that Great Siren of the Soul, whom we call the Great Teacher, said, not for Himself alone, not for those alone who should be ministers of His in pulpits, but for all of those who use truth in its applica¬ tion to life, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free” — free from fear, free from bondage, free from the things that destroy human life, free from the things that keep human life from reaching its highest levels. The church can contribute, please God it may, a new and keener sense of the significance and value of truth. The churches also can contribute a real sense of the relative values in life. Honorable William Russell, one time governor of Massachusetts, said a thing that the church ought never forget, and it is one of the things that the church can contribute to this process of making character. He said, “There is an everlasting difference between making a living and making a life.” In these days when making a living is so stressed and emphasized and means so much to us, the church can contribute a sense of values that places emphasis upon life as better than living, as the thing for which living exists. I had an experience on this subject of values which perhaps, without im¬ propriety, I may quote to you. I was located at the University of Denver when silver was demonetized and the bottom dropped out of Colorado General Sessions 39 prosperity temporarily. I was in Chicago trying to see the World Fair. One Friday morning I received word from my wife that perhaps I had better come home and then like an optimist she said, “Maybe we can go back again a little bit later.” So I left Chicago on Friday night, and arrived in Denver on Sunday morning with exactly seventy cents in my pocket, which indi¬ cates that it was time for me to be home. I went out to my home in the suburbs, greeted my family, and we had breakfast. We had prayers to¬ gether. Then I began to inquire about conditions. It was a sorry recital. Bank after bank had closed. Man after man had financially failed ; concern after concern had gone to the wall. Then rather timidly I ventured to ask about my own small savings, for I had saved a little bit, all the more preci¬ ous because there was so little of it, and I had invested it. My wife as kindly as possible explained to me what had happened, and I went upstairs alone into the great bedroom with two windows opening toward the rising sun and two opening toward the eternal mountains, and I took down from the shelf in the closet a tin box that was locked — locked with a rubber band. I opened it and took out from the box certain securities and mortgages. They didn’t mean much in value or in aggregate I mean, but the more worthless they were the more beautifully they were printed. I spread them out and looked at them and had the feeling that a man has when he drops from the fortieth story of a building in an express elevator and is moved to ask the conductor to take him back to enable him to pick up what he has lost somewhere along the way. I folded these certificates up and put them back in the box, locked it again with the rubber band, and laid it back on the shelf. Then I did what I had never done before, never have done since, and shall never need to do again, because I got that lesson once and for all. I took down a roll that was done up in newspaper and tied with a string. I untied the string and unrolled the roll, and spread out on the bed three diplomas that I had been permitted to get in two Christian institutions. They were written in Latin, and I 'was a university chancellor and could not read Latin anymore. Of course I understand why Latin is a dead lan¬ guage. It has been studied to death, and I helped to do it. Though I could not read these diplomas I could read the names that w*ere signed to them and. I knew what those names stood for. Presently I laid the diplomas back on the shelf — and that is the last time I have seen them — and walked out of that room like a lord. All my courage came back, all my hope was restored, all my sense of worth and personality quickened ; for it seemed to me that morning, it seems to me tonight, that those diplomas represented the kind of value over which tumbling banks and failing concerns had absolutely no effect; that they were rich with the value that would last “Till the sun grows cold and the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold." I walked the streets of that stricken city that week and man after man said, “Chancellor, did you get caught in the storm?” And I said, “Not I. I lost a few things overboard but the storm never touched me.” 40 National Education Association I learned what that great Soul meant when He said, “A man’s life con- sisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesses.” It is for the church, in my judgment, among other things, to give back to the world in this day that sense of value and to make it, with your cooperation, quick and signifi¬ cant and vital in human life. It is also within the province of the church to help the homes, the schools, and the press to keep the soul of the world alive in this materialistic day. It can help it by making emphatic in this new generation and in every genera¬ tion those magnificent words a great English schoolman made the basis of his whole theory of education. 1 refer to Thomas Arnold, whose work at Rugby College was based on the double principle of an inquiring love of truth and a devoted love of goodness. The church can help prepare the homes and the schools, if it will, for modern human life. The church can offer to the world the living definition of what we mean by character ; for we get our great definitions not in terms of the dictionary, but in terms of life. If I were asked to define certain words I could. If I were asked to define the word “mother” I could, and if I should repeat what the dictionary says, you would say, “That is all very well for the dictionary but evidently the maker of that dictionary did not know my mother.” If Dr. Condon could bring here that lovely mother of whom he has spoken, or if I could bring here a lovely young woman whom I have not seen for more than threescore years now, every one of you would see a different figure, but every one of you would understand if I should say that was a mother. Personality defines the term. If I were asked to define the term “preacher” I could. If instead of defin¬ ing “preacher” I could bring here that plain country preacher that brought you to Christ, or one of those simple great souls whose lives were touched as with a life of culture, such supermen as Phillips Brooks, Matthew Simp¬ son, or others whose names leap to my lips, and you would be caught up in the tidal rush of their speech into the third heaven and see things that it is not lawful for me to utter, and I should say to you, “That is a preacher,” you would understand. Personality defines the term. If I were asked to define the word “doctor” I could, but if I should repeat what the dictionary says you would say, “That is all very well for a 'dic¬ tionary, but evidently the maker of the dictionary did not know my family physician.” If I could bring here the very finest character that the advance of forty years has brought to the surface, William McClure, a country doctor of the old school, and you should see him battling all the night for the life of Belle Saunders’ husband; and in the morning when the fever broke, go out and throw his waistcoat one way and his coat the other and try with his twisted legs to dance the Highland Fling just for sheer joy that a man’s life had been saved, and could say to you, “Now that is a doc¬ tor,” everyone of you would see a different figure. Personality defines the term. General Sessions 41 If I were asked to define the word “character” I could, but if I should recite what the dictionary says you would go out saying, “There must be a better definition.” But if I could bring here before you, as maybe I can by the gift of your imagination and spiritual insight, a Teacher who wore sandals on His feet, a seamless robe upon His person, and taught the lowly the way of life and spake as no man spake before, that went about doing good ; if I should stand with Him here a moment and say to you, “He is the definition of what we mean by character,” you would all see the same figure and all understand and I trust would vow together, as I should want to vow with you, that to the end of our lives we would work upon this priceless human material to present it at last without spot or wrinkle or blemish in this likeness and image. ADDRESS OF WELCOME HON. MYERS Y. COOPER, GOVERNOR OF OHIO Ohio esteems it a high privilege as well as a very great honor to entertain the Sixty-eighth Convention of the National Education Association. As her Chief Executive I bid you a most cordial welcome to our state and to our capital city. Your annual gatherings rightfully attract national and inter¬ national attention since they give emphasis to educational advancement and progress. While we wish fully to perform our duty as host, we are not un¬ mindful that we will receive from this body far more than we possibly can give. Our people believe in education. You are in the midst of friends. I extend to you in their name the fullest possible measure of hospitality during your stay within our borders. We yield to no other commonwealth in appre¬ ciation of the benefits of universal education and of the idealism in education for which this Association stands. We are proud to state to you that no child in Ohio, however remotely located, lives beyond the privilege of a thorough secondary education, and that in our system of instruction equalization of educational opportunity is an accomplished fact. We have, however, the characteristic American attitude of advancement toward new goals of achievement, and we hail your coming and your deliberations among us as calculated to more clearly define the educational objectives for the immediate future. We are proud of our 41,000 teachers in Ohio. Our state does not regret them one penny — indeed we wish we might make it more — of the teachers’ salary, approximating $54,000,000 annually, because we believe we make no finer investment than that which has to do with the preparation of our youth for happy and useful lives. Hence it is that the taxpayers of our state dig deep in their pockets to the extent of $125,000,000 annually for elemen¬ tary and secondary education alone. We believe in education. Without education we would not survive the perils that beset our nation. It is our fixed conviction that education is the chief and essential means by which the permanency of a democratic society may be assured. This is the day when “the man who knows” is in demand, 42 National Education Association and so challenging are the responsibilities of the hour that the conservation of human value is paramount to every other consideration. Unpreparedness is the greatest tragedy of life. Its toll is taken in priceless time, its compensa¬ tion in unrewarded effort. The teachers of America hold the destiny of our youth and of our coun¬ try in their hands. More and more are they called upon to marshall their resources in the realm of ideas and thus develop and mold the character and tendencies of the youth. The safety and security of our nation will be found in a mobilization of her resources in the realm of ideas and their utilization in defending our national heritage, which represents the toils and sufferings, the tears and heroisms, the sacrifices and martyrdoms of other days. The need of America today is for this type of leadership as evidenced in the counsels of your great organization. An outstanding characteristic of Ohio is that she produces more of every¬ thing than she can use, even school teachers. No doubt there are many teachers in this presence who were born in Ohio. To you, our native sons and daughters who have returned for this convention, we need not say that Ohio is the best state in the Union. It would be hard to convince you other¬ wise. To the thousands of others who are here, let me say that you will find our state at least not outranked in hospitality and the desire to make you feel perfectly at home and have a thoroughly good time. Our people have been planning and working for this convention so as to make you comfortable and happy while you are here. We want you to accept our courtesies in the same spirit in which they are extended. It is our hope that when you leave Ohio you will carry away with you many pleasant memories of a profitable convention and a disposition to return again at an early date when you can stay much longer. WORDS OF GREETING JAMES J. THOMAS, MAYOR, COLUMBUS, OHIO I am very happy this morning on behalf of a warm-hearted community to extend to you our sincere greetings and welcome to the Capital City of this great Buckeye State. Columbus is just a little bit more than a capital city. It is one of the leading educational centers of the middlewest, also growing in importance as an industrial and commercial community. The key is the symbol of hospitality, but the key of Columbus has already unlocked the hearts and hands of the whole community which bids you welcome and hopes that you will enjoy to the fullest the freedom of our city. If there is anything that we can do that will add to your comfort or to your happiness, command us. General Sessions 43 WORDS OF GREETING J. L. CLIFTON, STATE DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION FOR OHIO As director of education of the State of Ohio it gives me pleasure to welcome to our state, on behalf of the 42,000 teachers, the delegates and friends of education to Columbus this week. We are anxious for you to know us better ; we are anxious for you to know something of what Ohio is trying to do for the advancement of education and for the welfare of the hoys and girls of our state. We cannot help but remember that all our pro¬ gram of education directs itself toward the welfare of our children, and in behalf of the boys and girls we hope that you will bring to us something that we can take in turn to them. I hope that the delegates and friends of education will visit us this week. I hope that they will come to the story that we have told by exhibition in the Elks’ Home on East Broad Street. We have written our story there for you to read, and we cordially invite you to come and see if it is well told. The ladies of the convention are always welcome at the Elks’ Home. We have opportunity for your entertainment there, and you will find a place to rest and recuperate. We hope you will come and enjoy our offered hospitality. We are trying to do the best we can. You never gave us an opportunity before and so we are just doing it the way we find we can for the first time. When you come back again to a National Education Association Convention at Columbus we will know how to do it better. We are glad to have you and we welcome you to the State of Ohio and to the City of Columbus. WORDS OF GREETING J. G. COLLICOTT, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, COLUMBUS, OHIO On behalf of the teachers of Columbus, 1500 of them, on behalf of the pupils of the schools of Columbus, 48,000, and on behalf of the parents and citizens of Columbus, approximately 300,000, I am authorized and directed to say to you that for your delight we are all here. Our cordial welcome for you we wish to express in the singing of our teacher choruses, in the singing of pupil choruses, in the elementary, junior and senior high schools. For you our high-school bands are eager to play, for you our courtesy luncheons arranged during the week, and we are delighted to have the opportunity of visiting with you as you go as the guests of the 10,000 teachers of Ohio on Wednesday at twelve oclock. We hope to take as our special guests of honor each visiting teacher outside of Ohio. An Ohio teacher wishes to have the honor of serving as individual host to each of the 8,000 visitors from outside of the state. For you we have planned the interesting trips about the city and in certain interesting sections of our state ; for you we have planned the great educational pageant this evening and we hope you will be on hand 44 National Education Association in good time at the stadium. There is plenty of room for everybody. You will see someone representing Mr. McGuffy as he looked in his lifetime, also Horace Mann, and those great educational characters from Ohio. You will have an opportunity to appreciate what their contribution has been. We also have planned to join with you on the Fourth of July in celebrat¬ ing our great Independence Day. Our flag drill will occupy the entire play¬ ing field of the stadium. We have capacity for 75,000 people, and a chorus of 3500 will sing patriotic songs. This is our welcome to you. We hope in the future as you recount the cities that have honored themselves by attempting to the best of their ability to honor this great educational organization that you will be able to recall the shout of victory that is always given by the boys and girls in our Ohio colleges, and as you listen to the names of the cities and states that have entertained in proper fashion this great organization you will recall those three great shouts of victory — “Yea, Ohio! Yea, Ohio! Yea, Ohio!” VITAL VALUES IN EDUCATION E. RUTH PYRTLE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, AND PRINCIPAL, BANCROFT SCHOOL, LINCOLN, NEBR. The challenge to the profession of teaching has never been stronger than • it is today. The problems for solution have never been more important nor more numerous. The zeal of the profession to meet the challenge has never been greater. Teachers — individually and in organized groups — are devot¬ ing themselves vigorously and intelligently to the solution of the intricate problems in education. The privilege which you have given me this year, as president of this great organization, to see the “field” in action — to get a “close-up” by visits into the field — has been highly inspirational. I could wish nothing better for all the children of America than to have them enjoy the opportunities and benefits that I have seen provided for children in some of our best schools where I have been privileged to visit. The theme chosen for this sixty-eighth convention of the National Edu¬ cation Association is “Vital Values in Education.” These values will be discussed by speakers of national and international achievement under the subtopics : 1. Wise use of leisure or the art of living as a vital value in education 2. Creative learning as a vital value in education 3. The international point of view as a vital value in education 4. Character and religion as a vital value in education I shall briefly use three illustrations of vital values that need constant emphasis in our schools. Were there time, these few illustrations could be increased to cover others such as health, citizenship, recreation, music, social studies, and character growth. First , let us emphasize the need for freeing intelligence. Our much loved educational philosopher, Dr. John Dewey, warns us against that type of General Sessions 45 school, that “has literally been dressed out, with hand-me-down garments — with intellectual suits which other people have worn.” Dr. Dewey describes in this sentence the teacher who follows mechanically the course of study waiting for a supervisor or a superintendent to tell him what to do next. This traditional type of teacher is reducing the activity of the child’s mind to a docile and passive taking in of the material presented — in short to memorizing with simply incidental use of judgment and of active search. It is encouraging that more and more teachers are reversing this in practise and leading pupils to think, weigh, measure, reason, make judgments, and let memory become the byproduct, rather than the main objective of the day’s program. Dr. Dewey says that in our schools wTe have freed individ¬ uality in many modes of outer expression without freeing intelligence, which is the vital spring and guarantee of all these expressions. It does not take new or different equipment from that which we now have in nearly all schools, but the use of the equipment or environment in a more profitable manner. For example, he says, take the child outofdoors widening and organizing his experience with reference to the world in which he lives; let him pursue nature study as a vital observation of forces working under their natural conditions; let him observe plants and animals growing in their own homes, instead of merely discussing dead specimens. We believe it is fundamental that we have a sense of vital values in edu¬ cation and put emphasis on first things, first. Henry Turner Bailey emphasizes that nature is the inexhaustible reser¬ voir of suggestion for all science — the trees, the birds, the butterflies, the moths, the clouds, and the stars never cease to entertain and to bless all who have learned to love them. He says when we are wiser, we will run the buses of the board of education not to bring rural children into city schools but to take city children into the country that they may learn to know and love God’s first revelation to man, and feel at home in the natural world because they are well acquainted with it. Which is the greater tragedy, for a child to live in a crowded city in a home and school environment that almost prevents his chance for apprecia¬ tion of the real values of life, or the child living in the rural school environ¬ ment — perhaps surrounded by the beauty of God’s great outofdoors — and yet not appreciating it because of having “eyes that see not and ears that hear not?” Once I asked a twelve-year-old boy about the scarlet tanager, which was nesting within a stone’s throw of his school. This modern rural schoolhouse was located in beautiful river woods, a locality w~ellknown to ornithologists as one of the best in the United States for making a large bird list. The boy knew nothing about the tanager. He said his teacher thought his class did not have time to study birds; they had so much arithmetic and geography “to get.” Bishop William A. Quavle once said he would like to add a beatitude to the list, to read “Blessed are those who have eyes to see and use them. The beatitude I would add is “Blessed are those who help others to see.” 46 National Education Association These blessed surely include the classroom teachers of America who have the vision of putting the emphasis on “first things first ” and put that into practise in everyday classroom instruction. Fortunate, indeed, is the child who is associated with that type of teacher! One of your favorite authors in his “God of the Open Air” expresses this philosophy of vital values: These are the things I prize And hold of dearest worth: Light of the sapphire skies, Peace of the silent hills, Shelter of forests, comfort of the grass, Music of birds, murmur of little rills, Shadows of clouds that swiftly pass, And, after showers, The smell of flowers And of the good brown earth, — And best of all, along the way, Friendship and mirth. Second , the entire teaching profession needs to be enlisted in training for the wise use of leisure. Recognizing that this can be accomplished only through the enlistment of the entire profession, the Association has this year appointed a National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life and forty-eight state commissions to stimulate and lead the movement; but the real work will be effectively done only when each teacher catches the vision. Teachers, better than anyone else, can interpret -what was meant in the following statement, which was sent to each member, setting forth the pur¬ pose and plan of the Association’s movement for the enrichment of adult life : The purpose is for the teaching profession to promote plans for the wise use of leisure, or avocational efficiency, just as it has been promoting vocational efficiency. The plan of organization is for the National Education Association to take the initiative and assign to the Department of Adult Education the chief responsibility for organizing and carrying the work forward; to seek the cooperation of the American Federation of Labor, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Ameri¬ can Legion, the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, and other national agencies; to ap¬ point a committee in each state ; and to provide for contacts with all industrial, civic, fraternal, and religious organizations. The Executive Committee of the Adult De¬ partment, together with twenty-five additional members, will constitute the National Commission on the Enrichment of Adult Life, and a group in each state of from fifteen to fifty members will constitute the state commission. The work of the department and commissions is to conduct investigations; to de¬ termine the best plans for recreation and for work during extra hours for the enrich¬ ment of life; to outline problems for investigation for state commissions; to call on colleges to conduct lines of research; to call on the best thinkers in the nation for suggestions; to send out to the state commissions conclusions and recommendations; and to secure funds from individuals and organizations for the work of the com¬ mission. The work of the state commission is to follow out the plans of the national General Sessions 47 commission, both as to investigations and as to the distribution of information; and to initiate plans for securing the cooperation of teachers and citizens in every com¬ munity in the state. The old theory, that people do not learn after twenty-five has been exploded by years of research and experience. People can now see richer lives ahead of them. In proportion as we spread the knowledge of actual facts, will we add new hope in the lives of men and women; and in proportion as we provide opportunities for growth, will we witness improvement and enrichment of home and community life. This is a movement to meet a great national need. The people in industry and in the professions are ready for it. A third vital value in education will be discussed under the theme, “The international point of view.” It is wellknown that much of the discord, un¬ happiness, and lack of harmony in the world is due to ignorance and mis¬ understanding. Through false teaching, prejudices and hatred have been built and fostered. It often takes decades, even centuries, to eliminate the bad effects of such teaching. We had far too much of that in the late World War. One of our widely read newspaper writers admitted after the war that he wrote untruths about the atrocities overseas to inflame the feelings of hatred in America — people are better fighters when they hate. After the death of this writer, only a few years ago, the excuse was made that he wrote thus to help America — he wrote lies for the sake of patriotism. Is genuine patriotism dependent on truth or falsehood ? “My country right or wrong?” No. “My country, may she always be right.” We need, in our schools of America, textbooks in history and geography, newspapers, and magazines that are written with the open-minded attitude of seeking the truth. The World Federation of Education Associations, which met in 1929, in Geneva, Switzerland, set as one of its purposes the study of sound forms of education by the giving of accurate and satisfying information in regard to one another and by eliminating, so far as possible, the old-time prejudices and animosities which have too long dominated the world. Can we not in the schools of America “set our own house in order” by developing a sense of true values — by eliminating from our instruction that which is not built of truth. Most of us as teachers believe that the hope of the world is in the youth of the world. International goodwill, world understanding, will come when a generation is taught and acts upon the principles of justice taught by the greatest teacher of all time. May I quote a paragraph written by the college youth who won the second prize in the National Oratorical Contest of the 1928 Intercollegiate Peace Association ? There is food for thought for the teachers of America in what this youth says: Education for peace, moreover, involves the training of youth in international understanding. Are our schools developing minds of international understanding? Not if they teach jingoistic patriotism. Are they fostering human sympathy? Not 48 National Education Association if they inculcate hatred of other nations and fear of other races. Our educational system must take more and more definitely world peace as an objective. Let us cease to glorify militaristic campaigns and military heroes. Let us stress rather the study of peace efforts, international sports, world contests. Let us urge the wider study of foreign languages and foreign culture. Let us show the indebtedness of our land to other lands. Let the Atlantic and the Pacific be henceforth, not barriers sepa¬ rating enemies, but links connecting friends. And finally, let the boy and girl seek out between themselves and other races, not points of difference but interests held in common bonds of friendship. These vital values of freed intelligence, wisely used leisure and world goodwill, open many doors to service. You will think of others. As you follow these programs through the week, you will have a new appreciation of the glory of teaching. Your satisfaction in service will be deepened. You will understand better the causes that underlie the rapid growth of the National Education Association. You will feel a new dedication to its pro¬ gram of service to childhood. You will appreciate more fully the vast work which remains to be done before the perfection of teaching, the improve¬ ment of salary schedules, the building up of retirement systems, and tenure regulations can be fully accomplished. Generations of the finest men and women of America have poured their lives into the National Education Association. They have laid foundations, but much remains to be done. Progress literally waits on able leaders and loyal folldwers. There is a part for all. Our educational progress and the advance of our civilization will depend upon us and it will be measured by our energy, our vision, and our loyalty. EDUCATION FOR WORLD COMMUNITY PAUL DENGLER, DIRECTOR, AUSTRO-AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, VIENNA, AUSTRIA A few months ago I came to your country for the third time on one of those great and luxurious boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. What had been at the time of Columbus a great and unheard of adventure was just a plain trip to me, with dancing, music, and radio, a thrilling experience as long as you were not seasick. I went on in one of your marvelous transcontinental trains. There was a club car and all conveniences and it was no more the adventure of your great pioneers as they moved West — no danger, no difficulty, no ad¬ venture. Then I came to San Francisco and to Berkeley where I was teaching “Comparative Education in Europe,” at the summer session and there I had not at all the feeling of being far from home. I can send a tele¬ gram home and have in a few hours a reply. I can even speak to my people at home. In old times wffien you took a boat you never knew whether you would come back ; when you took a train you never knew whether you would arrive. Just think of our great German poet, Goethe, when he went to Italy. It was a great adventure. It took him weeks and weeks to get there. General Sessions 49 To attend this meeting in Columbus I came by airplane. I left on Fri¬ day night and I came to Los Angeles and left Los Angeles Saturday morn- ning, was here last night and here today, leaving tomorrow and teaching on Thursday. Well, this airplane trip was not even an adventure, not even dangerous. However, I must confess to you that there are air pockets. They first say there are not. Well, we found one quite vicious in Arizona, which dropped us a few hundred feet and our heads bumped the ceiling. Now boats, trains, airplanes, all that is my personal experience. It is as well an experience of yours. Everybody can have such experiences today. All of the boats going over from here to Europe are crowded, all of the trains in Europe are packed, and so it is in Asia, in South America, in Africa, all over the world. A continuous stream coming from one country going to the other — an interchange of people as it has never been before in the world. Besides that we have the press, the radio, the mails. We read every day astounding new things about progress and accomplishment. Byrd is speaking to us from the South Pole ; Marconi is putting on the lights in Sidney, Australia ; in the electrical convention in Berlin a hundred people from the four corners of the world speak to one another, and millions all over the world listen. What does that mean ? I believe mankind is facing an entirely new situa¬ tion today, a situation which has never existed before, which could not exist because he had not the possibilities for it. It is a new rhythm which has come into the world and we are just at the beginning of this new time. We could divide the time into two parts — the time up to our arrival and from now on. How does that new situation affect us. Both economically and culturally there is a progressive attractivity and uniformity all over the world, as well as a growing interdependence. Look at the picture of old Europe. Every nation had its characteristics deeply written in the past. They had their arts, their customs, and even their food was different. If you come to Eu¬ rope today you will find a growing uniformity, and if you go to a hotel perhaps you will not know whether you are in Belgium, in Italy, in Austria, or in Germany. We are so interdependent that if something hap¬ pens in one corner of the world we feel it in other corners of the world. This growing uniformity and interdependence of the world is one of the great characteristics of our time. In spite of that we see in our time just the opposite of this movement in other fields. We find race nationalism all over the world ; we find that this integration of the world is opposed by disintegration to the same extent. All over Europe today you find high walls of tariff, hatred, and suspicion. Look at Germany and France, France and Italy, Italy and Jugo-Slavia, Hungary and Rumania, Czecho-Slovakia and Belgrade, Poland and Lithuania; wherever you look you will find in spite of that great unifying movement that the nations strive to break away from one another. 50 National Education Association We had only one human culture up to the Renaissance, and later. Now we have English culture, French, German, Italian, American, and so on. Not only are the nations building up high walls against one another, but even within nations, the political parties opposing each other are two differ¬ ent worlds. In Europe, after we have an election we decide on the future of the country, whether it will be conservative or radical. It may be that after the election a country runs reactionary or Bolshevistic, or that hatred goes down to the whole life — goes into the family, goes into the school. Our schools in Europe are full of politics. This wonderful youth movement in Germany was already started before the war, and the boys and girls said, ‘‘We want to be free; to have our own leaders; to go into the woods and be good friends; to have our fires on the tops of the mountains, and shape our lives as we want ourselves and our own leaders.” Now this great youth movement has split into different parts. You may come to a school in my country and you will find that the youngsters, perhaps, will not speak to one another because one group belongs to the radical organiza¬ tion and another group to the conservatives. So you find growing disintegration in spite of this progress which throws us together from all corners of the world. The slogans which are used for both movements, for that one economic and cultural union, and for that narrow nationalism which considers itself the only thing in the world are international and national. Very often you find the belief that those two forces, international and national, are opposed to each other. In Europe you cannot think interna¬ tionally if you want to be a good patriot. I personally believe that there is no conflict at all between National and International. Suppose we replace the word “international” with “supernational.” What does that mean, “supernational”? I do not think of some executive body controling na¬ tional affairs. I am thinking of a mentality, of a state of mind which is this — first of all we must be good patriots ; we must be proud of being what we are. You are Americans and I am an Austrian, and I am as proud of being an Austrian as you are of being Americans, and we must realize the con¬ tributions to humanity which come from each other. Based on that back¬ ground of a deep national conviction in the best sense of the word, being proud of our traditions, our customs, our kind of thinking, our conception of life, we can build up the supernational mind and we can think in terms of world community. There is no conflict as soon as we see supernationally. A countryman at home once said to me, “I hate the Englishmen.” “Why do you hate the English?” I said, “Do you know English people?” “I know some of them,” he said. “Now why do you hate them?” “Well,” he said, “I don’t hate them. They are nice people but you see I hate this idea.” That is a typical attitude. We have our prejudices; we say what others have said ; we repeat what we read in certain papers, which are written for General Sessions 51 the purpose of controling the public mind. We have personal experiences, but we do not believe in them because it is printed otherwise. I go even further. I do not say we can think supernationally without being bad patriots. I even say we must think supernationally if we want to be really good patriots. The explanation may be what I said at the begin¬ ning, this growing interdependence — we are interlinked, intertwined, all of us, throughout the world. We must think supernationally if we want to maintain our own culture; if we want to serve the future of humanity. I have gone through much hardship during the period after the war. I have seen so many countries, and I have lived in that atmosphere of suspicion, of narrow-mindedness, of hatred, so that I know what the Europeans need so badly — this idea that we must have our own nation, but at the same time we must believe that above the nation there is something greater which is our continent, the continent of the world. Education today also faces an entirely new situation. We need first of all the cooperation of the nation in the nation , and then the cooperation of the nations. We must try to develop child communities, teacher communities, and parent communities. I believe that we need the parents more than any¬ thing else if we want to avoid those conflicts for the children. The home must go with us. I could give you many illustrations where teachers in my country did their best to create a broad-mindedness, an international mind¬ edness, and the child came back home and father, with just a smile, with just a word, killed all the enthusiasm and confused the child. It is a long way. Let us think of what has been done on this side for bringing together not only the nation but the nations. Your National Edu¬ cation Association has done a great deal for the teachers and parents, and above all, for the children of your country. The fact that you have placed on your program this year the “International Aspect of Education” proves that you are aware of the situation as it is. You are at the beginning. It is just coming but it is going deeper and deeper, and within a generation it will go to each individual child through the channels of school and home. There are other organizations — the whole parent-teacher movement in your country, the World Federation of Education Associations, which I attended last year in Geneva; the Progressive Education Association, and then a fine international organization which is the International Education Fellowship. The International Education Fellowship has every two years a big con¬ ference, once at Locarno ; last year we had one in Elsinore, Denmark, at¬ tended by thousands and thousands of teachers. There was an atmosphere of friendliness, of understanding, of international mindedness. Every evening each nation gave a little entertainment. I remember with particular delight the American entertainment where we made fun of the speakers of the Con¬ ference in a very nice way. At the Polish entertainment, a German student accepted and thanked the Poles for their invitation just at that time when the commercial war between Poland and Germany was very acute. 52 National Education Association There are international games of all kinds in European countries today which help create and promote international mindedness. Last year we had in London an international jamboree, with thousands and thousands of delegates from all countries of the world. Scholarly interchange throughout the world is growing apace. We have in Europe institutions like the Austro-American Institute in Vienna; there is one in Paris, one in London, one in Berlin, another one in Rome; there will be one in a few weeks in Italy, and one in Vladivostok and Budapest. Throughout the w~orld we have now such institutions as I am represent¬ ing. What does that mean? Ours is a center for international understand¬ ing, for that supernational mindedness. We organized summer courses at the University of Vienna. We organized a student exchange. We are sending students from Europe to America. This last year I have sent thirty-five students to America and a similar number is coming to our country. They are staying in our best hotels in Vienna and in our best families. They do not pay a cent for the whole year, free board, lodging, and tuition. In these institutions we try to develop friendly atmosphere. In the Austro-American Institute we try to make personal contacts. We introduce these newcomers to students, to our professors. We take them out into the country where of course the American friends drink only soda water because we have that bad habit of drinking wine, but I think we are doing away with that. The Youth Movement, for instance, forbids this to its members, — and there are more than three and one-half million boys and girls now registered in the Youth Movement — they never drink, they never smoke. That comes from the inside. Do you know what the attitude of our boys and girls is now ? It is considered as smart not to smoke, not to drink. It is not sportsmanlike. It is this new idea of youth which I think is very fine. Now these institutes, like our Institute in Vienna, at the same time are connected with other institutes, those of Paris, Berlin, and Rome, and all the other institutes ; so that there is a network all over Europe today. This increasing scholarly interchange is one of the characteristic postwar prod¬ ucts. There will be new institutes all over the world and there will be an increasing interchange of scholars or students, and of parents and so on. But what can be done still further in the future? One great thing which we can achieve is international student correspondence. We are just in the beginning. Wouldn’t it be fine to have an international teachers’ correspond¬ ence? Wouldn’t it be great to have international parent organizations’ cor¬ respondence? Nothing of that kind exists as yet except the student corre¬ spondence, which is in its infancy. Then international educational films could be shown all over the world showing that children are the same all over the world. In a subway in New York there was a Japanese child and beside that child a white child and two people came in, husband and wife, and were seated facing those two. And the wife turned to her husband and said, General Sessions 53 “Now just look at those children. They look so different. They are so small. There is a world between them, the white and the Japanese.” And after awhile the Japanese baby began to cry and the white baby joined in and then the husband turned to the wife and said, “Well, they look’ differ¬ ent but they speak the same language.” So it is true. I see it every day. Your American children speak the same language as our children do, and it is the same all the world over. If we could have educational films showing child life in Russia, in Japan, in South America, and so on, they would bring us closer. But it would be still better if we could travel and have an international student exchange to the greatest extent. How fine it would be with the co¬ operation of the states, of private organizations and contributions from youth to make such an interchange. Send hundreds of boys from Germany to France, and hundreds of girls from Italy to England, and so on. Have the youth of the world move during the summertime in hundreds of thou¬ sands. That would make them know the others, and that would make them appreciate the countries of the world. Wouldn’t it be splendid to have student delegations? Wouldn’t it be fine if some day Columbus would send some bright boys and girls, perhaps 16, 17, or 18 years old, to Europe, bringing a message of goodwill from the boys and girls of Columbus to the boys and girls over there; take pictures, take notes; come back and bring messages of that old world to American children. Well, those are just a few instances out of thousands which must be carefully planned but which finally will bring the young generations together. We are today more and more drawn together by the technic of inescap¬ able progress. In spite of that, nationalism is trying to build up. These two conflicting tendencies can be overcome by a supernational mindedness. To build up such a supernational mindedness is up to you and to me and to the thousands of teachers all over the world. I deeply believe that never have the teachers had a greater responsibility than in our times, because we are facing an entirely new situation which needs a new kind of mind and a looking-forward into an unknown future. The responsibility of the American teacher is greater almost than our re¬ sponsibility in Europe. America is a young country, it is not so bound by traditions. It can build up a new spirit easier than we can in our thousand- year-old countries over there. America has universal interest in education, which is not so true with us. But more than that, you have one great thing which we have lost over there — cooperation. That word cooperation is perhaps the most precious inheritance of pioneer times, and only being here can one realize it. What we in Europe believe the Americans to be is very often that everybody is a little Rockefeller who comes from over here ; that they are hard-boiled business men ; that there is marvelous business or¬ ganization ; that you have jazz and skyscrapers but we do not know that your greatest quality is cooperation. 54 National Education Association Now when you come more and more, when you have that interchange through letters and maps of all kinds, in Sunday-school books, school dele¬ gations, through school fairs and through a thousand means of this tech¬ nical world, then I believe that you can teach us that cooperative spirit. You can help us to fight that wrong nationalism which is threatening Old Europe and you can spread out the real conception of patriotism. This new goal in American education as well as in universal education, this education for supernational understanding which is in its infancy but which will grow and which must grow if we want to save the world, is as much for your sake as for ours. Let us be convinced that patriotism is a great thing, but patriotism is not enough, because above all else there is humanity. This is my deep personal belief. It is the message which I have brought you from Europe, from my own country, Austria, a small country today but still great in culture, and I believe that culture does not depend upon navy, upon army, upon great territory. This is also the message which I brought you from the other corner of your great American Continent, across mountains, plains and deserts from California, that in spite of all those things which separate us, teachers, parents, and children, throughout the world, there is some greater thing which unites us, and this greater thing is the cooperation of the teachers throughout the world and the conviction of the new teachers throughout the world that above nations there is humanity. GREETINGS A. E. WINSHIP, EDITOR, Journal of Education , BOSTON, MASS. I regard this meeting of delegates of the National Education Association the most important meeting that has been held or is scheduled to be held in 1930'. I am not unmindful of the revelations of science, devotion of philan¬ thropists, wisdom of economists, and zeal of religionists. This is the only delegate body of 1200, representing a paid membership of 205,000 persons, whose main purpose is the promotion of civilization by the careful preparation of millions of boys, girls, and youths to be intelligent men and women, equipped for worthy citizenship. The delegates here assembled have created a commodious official head¬ quarters in Washington with a staff of experienced, devoted experts of high efficiency and are maintaining it without one dollar of public money, or one penny from any private source, foundation, or philanthropist. Considering the tendency of the times to tap the public treasury, serve the business interests, and enjoy the generous luxuries of the benevolent- minded, the record of the National Education Association to mind its own business, and serve God and humanity with every penny of its two-dollar membership is the wonder of the twentieth century. General Sessions 55 These delegates are solely responsible for an organization, never fettered by anemic traditions and never entangled with fanatical alliances. These delegates are the mainspring or balance wheel of an organization of teachers and other educators who are consecrated to the service of the school and the children for the highest good of civilization. It is of inestimable service to teachers, not for the teachers personally, but for their efficiency in the schools for the advantage of the young people who are to be the America of tomorrow. ALASKA , OUR LAST FRONTIER A. E. KARNES, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, KETCHIKAN, ALASKA I would like to impress upon you that Alaska belongs to and is a part of the United States of America, having been purchased from Russia in 1868 for the sum of $7,200,000. It should seem unnecessary that American edu¬ cators be told this, but we Alaskans are continually coming into possession of facts which prove that there are many people of the States, including not only teachers, but business and professional men as well, who are not so informed. Letters come addressed to Alaska, Canada, and to Alaska, British Columbia; and every year hundreds of parcel post and express pack¬ ages come to the territory from the states with customs declarations on them. Within the past year a Rotary Club of the state of Wisconsin sent the Rotary Club of Ketchikan an American Flag, with a statement that it was making a collection of flags of foreign countries and requested that the Ketchikan Club send a flag of its country in return. Again within the past year a member of another Rotary Club in the state of Texas, and another in Minnesota, wrote the Ketchikan Club that they had been appointed inter¬ national corresponding secretaries, the duties of whom were to correspond with clubs in foreign countries with a view to creating a better international understanding. I could go on and give dozens of instances which have come to my per¬ sonal attention, which show that far too many people in the states need to be informed that Alaska is a part of the United States. I would also like to correct any false impressions as to the climate of Alaska. When the territory was purchased, it was often referred to as “Seward’s icebox,” and ever since writers of fiction and writers of fact, who have wanted to add color to their writings have pictured Alaska as being perpetually covered with ice and snow, with its inhabitants living in ice and snow houses, and many other such false ideas. The coast line of the territory, from the Canadian border around the Gulf of Alaska, to the Aleutian Islands, lies directly in the Japan Current, and this part of the territory has a very mild climate during winter months as compared with that of the northern states; the mean temperature of this 56 National Education Association area for "winter is around twenty to thirty degrees above zero, and only for short periods does the temperature fall as low as zero. I have lived in Ketchikan for the past three winters and eight degrees above zero is the lowest temperature recorded in that time, and wdiile my friends of the middlewestern and northern states have been writing of twenty-five to thirty degrees below zero the people of southeastern Alaska have enjoyed temperatures of but few degrees below freezing. Of course, the interior of Alaska is cold during the winter months, the temperature running from ten to forty degrees below zero, with occasional temperatures as low as sixty below, but these extreme low temperatures are not at all common, while similar low temperatures are sometimes recorded in some northern states. On account of this misunderstanding of climatic conditions, business houses in the states often refuse to fill orders to be shipped during winter months ; they have the idea that the entire coastline is frozen up during this time. This alone has caused business houses as "well as individuals in the territory serious inconveniences. As a matter of fact, two steamship companies operate regular weekly sendee between Seattle and Seward, touching all the towns of southeastern iUaska; and from Seward, trains run twice a week to Fairbanks, 475 miles to the interior. So instead of Alaska being isolated during the winter months, there is regular passenger, mail, and freight service to all the larger centers of population, while the smaller settlements are served by dog-team or by airplane. Alaska has an area of more than 590,000 square miles, or is about one- fifth the size of the forty-eight states ; it is larger than all of the New* Eng¬ land states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Dela¬ ware, West Virginia, Porto Rico, Hawaiian Islands, Washington, Ore¬ gon, and California combined. Its coastline is longer than that of the United States proper. Yet, with all its largeness, its population is only a little over 50,000, consisting of about sixty percent whites and about forty percent natives. I wish I had time to tell you something of the serious problems fac¬ ing the natives of Alaska, and also something of the life and customs of the Eskimos, but it would take too long. At the present time, fishing is the most important industry and has been for many years; over $75,000,000 is invested, and over $50,000,000 worth of fish are taken from the waters annually; this represents an annual pro¬ duction of more than seven times what was originally paid for the territory. Salmon is the most important fish taken, while halibut, herring, codfish, and some shellfish are also taken. An industry not yet started, but for which surveys have been made and contracts let with the government by two of the largest paper concerns of the United States, is that of the paper-pulp industry, and this bids fair to rival that of the fishing industry within a few years. Due to the fact that paper pulp timber in the eastern states is being rapidly depleted, attention General Sessions 57 has been directed to Alaska, which has enough such timber to supply the needs of the states perpetually. The second industry in importance is mining; over $25,000,000 worth of precious metals are taken annually, and since the territory was purchased more than $570,000,000 worth, or more than eighty times the purchase price of the territory, has been taken. Gold is the most valuable metal taken, with copper, silver, lead, and tin ranking next. There are also large deposits of a high-grade marble, as well as coal. With all that has been taken, geologists tell us that hardly a scratch has been made in the surface as compared with what may be expected. Mining will always be an important industry in Alaska. More than $15,000,000 worth of fur has been taken, and while the total annual value of fur from wild animals is slightly decreasing, fur farms are springing up rapidly; the climate is especially adapted to raising mink and blue and silver fox, and this industry is becoming more and more im¬ portant. While agriculture is being conducted only on a small scale as compared with that in the states, experiment stations were established many years ago by the government, and many people have been attracted to the interior be¬ cause of its possibilities. Many do not realize that even as far north as the Arctic Circle there are from eighty to one hundred growing days each sum¬ mer, and that with the long days, the longest of which the sun shines nearly twenty-four hours, about as much sunshine is available for growing purposes in that region as is available in the states. The finest kind of vegetables are grown, as well as the small fruits, such as strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries, and the interior of Alaska teems with wild cranberries, while the timbered regions abound in red and blue huckleberries. Small grains, such as wheat, oats, and barley, are being grown, and it has been demonstrated that hogs, cattle, and sheep can be raised successfully. The principal live-stock industry is that of raising reindeer. Between the years 1892 and 1902, 1280 reindeer were imported into the northwestern part of the territory, and distributed among the Eskimos under the direction of representatives of the United States Bureau of Education. There are now nearly one million reindeer, and last year more than 75,000 tons of frozen reindeer meat were shipped to the states. This industry has great possibilities, for the territory will support many millions of reindeer, with very little expense ; and in the not far distant future the states will depend on Alaska for a good supply of its cheap but delicious meat. I wish I were able to picture to you, even in a small way, the beauties of the scenery of Alaska, but our best writers have expressed a lack of words for this purpose. Those who have visited all the other wonders of the world, and who have visited Alaska, claim that it is the richest spot on earth in point of scenery, with its forest-clad snow-capped mountains, its mountain-locked lakes, its long winding rivers, its dashing trout-filled streams, and its 20,000 square miles of glaciers. 58 National Education Association There are eight mountain peaks higher than Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the states, Mt. McKinley being nearly 6000 feet higher. There are a few active volcanic mountains and the “Yally of Ten Thousand Smokes” is considered one of the chief wonder spots of the world. The scenery of Alaska attracts thousands of tourists and scientists annually. Alaska, the last frontier, is also the last and greatest playground of America, with its big game, consisting of bear, deer, moose, caribou, moun¬ tain sheep, and mountain goat ; and its small game such as ducks, geese, ptarmigan, grouse, and so forth. Its trout fishing is the best to be found any¬ where, and a thing the game fisherman appreciates more than anything else, there are no “Keep Out” signs facing him as he fishes along the lake shores and streams. There is no limit to the number of trout one may catch, and in fact, on some streams there is a bounty on trout, for they eat salmon eggs, thus destroying commercial fish. I hope that you will become more interested in this territory and its prob¬ lems. I hope you will adopt the slogan, “See America First,” and you have not seen America until you have seen Alaska. At present you can reach Alaska only by boat or by airplane. But watch with interest the development of the proposed Pacific-Yukon highway. Con¬ gress has already appropriated money for its survey, and Canada is joining in on the project, and will help build it. We of Alaska hope that before many years this highway, which already extends as far north as Hazelton, British Columbia, will be completed on to Dawson, Fairbanks, and to Nome, with side roads to the coast towns of Hyder, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, and Juneau, and when it is com¬ pleted, the greatest recreation ground in the world will be accessible to every automobile owner of North America, and at a cost that even school teachers can afford. THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS MRS. A. H. REEVE, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF HOME AND SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA, PA. We look into a mirror and we see what is to us the most interesting sight in the world, namely, ourselves. We look eagerly, to see what manner of man or woman we may be, but we like best to view the picture under rose- shaded electric light. We pose a little; we make the best of ourselves. Un¬ less the pitiless glare of day shines upon us we do not see the shortcomings, the peculiarities, the wrinkles, and having beside us no standard with which to compare ourselves, we go away, as a rule, well satisfied with what we have seen. Like the wicked queen in the old fairy tale, we cry: General Sessions 59 Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest of us all? and we greedily accept the flattering assurance that we have no rivals. In Lewis Carroll’s delicious nonsense story, as Alice looked at the great mirror over the fireplace, it melted into permeable mist, and she passed through it into a land in which all the values were changed. The harder she strove to reach a goal, the more elusive did it become, and it wTas neces¬ sary to run as fast as possible in order merely to stay at the point at which she had arrived. In moving out into the international field we have passed through the looking glass, and we are now only one square on the great world-checker¬ board. Like the baby which the Duchess thrust into Alice’s arms, the thing we have been carrying so carefully sometimes turns out to be only a pig, instead of a precious infant; and again, what over there has looked like a Red Queen, when we come back here and shake it, resolves into a kitten, and a black one at that. “A sense of values is the best spiritual police against what is mean and shabby,” Henry Neumann has said. Here in this country we have perhaps no greater need than a true sense of values, and if this great convention makes us pause in our busy lives to take stock and make honest appraisal, it will have made a tremendous contribution to national advancement. We are a very young nation, and we have all the defects as well as the virtues of youth. We are cock-sure of ourselves ; we are inclined to be “bumptious” ; we love to “tell the world,” and we do it. We lay heavy em¬ phasis on money and what money can do. We like things to be large and showy ; size and cost bulk hugely in our conversation about our belongings and achievements. We like our high spots to be heavily gilded, so that people afar off may see them and be dazzled, and we do not feel ashamed that they are so high and so “spotty,” and that between them lie barren deserts and swamps, “bad lands,” and vast stretches of dull mediocrity. We like to have a reputation for knowing some thing about every thing, and we do not mind as much as we should that we do not, in the mass, know a great deal about anything. We think that our lack of culture is concealed by a high surface polish. We make our boast that in our country every child may be prepared for college ; but we do not shout so loudly the fact that only a fraction of them take advantage of that opportunity, and in educational circles we very often do not even whisper about the effect upon those who cannot go of the domi¬ nation of college entrance requirements which one hundred percent of our high-school students must meet. Vox populi is beginning to murmur, how¬ ever, on this point and it will sooner or later have to be recognized as still vox Dei. We talk much of the honor due to the teachers, and we glorify the pro¬ fession in the educational press ; yet in more than one of our greatest states 60 National Education Association the average salary paid the teachers is $700, in spite of the fact that social scientists have set from $18 to $20 a week as the lowest sum on which a single person can live decently and respectably, at a level of efficiency, upon his or her earnings. We do not ask where or how they raise the other five or eight dollars to bring them within the safety zone. We make eight}* percent of the world’s motion pictures. We are adver¬ tised, not by our loving friends but by the world’s greatest amusement money-makers. What do our social values look like through the looking glass ? People over there say frankly : “Tell us of your new methods in educa¬ tion, of your bringing together of home and school, of your splendid work for mental and physical hygiene, but do not tell us of your homes. We have seen too much of them upon the screen. We find it hard to believe what you say about them, in the pictures that you send us. Your young people drink in public to intoxication ; they ride about at night in cars with no chaperon ; they go to cabarets and what you call roadhouses. Young men and women grow affectionate upon slight acquaintance; and these are not the lowest of your lower classes. They come from homes which are veritable palaces and their parents seem to be men and women of social position. Tell us of your schools, then; we do not want to hear about your homes!” The first and greatest value of the international viewpoint is that it brings us to see ourselves as others see us; and it will “frae mony a blunder free us, and foolish notion,” if we will not shut our eyes tightly to avoid the sight of what may be unpleasant to our national pride. It may help us to measure ourselves, not by money but by what we do with that money and what we secure of solid benefit in return for what seems — to Looking Glass House — the outpouring of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. To us has much been given. What of our stewardship ? Are we better citizens and parents, better teachers, principals, and superintendents, to match our better schools ? What of our equality of educational opportunity, and how far may we honestly lay claim to it, and what, exactly, does it mean? How do we stand in comparison with old world systems through the looking glass, as regards teacher training, preschool education, rural extension, and vocational guidance? To establish values, we must make comparison of standards. People are coming to the Lnited States from all over the world; not. idle tourists such as we send abroad by hundreds of thousands every year, to spend millions of dollars and misrepresent our country, but thinking people, students of edu¬ cation and economics. They have seen our glittering high spots from afar and they are coming for a closer view. They are finding those other levels, where the gilding has worn off or has never been applied. Now that we have stepped through the mirror and out upon the great checkerboard, we shall have to run very fast indeed to stay where we are in their opinion ; and that is, after all, only in the ninth square in the educational field. Yet we go on making our high spots higher and brighter, instead of leveling up and doing General Sessions 61 a little painting down below. Our slums and our skyscrapers are rather typical of our American life. On the other hand, what are some of the virtues of this national youth¬ fulness of ours? Much the same as those of the young people of our day, — a splendid selfconfidence, enthusiasm, the courage of our convictions, the spirit of adventure, that same spirit which has led to the sweep of our empire from sea to sea and now, through glorious daring, to the carrying of our flag from pole to pole, and which in education leads us to try, to weigh, to risk, and so, ultimately, to achieve. Men and women are giving strength and brain and life itself to educational advancement, some provided with all that they could ask or desire for their task and some laboring in the desert places under conditions which try men’s souls. It is this social and human waste which must be salvaged. Great hearts and keen minds must not be lost be¬ cause we fail of the vision which will reach beyond our town or even our state into the vast national field and through example and inspiration and the education which comes through such meetings as these, will lead us to see that until we have given all of the children that to which they are entitled, we have failed in our citizenship. The international viewpoint demands our re-orientation. We must see this land of opportunity, not only as demonstrating education at its best but as offering a ground for experimentation, in which, because of our freedom and our local selfgovernment, new theories may be tried, weighed, and ac¬ cepted or rejected as their value may be proven. We need, therefore, to recognize frankly the constantly changing nature of our program, not as a liability to be concealed as far as possible from the public eye, but as what may be considered an asset, if we are willing to admit that where we fail and confess to failure, we are but saying that we are wiser today than we were yesterday. There is nothing so stultifying to progress as the fear of change. Change is a vital value, not only in education but in all life. We change when we grow, when we broaden and develop. We who are living in this age of miracles have reason to be thankful that the old walls of traditions are crumbling before the trumpet blasts of the priests of the new dispensation and the new ideas in education are rushing in wThere formerly they had striven in vain to climb over the barriers of prejudice and ultra¬ conservatism and — dare we suggest it? — slothfulness. For it is so much easier to go on as we are! When we pass through the looking glass we find ourselves in a strange world of centralized instruction, and we look around and, like the Pharisee of old, we thank God we are not as other men are, we who shy like colts when the shadow of federal influence falls across the field of our cherished states’ rights. Yet, in Looking Glass House there are some things which we should do well to observe. Over there the teachers must all measure up to certain fixed standards. Politics and local patronage cannot enter into the realm of public instruction. Our flexibility, so desirable in many instances, becomes flabby weakness as we range from our superbly equipped education- 62 National Education Association ists, down the long scale to the child sent out from high school to teach other children. Our vaunted equality is in danger of becoming known for the hollow mockery that it is, when we look back at it from the other side of the mirror. Another vital value, a crying need of today, is working knowledge which will function on all levels. The educational theories which have been worked out in the seats of the mighty must be adaptable, and adapted , to the use of the man on the street or the country road, to the woman in her kitchen in the flat or on the farm. We must lay more emphasis upon the principles which are applicable to all conditions, modified to meet local requirements. We must level up as well as down. Local demands must be raised to their highest power through the education of the people in the economic worth of practical wisdom. If the standards the teachers are trying to establish are to be those for all children, the public must be solidly behind the schools — and not too far behind. The support which can come from intelligent public opinion and from that alone is a vital value, a universal need which is being met as yet in only the most elementary degree. Dr. Lewis Alderman has well said : “Our motto has been that we must educate all of the children of all of the people. But we find that we have not succeeded in this because we have diagnosed the case as one more simple than it is. We find that we can¬ not educate all of the children without also educating all of the people.” A survey carried on in fifty countries by the International Bureau of Education for the International Federation of Home and School has shown that in thirty-three nations, definite and persistent effort is being made to draw together those major factors in education, the home, the school, and the community. For the child is not sent to school as a sheet of white paper upon which you may write ; nor is it even a palimpsest, on which you may cover the old lettering and begin a new story. It is a little human document, which often must be translated with much travail of spirit. The first chap¬ ters are complete; the character of the hero or heroine is clearly outlined, and that which follows can be only a development of the plot. In the White House Conference two striking points which are already emerging from the mass of material which is accumulating are these: The appalling inequality of educational opportunity of which we have spoken ; and the fact, gathered from practically every one of its many committees, that the life of the child is a unit and must be so treated, and that to this end, the home and the community must be recognized as coequal educational factors with the school, and as such, must be drawn into an ordered, work¬ ing partnership in which the duties and responsibilities of each member of the firm shall be clearly defined and adhered to. Now what do we see in Looking Glass House? The nursery schools, which here are so few, so experimental still for special groups, in France are a part of the public school system, and the poorer the neighborhood, the more wretched and squalid the surroundings, the more surely are these ttcoles Maternelles , these Motherly Schools, to be found. The teacher is the General Sessions 63 mother of all the neighborhood and every concern of the poorest household is vital to her who reigns as a veritable queen among her adoring subjects, the parents of her little pupils. In France we see too the Ecole Menagere , the Housekeeping School. In grim old buildings, up three or four flights of winding stone stairs, are rooms simple to austerity. Here are found no gleam¬ ing near-mahogany, no electric stoves and refrigerators preaching the gospel of the instalment plan, but simplicity and frugality to match the homes from which the pupils come and to which they must return. When a dress is worn out, they do not throw it away and buy another for $4.98; they dye it and one or two others in the same stage of dilapidation and out of the three they make one good and useful garment. Move now to the white square where we see the windmills and the canal boats and look for a moment at parent education in Holland. There we see no orderly classes presided over by intelligent young women, college-trained, and with perhaps occasional contact with a real, live child in the regulated atmosphere of a nursery school ; we hear no wise expositions of “motivation” and “controled environment” and “conditioned responses.” We see instead a great rambling red brick schoolhouse, the Museum for Parents and Edu¬ cators, presided over by three women who are mothers first and teachers by vocation. On the first floor are rooms filled with toys, bought and home¬ made, Montessori equipment and Froebelian playthings, picture and story¬ books, and a parents’ library, and the director is ready to discuss books or to give lessons in toymaking or the use of the apparatus. Baby clothes and clothes for children line the walls of the next room, and on the big tables mothers are busy cutting little garments out of new material or old clothes of their own, while a director stands ready with advice or instruction, as need may arise. In a third room are casts and models of the human form in childhood, a lifesized baby doll and a complete display of all that is needed for the care and comfort of children on varied economic levels. Here a nurse talks on feeding, bathing, and clothing, and gives hourly demonstra¬ tions as the mothers come and go. There are other rooms to meet other needs, and on the second floor is a sunny kindergarten where mothers may “park” their babies while they themselves go to school. Helpful literature is distributed, and if they are puzzled, nurse or director is ready to talk over special problems in friendly fashion in a quiet corner. Heroic little Belgium fills another square, in Looking Glass House. In its center stands the great state building which houses the Juvenile Court, where little boys shake in their shoes before the black-clad judges, three in a row. Not our idea at all, you may say. True; but they have another idea which is not ours either. Scattered through the poorest districts we come upon little houses just such as those the children live in, only these are very, very clean and neat. The door opens at a touch and we see a cheerful room with plants and a bird or a cat, and among them a pleasant-faced woman, knitting. The backroom is a playroom for small people, and in the little yard are swings, a sandbox, and some other apparatus. Upstairs are rooms 64 National Education Association for study and for handwork, and there after school may come the children whose parents are at work until seven oclock and who otherwise would roam the streets and feed the Juvenile Court. There they may find help with their lessons, occupations if they want them, and a simple supper; and juvenile delinquency is going down in the scale since these little homes opened their friendly doors. They are so poor, in Looking Glass House, so very poor sometimes, and they can do only the simple, homely, human things; but when we look back through the misty mirror, our great institutions look a little bleak and over¬ whelming, and the real values become more apparent. How our sense of those values changes and broadens as we look out as well as in and recognize and appreciate those which may make for our mutual interest and advancement ! In our dealings with those in Looking Glass House, wdiether we go to them or they come to us, we see how vital are such things as tact and imagination, that magic power to put ourselves in the place of another, and sympathy in the true sense of the word, as feel¬ ing with, and not for, one another. Language and expression and the degree of national experience mean much ; they are the background out of which values and concepts are developed. Racial psychology brings differences in thinking. We must learn to avoid easy assumptions based upon our own limited experience. To this new internationalism we must bring a desire to learn, and not to instruct. When men and women can come together with nothing to sell or to teach or to preach, the way is open for the establishment of that friendship which shall bring the world together, to labor for the welfare of the children, and the assurance of peace upon earth. INTERNATIONAL GOODWILL, A NATURAL OUTCOME OL THE SOCIAL STUDIES CURRICULUM LOR THE EARLY ELEMENTARY GRADES IDA ODELLE RUDY, PRIMARY SUPERVISOR, DAYTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS, DAYTON, OHIO That times have changed is evident. We see traces of this wherever we look. A few years ago, we had small groups working out problems of inter¬ national understanding and international cooperation. These groups gathered here and there and encouraged this type of thinking. But they were not very popular. People were hesitant about discussing these problems. Gradually groups became larger, and in other organizations we saw evidences that these ideals were permeating. The leaders who foresaw a federation of world educators and who came together in San Francisco some years ago, are realizing their dreams now, and while they stood quite alone at that time, they have gathered together thousands whose influence is felt and who are now promoting friendly world relationships. After all we are world neighbors — Lindbergh, Eckener, Byrd, and others have demonstrated that distance is not so great, and that we are becoming General Sessions 65 close neighbors, and that each nation is only a small part of a big, interesting world. This neighborly feeling has been felt in every organization and com¬ munity. It is quite the thing to speak in terms of international relations now. Those who are not entirely well versed on the subject are finding it neces¬ sary to fall in line with this spirit of today and study international prob¬ lems. Those who have been interested and have been students are having a chance to talk more freely about this. The schools have a great part to play in this interesting world situation. Our great educative system — the factories that turn out thousands of boys and girls each year who take their places in life — is the greatest of all world powers. What then are the most vital factors in the educative process? They are the child on one hand and the adult civilization on the other. What is the child? Rugg says, “The child is a jumble of needs and interests and of a wide range of potential abilities/' What is adult civilization? According to Rugg, “Adult civilization is an intricate and wellnigh incomprehensible composite of economic, political, and social institutions/’ With these t^wo important factors our world of humanity is developed. Let us think of the child first. 1. He must understand himself and the world in which he lives, and how it came to be. 2. He must have direct contact with things and people and the world about him. a. He is a member of a certain family, sex, and race. This gives him his in¬ heritance, gifts, abilities, capacities, and traits. b. He is black because he is born black or vice versa. c. He is plastic. d. He is susceptible to influence by the authority of older people around him. 3. His moral habits are formed by the law of effect. Right is what is approved by his elders and that which satisfies a desire. 4. He is individualistic. 5. He has certain tendencies. 6. His environment, training, education, play their part in his life and are con¬ ditioned and limited by the nature which is being influenced. The environment acts not as a creative force but as a stimulating and selective force. Kirkpatrick calls the age from three to six the period of individualism when children intelligently try to modify other people, their physical environ¬ ment, and their world of fancy to suit themselves, and through this self- assertion develop a personality more independent. Their conscience is influenced by the authority of older people around them, and their moral habits are formed bv the law of effect. Right is what is approved by their elders and that which satisfies a desire. Adult civilization is complex. It is filled with perplexing problems. It has struggles and disappointments. It is a strong factor in the life of a child. It must help the child to understand himself and his world about him, this complex life in which he exists. This understanding must come about 66 National Education Association through direct contacts with things and people of this world in which he lives. What is the power that creates this atmosphere for right impressions, habits, attitudes, and ideals? The answer is our schools. The curriculum of our schools, especially that for the early years which are so impressionable, must give opportunities for real thinking along the lines of world interests today. The child must be taught to know and appreciate : That all people of the world are occupied with the same things: 1. Building homes 2. Growing food 3. Making clothing 4. Engaging in wholesome sport 5. Celebrating holidays. That all nations have similar problems and that all are striving for same things such as: 1. Conforming to some religion 2. Creating and maintaining a stable government 3. Extending educational opportunities to all 4. Adjusting differences by means of laws and customs 5. Promoting health and happiness 6. Providing productive employment. That other people and nations have achieved success and that credit should be given them for inventions, discoveries, and other contributions to the world’s pro- gress. ( s Our social studies, then, should form the nucleus around which our cur¬ riculum should be built. These studies should be rich in material that will help our children to appreciate the value of labor and struggle, and should promote friendships among the children of the world. They should also stimulate curiosity about the lives of other people and nations. They should instil a sympathetic understanding and respect for the customs, forms of government, and religion of other peoples. In the city of Dayton, Ohio, a fourth-grade class visited a foundry. As the children observed the work of the men, one child of nine said to his teacher, “I never knew that men had to work so hard in a foundry. I never knew they had to work so long. I appreciate now what it means for a man to start out in the morning and work all day.” This is just an example of what understanding and knowing through direct contact with people and things, mean to children. Give to them a rich experience through the social studies about other peoples and other coun¬ tries, and they will unconsciously absorb right ideals of peace and goodwill for all people and all countries. With the child on one hand and adult civilization on the other, the school is our opportunity and the teachers are the guiding stars. Our goal should be peace and goodwill among all men and all nations. Then goodwill need General Sessions 67 not be celebrated only on May 18, but will become such an intricate part of our lives that we will influence all who come in contact. We must know to understand, and we must understand to be able to know. If I knew you, and you knew me. If both of us could clearly see, And with an inner sight divine The meaning of your heart and mine, I’m sure that we should differ less, And clasp our hands in friendliness. Our thoughts would pleasantly agree If I knew you, and you knew me. LOOKING FORWARD— ABSTRACT ~ AUGUSTUS O. THOMAS, PRESIDENT, WORLD FEDERATION OF EDUCATION ASSOCIATIONS, AUGUSTA, ME. A world civilization is being built up with startling rapidity. Commerce, travel, communications, the press, religious and educational cooperation, treaties and agreements, and worldwide charities must lead through imita¬ tion to a civilization of universal character. The world is face to face either with cooperation or catastrophe. Intellectual disarmament must precede the physical. Our country could well afford, on the precedence of the Boxer Indemnity, to set aside the $143,000,000 coming from Germany, as a payment of ex¬ penses incident to the occupation of the Rhineland, the income to be used under the direction of the government or such provisions as it may make for educational research, fellowships, exchange of students and teachers, lec¬ tureships, to be applied to all countries. This, done for the development of the spiritual values of a worldwide civilization, would prove a controling influence in the world’s progress and for international goodwill. A policy of isolation for a great country like ours is a dangerous policy. Today no nation can live unto itself alone. The material prosperity of the several countries is of great concern to us. With our development of mass production, the perfection of machinery and our high efficiency make it necessary that the markets of the world be open to us. The future will de¬ mand such international cooperation, rather than rivalry, as will raise the standard of living of all peoples. This will require a more uniform level of wages and buying power. If the people of all countries could be raised in productive capacity and purchasing power more nearly to our own level, there would be less unemployment. Markets would expand. Capital would be more constantly employed. National distrust, racial animosity, religious bigotry and intolerance would grow less, finally disappear, and a reign of justice would be ushered in. 68 National Education Association THE TEACHER'S JOB JOHN CALLAHAN, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, MADISON, WIS. A. little more than forty years ago I began work as a teacher in a little log schoolhouse in northwestern Wisconsin. While most people have a notion that vocational guidance is a modern invention, I wish to say that I was made a school teacher by vocational guidance. I had taken the teacher’s ex¬ aminations for the county merely because they were held in the schoolhouse where I attended high school, and as the other members of my class were writing, I decided to try it also ; but I had made up my mind to learn a trade and had no intention of teaching school. The high-school principal, under whose supervision I was for four years, spent quite a little time talking to me every once in a while about the joys of school teaching and finally convinced me that I ought to try it. However, at that time, and for at least ten years thereafter, I had a notion that teach¬ ing school was not an important enough job for a man to spend his life with. I thought, of course, that as far as women were concerned, it was as good a job as they could give their time to, as long as they cared to stay in any particular line of business. There were not as many things then that a woman could do as have developed in the years since that time. However, 1 liked the work and in line with Mark Twain’s definition of work and play, I found myself playing most of the time. A few years later when I became principal in a small town, it was my duty to convince the schoolboard and other members of the community that certain improvements and additions to the work should be made. That made it necessary for me to begin studying the importance of school work. I have kept that up, and I have sometime ago come to the conclusion that there is no more important work that either a man or woman can devote a life to. There are three very good reasons why the nation should spend #the amount of money it is spending on the schools. First, if we go back to the time this country was established, and our Constitution adopted, and look into what was said by the various statesmen in regard to schools, you will find that they all said something about like this: That if we made a success in the experiment of government that they were starting, it was going to be necessary, for us to have an intelligent, educated electorate, an electorate that could do some thinking on its own account and not be at the mercy of every demagogue who came along with a cure for all the ills, or supposed ills, the country was heir to. Every statesman that has said anything on the subject since that time has said about the same thing. When one looks into what they said about education at that time, he begins to wonder why they left it out of the Constitution. Many people are inclined to tell us that they left it out because they were convinced that it was a matter that should be left to the states ; but when one digs into the General Sessions 69 history of the time, he cannot help coming to the conclusion that that was not the reason. The reason was that there was such a wide difference of opinion between the New England states and some of those farther south as to what should be done in the way of education that they knew they never could come to an agreement on it ; so they left it to the states, hoping that the states would do a good job. I have developed for myself a second reason for spending all of the money we are spending even though the first is sufficient. There are still in the world many people who object to paying taxes for the education of other people’s children. When I meet one of these people, I like to sit down and talk it out with him, because what I think they are doing is simply paying insurance on stability for the future. Our school system is the only insurance for stability worth having. If you doubt that, I suggest that you take a map of the world and pick the countries that have very little or nothing in the way of schools. Then go back into their history and note what happens every time they decide that they need a change of any kind in government. In almost every case they stage a revolution with all its loss of life and property, and property rights go overboard and are not worth the paper that records them. When you study the history of this country, you can find a great deal of evidence that we have been able to settle many things of that kind with the ballot and without any trouble. The third reason that I have developed to justify the cost of education in this country is one that is not used quite so often. I will admit it is not as high a type as the other two, but nevertheless, it has a great deal of weight in certain quarters, and that is the business promotional value of our schools. I believe that of all the business promoters, our school system is the best. First, if you could go back with me to the time I began teaching school and come down over the years making a note of the number of things that were regarded as luxuries that have come to be looked upon as actual necessities at the present time, you would understand what one means when he speaks of the rise in the standard of living. Now if education or schooling has had anything to do with this rise in the standard of living that has gone on steadily during the last fifty years, it has just that much to do with the increase of business that has come during those years. Second, take a map of the world, select the countries where there is a school system that com¬ pares somewhat favorably with ours. You will note that countries with good school systems are doing many times the amount of business that is done in the countries where there is no school system. When two things of this kind go together in every case where they exist, it certainly means that one has some effect on the other. Consider the countries in which there is no such school system as we have and then ask yourself, or any business man, this question: How will a million of those people compare as an asset to any 70 National Education Association business, with a million people such as we find in the United States, or in other countries where there is a good school system? The answer will always be that there is no comparison ; that as a business asset, they are very far apart. Then, if this is true, business should be back of the schools at least to the same extent that they are back of their advertising, for, without the schools, their advertising would bring very little business. Sometimes when I present these arguments to business men, I am told that they would agree with it, if most of our education was vocational, aimed at preparing young people for lines of work out of which they might make their living. In that case, they assume that what is known as our academic schooling has no effect on business. But, when one looks over the situation carefully, one is forced to a different conclusion. Take, for example the result that has come in this country growing out of the fact that we have not only taught the people of this country to read, but have made readers of them. Go back thirty or forty years and get from our census the number of Deople who were making their living then out of the fact that the people of this country were reading; then take this coming census and get the num¬ ber of people that are now making their living out of that fact, and you will find that while the increase in population of the country has not been one hundred percent, that the number of people who are making their living out of the fact that we have made readers of the people in this country is over three thousand percent. This, as well as promoting new business, has had its business adjustment value that has taken thousands of people out of com¬ petition with other lines of work, and this type of adjustment has been extremely valuable in this country because every year labor-saving ma¬ chinery ruins the work that many people have prepared themselves to do and they find it necessary to adjust themselves to other lines of occupation. The same thing that is said for reading may be said for music and art, in spite of the fact that many people are inclined to call them fads that are put into the schools to the detriment of the fundamental subjects. This does not mean that I am opposed to vocational training. I am very much in favor of it, but I also want the young people of this country to have as much academic education as they can be given before they start on a definite vocation. When I give these reasons to groups of teachers as a basis for my belief that there is no occupation in this country more important than that of school teaching, I am sometimes told by teachers who are spending their life in grade work or in certain types of class work in high school, that it is all right for me to talk that way, that the position I hold has some impor¬ tance; but that if the little job they hold has any such importance, they fail to see it. At times like that, I like to call their attention to the text which Reverend Talmadge used for one of the best lectures he ever gave. It is taken from the Old Testament and runs about as follows: “Even as is his reward that goeth down into battle, so shall his be that stayeth by the stuff.” That was a regulation made long before the time of Christ by one of those General Sessions 71 old generals when all the reward that soldiers received was the loot that they captured in their campaigns. This loot was then divided among those engaged in the battles. As a result nobody wanted to stay by the stuff. In other words, nobody wanted to guard the baggage or supply trains, and, just as in that time it was as important to do that as it was to fight the battles, so today in the teaching force of the country, the privates in the ranks are just as important in the jobs they have to do from day to day as the principals or superintendents can possibly be. The colleges could do very little if the work that is done by the teachers before these young people reach college had not been done. I am perfectly willing to admit, of course, that the rewards are not very great, at least in the financial line, but that is not the only reward that comes from a work well done. When wTe consider the fact that many of the grade teachers and high-school teachers go on day after day, year in and year out, doing the best piece of work for the young people that they find themselves able to do, we realize the importance of their position. When I remember my own attitude during the first ten years of my school career, I cannot help but feel that it would have been better for me and better for those with whom I came in contact had I had the appreciation of the importance of my job that I came to have later. I feel that I am sometimes boresome in my desire to convert every school teacher to the same view that I have, as far as its importance is concerned. If we can once get over to the people of this country this view of the importance of the schools, there will be no need for further worry as to their financial support My own opinion is that we are making headway very rapidly as far as this is concerned. THE PHILIPPINES IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION CAMILO OSIAS, RESIDENT COMMISSIONER FROM THE PHILIPPINES, WASHINGTON, D. C. I deem it an honor to appear on the program of the National Educa¬ tion Association for the consideration of the international viewpoint in education, I am particularly grateful for the recognition of the existence of the Philippines on the educational map. I chose for my subject “The Philippines in International Education." While the country which I have the honor to represent has as yet no inter¬ national personality, the voice of a people like the Filipinos cannot be entirely ignored or disregarded in an adequate and complete determination of the international point of view in education and in defining the aim, content, and method of education for the modern world. The Philippine Islands are inhabited by a people tremendously anxious to achieve their national emancipation and complete selfsovereignty at the earliest possible date. It is their conviction that the fulfilment of America's promise and the satisfaction of their national aspiration are essential and necessary not alone for their political wellbeing and economic stability but for their intellectual orientation and educational security. 72 National Education Association Ours are a people essentially of Malayan stock and Oriental traditions. More than any other people of the Orient, and for a longer period, the Filipinos have come in intimate contact with the civilization of the Occi¬ dent. Possessed of an alphabet, a system of writing, and a culture of their own long before the first group of Europeans took possession of the Philip¬ pines in the name of Spain in 1521, for three hundred years 'and more, my people received the impact of European culture. During the Spanish regime elementary and secondary schools and institutions of higher learning were established. The University of Santo Tomas in Manila, with royal and pontifical sanction, wTas founded in 1611 or twenty-five years before Har¬ vard University. Some colleges of the Islands have a history as old as some of the oldest institutions of learning in this country. In 1863, the King of Spain issued his famous royal educational decree which was responsible for the establishment of a nationwide system of public schools. It resulted in the establishment of a school for boys and a school for girls in practically every town of the Philippines. Toward the third quarter of the nineteenth century, we already had some 1,608 schools. In 1870 we had more than 1,779 schools. When thirty- two years ago the Americans took possession of the Philippines there were over 2,160 schools in operation. These bare facts give an insight into the early cultural background of the Filipino people and explain how it was possible to achieve under American-Filipino cooperation the educational progress which impartial American educational authorities have pronounced as unparalleled during a similar period in the history of the world. The early American administrators quickly noted the great passion of the Filipino people for education. It was seen that there were no sacrifices too great for Filipino parents to make in order to have their children educated. In fact, this characteristic of our people was utilized by the American mili¬ tary authorities as a means of winning the confidence of the Filipinos in America’s purposes. As you well know, the Filipinos fought an unequal struggle for nearly three years against the superior force of this country. It was a continuation of the series of struggles waged against Spain to free ourselves from a dependent status and to bring about worthwhile social, political, and educa¬ tional reforms. We lost in that war, but we made manifest our firm desire for national selfexpression. Peace was restored upon assurances that America came to help us in our progress. We were assured by no less a man than the revered President Mc¬ Kinley that America went to our shores not to conquer us but to liberate us, to train us, to educate us in the art and science of self government. We ac¬ cepted in good faith America’s announced policy to assist us in the establish¬ ment of a selfgoverning democracy and eventually permit us, unhampered and untrammeled, to lead our own lives, and be masters of our own destiny. When the military authorities themselves devoted their time, energy, and effort to the reopening of the schools that were closed because of the Spanish- American war and later the American-Philippine war; when officers and General Sessions 73 soldiers laid down their arms and conducted schools and classes; when American teachers came to the Philippines by the hundreds; when the Philippine Commission passed Act 74 establishing the Bureau of Education in charge of the public school system of the Philippines below university grade; when the civil government inaugurated by Taft as the first civil governor showed clearly that American effort was directed toward insuring our welfare, our advancement, and our happiness, the Filipinos earnestly gave their cooperation in order that the ends of a free and demo¬ cratic government might be best solved. Education has been truly the handmaiden of the democratic movement in the Philippines. Our main objectives of educational endeavor have been to offer opportunity for free elementary education to every child of school age ; to conduct the necessary secondary schools maintained partly from taxes and from fees borne either directly or indirectly by those benefited; and to maintain higher institutions of learning for the development of leadership in the various lines of activity in our national life. In order successfully to carry out our educational program, laws were enacted for its adequate financing. The municipal governments set aside for schools at least twenty- five percent of the annual appropriations. The national or insular govern¬ ment devotes approximately thirty percent of its annual budget to the sup¬ port and maintenance of education. The Philippine Legislature from its organization has always been liberal in appropriating money for the educa¬ tion of the masses. Let me now briefly mention certain tangible evidences of educational progress. There are today in the Islands over 8,000 schools both public and private, some 30,000 teachers all of whom are Filipinos with the exception of 293 Americans, with an enrolment of approximately 1,250,000. The textbooks used are written in English and instruction is carried on in the English language from the lowest grade. The record of literacy in the Philippines today is better than that of Spain, Mexico, or any one of the South American republics or any one of the countries in the Orient except one, and it is better than that of thirty-seven nations which are independent. The curriculum of the Philippine public schools includes the academic features of similar institutions elsewhere. Vocational education has been made a part and parcel of our system of education. There are prevocational and strictly vocational courses offered. Physical education is given adequate attention, emphasis being placed upon general participation rather than the specialization of selected groups. Commercialized athletics is unknown in the Philippine schools, colleges, and universities. Ninety-eight percent of the boys and girls enroled in our public schools take active part in a regular program of group games, calisthenics, exercises, and athletics the whole year around. Opportunities are also provided for training students in good manners and right conduct, social activities, and selfgovernment. I shall now enumerate a few of what I deem to be Philippine contribu¬ tions to education. Among these are: 74 National Education Association 1. The evolution of textbooks adapted to Philippine conditions in English among a people to whom this language is foreign. 2. The successful demonstration of the efficacy of the direct method of language teaching as evidenced by the fact that all work is carried on in English and it is now a common medium of communication in the Islands. 3. The development of a general physical education program enlisting the par¬ ticipation of the greatest possible number instead of merely developing a few stars. 4. The incorporation of a graded system of vocational training for boys and girls as a part of the school curriculum in the public schools. 5. The development of teacher-training institutions and the preparation of a teaching, administrative, and supervisory staff of Filipinos in a language other than their own. 6. The large proportion (about 30%) of the government finances devoted to schools reflecting the universal passion of our people for education. I sincerely believe that the record of the Philippine schools merits the study of educators interested in international education. Although notable educational progress has been made in the Philippines, there is one great obstacle to our real national reawakening. I refer to the uncertainty of our political status. I am not now speaking of politics. In very truth, I am discussing education. It is not generally known in this country that although the Filipinos are under the American flag, we cannot, by your laws, be American citizens. Neither are we citizens of a free Philip¬ pines. If education is for the purpose of training the youth for good, useful, and loyal citizenship, how can we train the Filipino boys and girls when we do not know for what kind of citizenship to train them? You will appre¬ ciate the reason why as a schoolman I am exceedingly interested in the definite determination of our status as a people on the basis of America’s sacred promise and the Filipinos’ supreme desire. While it is true in a sense that education, like all science, transcends national boundaries and should be the patrimony of the entire world, nevertheless, I maintain that developed nationalism is a stepping stone to sound internationalism. Our people crave a nationality of their own that they may the better play their full part in international education. The true international point of view should be determined on the basis of the com¬ mon denominator of mankind. In the crystallization of this common denominator the Philippines and nations like it must not be disregarded. We truly crave the opportunity to be permitted as a people to make our modest contribution. Within the bounds of our own lights and limitations we must no longer be denied the privilege to apply to our education our conception of education whose trinity of aims is defined in terms of efficiency, freedom, and happiness. Will it be deemed unreasonable for me to expect of men and women in the field of education their genuine sympathy and active support as thirteen million Filipinos desire to have a place in the concert of free nations? The Philippines will then be a better laboratory for international education. We shall be in a better position to evolve a national system of education through the application of our own genius and talent, which shall embody the best of the Orient and of the Occident. The Filipino General Sessions 75 people will be better able to contribute to the common cultural and spiritual heritage of mankind. HO TV TO PROMOTE INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION CLARE SOPER, INTERNATIONAL SECRETARY, NEW EDUCATION FELLOWSHIP, LONDON, ENGLAND Why do we need to discuss this problem of internationalism ? Because, as was said recently at Geneva, “The world has just become conscious of itself, not as a composite of nations, but as a world.” We can see that in¬ dustry and commerce are being forced into practical internationalism by sheer necessity; they are welding the world into a material unit. It is urgent that a parallel cooperation should take place within educational and cul¬ tural spheres. The new world unit needs a new type of mind to function in it. It is for the teacher to seek ways of cultivating that new type of mind in the young who will have to live in this new world and face increasingly complex world problems. As H. G. Wells has said, we are witnessing today a race between education and catastrophe. It is my belief, however, that the international attitude cannot be taught, that like other great experiences such as religion and love it can only be conveyed from one person to another; it is a matter of contagion, not a matter of any statement of facts. Here we come to the problem of the teacher, for unless the teacher has some degree of world consciousness, nothing of permanent value can be conveyed to the school concerning internationalism. Internationalism begins with the individual. The individual problem is the world problem, for it is ultimately through the individual that the world can be changed. It may be that the best point at which to arouse enthusiasm for internationalism in the teacher is through some subject in which he is naturally interested and through which the implications of internationalism come most vitally. For instance, modern developments in science, education, psychology, and philosophy all sound the note of unity. Science has discovered the “unity of matter — the protoplasmic unity of life — and the pervasiveness of mind.” Psychology is occupying itself with the study of “wholeness” and in education are we not beginning to see the child — when we study him scientifically — as a “focus of relationships"? Further, internationalism is a practical application of the ancient (and modern) philosophy of the unity of life; it is an attempt to escape the “separation that is the root of sorrow.” The great religious teachers have never preached brotherhood as an arti¬ ficial idea. It is an expression in human relations of the law of life. What can we as individuals do in order that internationalism may become part of the texture of our lives? First, it is important that we do some work upon our own intimate thinking. It is quite fundamental sometimes to draw apart from the stress of daily life and try to reach a disinterested point of 76 National Education Association view, a disinterested standard of thought, that belongs to no country, no nationality, no religion, and no sect. It is almost impossible to gain this, but it is good to try to get away from the immediate and take a viewT of the whole, of the future, of life as far as we can see it. We know, when we stop to think, that our lives are dependent upon the ends of the earth, but we do not consistently act upon this knowledge. We have to make an effort to bring international thinking into line with international facts. We have not only the mind to deal with ; there is the emotional factor. We have to feel international and to strengthen our emotional discipline by definitely cultivating the art of liking our immediate neighbors. Emer¬ son has said ‘ 'Alone we are whole but when we meet we become fractions.” We have to learn the art of being fractions. A story is told in a pamphlet, published by the Friends Peace Committee, of a man who at a conference stood beside a stall displaying peace literature and shouted continuously “No More War” in order to attract attention to the stall. Presently a little Serbian boy passed along and the man said to his companion, “Look at that little mucker, he’s a Serbian — the dirtiest lot of people on the earth. Not one of them should be allowed in this country.” The writer of the story goes on to say that “attitude” is obviously more important than “concept.” We must develop attitudes, and attitudes are the result of experience. Here we come face to face wTith some of the fundamental changes that are permeating our conception of education. True internationalism must be the development of an attitude, of a habit of approach; it must be intrinsic and of lasting value to the individual through his wThole life. Such funda¬ mental effects can be produced only if the whole of our education is based on principles the same as those implicit in internationalism. What are some of these principles? They are admirably outlined in Professor D. A. Prescott’s recent book, Education and International Re¬ lations. We are coming to regard the child and not subjectmatter as the center of the school. This conception is followed by important implications : 1. The child learns best through direct experience. 2. The child is an active organism — there is a perpetual give and take between him and his environment. The school, therefore, becomes a place of active research rather than of instruction poured in by the teacher. The child learns how to attack problems, how to work upon their solution with his group. There is free scope for the individual plus cooperation with the group. Children develop the habit of going to sources, of weighing facts, of estimating bias. 3. Learning takes place around centers of interest that grow naturally out of the child’s life. There is an attempt to understand the problems of the immediate life around him. Then there is the growing attempt to consider the child as a whole, to educate him as a whole and not as a series of isolated faculties. There is an increasing recognition of and respect for individual uniqueness, and an effort to develop this in harmonious relationship to the group. General Sessions 77 There are the problems of the integration of personality. All these ques¬ tions are fundamental if we are to prepare the next generation to live in an integrated world. Our young people must be trained to make their own judgments, to weigh conflicting evidence, to see both sides of a ques¬ tion, and not follow authority blindly. As Professor Prescott says: “The replacement of the habit of accepting academic authority, by the habit of searching actively for the truth is of fundamental importance for the future attitudes of the people towards international relations. ' There is an organized body of people with these new attitudes to educa¬ tion and internationalism with which the teacher can associate and so receive inspiration and practical assistance in the daily work. I will refer briefly to the New Education Fellowship, an international organization of teachers who are seeking to adjust education to the needs of modern life, an organization that gives expression to a great search that is going on throughout the world. The Fellowship is worldwide with sections in twenty-eight countries and international headquarters in London. At its last conference held in Denmark over 2,000 teachers attended from forty-three countries. A report of this conference has been issued entitled “Towards a New Education'' and prefaced by Sir Michael Sadler. What services does the Fellowship offer to members? It offers opportunity for the actual practise of interna¬ tionalism. It offers personal contacts, information, international study. Every two years a conference is held to which come teachers from all nations. Calais, Montreux, Heidelberg, Locarno, Elsinore have been the hosts of these conferences. They provide personal contact with the co¬ workers in other lands, and with wellknown leaders. The next conference will be held in August, 1932, probably in the south of France. The Fellowship circulates information on experiment and research in the progressive field of education. There are eighteen magazines in seven¬ teen languages associated with the Fellowship. Perhaps the best known in the United States are the Xew Era magazine, an international monthly published in London and edited by Mrs. Ensor, and the Progressive Educa¬ tion magazine published in Washington. It is useful to work together internationally on specific problems. The Fellowship has set up commissions to study some of the more pressing problems that are facing educators in all countries. At present there are eight commissions. These commissions consist of representatives of different nations who investigate, report, and direct action. To mention only three of these commissions: there is a Commission on Modern Psychology and Its Application to Education; another on the Training of Teachers, and another on Examinations. This latter commission is already organized in twenty-two countries — countries presenting such varied problems as South Africa, Scandinavia, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia. Now here is a stream of international thinking, working, and contacting of which individuals can become a part. The Progressive Education As- 78 National Education Association sociation of America is affiliated with the Fellowship, and a joint member¬ ship has been arranged by which it is possible to become a member of both organizations. I have not dwelt upon the many international activities which may be undertaken by schools today, such as international camps, visits, corre¬ spondence, League of Nations Assemblies, or upon the potent force for good or ill that lies in our history textbooks and story books or upon the need for study of contemporary history by the teacher because, although these are all important they are matters that are only a part of the general permeation of the school with an international awareness. Many organiza¬ tions are concerning themselves with these details, and the awakened teacher can receive rich suggestions from them for classroom atcivities. The first step in international education is the w'ork we must do upon ourselves and developing with that should arise a basic reshaping of our con¬ ception of education. Then in order to strengthen and sustain our ideals we can reach out into cooperation with an international band of coworkers and so align ourselves with some of the new forces that shall link the na¬ tions inseparably and overcome the distances that still baffle understanding. A REDEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IN EDUCATION GEORGE D. STRAYER, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AND DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF FIELD STUDIES, INSTITUTE OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. The most significant ideal of democracy is that of equality of opportunity. We seek to develop a society in %vhich neither race, nor creed, nor economic status, nor class, nor caste shall interfere to deny to the individual the opportunity to achieve significantly and to live abundantly. We were con¬ cerned in the early history of our democracy with the guaranteeing of equality of political rights for the individual. We soon became conscious of the fact that the right to participate in government did not carry with it the realization of the ideal of equality of opportunity. As much as sixty years ago we had come to accept in the United States the idea of free tax supported public education as essential to the realization of the democratic ideal. The original concept of equality of educational opportunity was based primarily upon the proposal that no one of superior intelligence should be denied the opportunity to continue through elementary and secondary schools, through the college and the university. We had a one-track school system; the road for the capable from the elementary school led straight to the secondary school ; for those who could achieve success in the secondary school, opportunity to continue their education wTas provided in the college and university. This school system of a generation or more ago was democratic in that it did not set up barriers that made it impossible for General Sessions 79 one to pass through the several stages of the school system. It provided, as well, in many cases, for free tuition throughout the whole school system. But the scheme was essentially aristocratic in that opportunities were pro¬ vided for the most part only for those of superior intelligence, and there was a denial of opportunity to those boys and girls who were unfortunate enough to live in communities that were not financially able to develop the complete school system or in which, for other reasons, the provisions of education did not go beyond the elementary school. Possibly the most significant factor limiting the opportunity for education to American boys and girls, even today, is the lack of financial ability in the particular local area in wdiich they live. We still have children growing up in the United States who go to schools that are miserably equipped and poorly taught. In many cases the term is short, and the local school system does not carry them beyond the elementary school level. But we are making progress in achieving our ideal with respect to the equalization of opportunity insofar as it is determined by support. Every¬ where men accept the proposal 1 that the “state should insure equal educa¬ tional facilities to every child within its borders at a uniform effort through¬ out the state in terms of the burden of taxation ; the tax burden of educa¬ tion should throughout the state be uniform in relation to tax-paying ability, and the provision for schools should be uniform in relation to the educable population desiring education. Most of the supporters of this proposition, however, would not preclude any particular community from offering at its own expense a particularly rich and costly educational program. They would insist that there be an adequate minimum offered everywhere, the expense of which should be considered a prior claim on the state’s economic re¬ sources.” In a number of the states within the period of the past ten years state support, based upon the measured need of the community for support for its school system in relation to the ability of the community to support a state standard program, has been provided by law. This means that large sums of money are collected through state taxation on a statewide basis and that these funds are redistributed to the locality in terms of their need and of their ability to pay. It may happen that in a given locality the state standard program will require five times as much as will be produced by the tax rate that has been used as a basis for equalizing the burden of sup¬ port. In this case, the community raises one-fifth of the total amount of the tax rate needed to support the standard program, and the state con¬ tributes four-fifths of the total amount. It is possible to carry out such a program without interfering with local selfgovernment. If the basis upon which state support is granted requires a local tax less than the maximum amount that the community may reason¬ ably or constitutionally levy; then, after support has been provided by * Strayd- and Haig. The Financing of Education in the State of New York p 173 Mac¬ millan Company, New York, N. Y. 1923. 80 National Education Association local contribution and by state support for the maintenance of the standard program, the community is free to add to this program or to improve it by taxing itself for this expanded school system. It is desirable from the stand¬ point of the development of the state's standard program and with proper recognition of the significance of local selfgovernment that communities be guaranteed this opportunity for expressing their ideals and for exercising their initiative. We have, in the United States, an interesting history of national support for education. Through grants of land and of money, the public school system of the United States west of the Ohio River was established. Free higher education was originally developed upon the basis of national sup¬ port. In more recent years, special aid for vocational education furnishes another example of a movement to equalize opportunity and to stimulate the states in the development of their programs of education. National sup¬ port has, for the most part, been accomplished without interfering with the rights of the states to control, administer, and supervise their own schools. Further equalization of the support of education in the United States waits upon still further support to the states from the national government, for in no other manner may we reasonably expect to provide comparable oppor¬ tunities for education throughout the nation. The concept of equality of educational opportunity has grown during the past few years in another most important direction. We no longer be¬ lieve that a single-track school system provides equality of educational op¬ portunity. In our more progressive school systems, the traditional elementary school and senior high school have been replaced by schools which seek to provide unique opportunities for boys and girls who vary greatly in their ability to acquire skill or knowledge, in their power to undertake precise thinking, in their capacity for growth in power of appreciation, and in their ability to do creative work. Instead of the old-fashioned elementary school with a single course of study, we have provided schools in which individual instruction is given, others in which groups are organized with respect to their general intelligence or special abilities, classes for those who are back¬ ward, delinquent, physically handicapped, and the like. For that part of the school system which was once merely a repetition of the work done in the first six grades, we have established the junior high school with its broaden¬ ing and finding courses, with its earlier beginnings of mathematics beyond arithmetic, foreign language, science, and a variety of opportunities in indus¬ trial and household arts. For the high school, which was available for only the top ten percent in intelligence, we have provided the comprehensive high school with multiple curriculums, enroling more than fifty percent of all boys and girls of high-school age. We have added to the lower end of the school system the nursery school and kindergarten. At the upper end we have extended the program to include the junior college. We have paralleled the work of the high school with the continuation and voca¬ tional schools. We are beginning to develop a program of adult education General Sessions 81 which may prove to be the most significant of all changes in our school organization. The recognition of individual differences has been the key to progress. We have sought diligently to adjust our schools to the needs and capacities of those who are registered in them. City school systems, small and large, have developed an organization for the study of the problems of curriculum. Teachers, supervisors, and superintendents, under the direction of well- equipped specialists, have moved our schools beyond the stage that they oc¬ cupied when the textbook was the only guide provided for the teacher. More and more certainly courses of study are offering suggestions to teachers which will enable them to make significant adjustments to in¬ dividual needs. Our curriculums are less traditional and more certainly re¬ lated to the social demands which the schools are organized to meet. The interests, enthusiasms, and creative abilities of children are given a larger place in our modern courses of study. However, the realization of the ideal of equality of educational opportu¬ nity will require a reorganization of our public school system in most of the states. The district and township school organization now so commonly found must give way to the larger unit. It is safe to propose that only when the local school system includes elementary schools and junior and senior high schools is there any reasonable possibility of providing for the individual needs of the pupils living within the area. This complete school system cannot be organized in a one-room school, nor can it be maintained in a township which provides a number of small and incomplete educational units. The variety of opportunity throughout the school system necessary for the significant education of all boys and girls is dependent upon the em¬ ployment of competent teachers working under the stimuli provided by ex¬ pert supervision in school systems organized and administered in such manner as to make possible the adjustment of the school to the needs of each boy and girl. The realization of this ideal requires that relatively large numbers of children be brought together in one organization. With the coming of good roads and rapid transportation by automobile, it is as reasonable to propose that the country be considered the unit for the or¬ ganization of the school system today as it was to organize that school sys¬ tem in a district or township fifty years ago. Our experiment in democratic education has important implications for the rest of the world. In some regards other democracies have outdistanced us. The provision, for example, for support as well as for free tuition, is an important addition to the concept of equality of educational opportunity. The peoples of other countries propose, without hesitation, that w~e are the only country wealthy enough to seek to provide education for all boys and girls at the secondary level regardless of the degree of intelligence which they possess. They look at our secondary school system critically because they fear, as do many of our own group, that we will provide less signifi¬ cant education for boys and girls of superior intellect. On the other hand, 82 National Education Association they acknowledge that essentially democratic ideal which would provide continued education for all along lines from which they may profit and at levels indicated by the varying abilities and capacities of those who make up the whole population. The concept of equality of educational opportunity is significant for hu¬ manity as well as for the citizens of one democracy. We have to our credit the benefactions of a group of our citizens who have contributed to the de¬ velopment of education and to research throughout the 'world. The mis¬ sionary enterprises supported by our people that have carried schools, col¬ leges, and medical education throughout the backward countries of the world are a significant contribution to the development of a world of mu¬ tual goodwill and understanding. There are today in other countries, particularly in Europe, experiments under way which may contribute much to our understanding and apprecia¬ tion of a democratic school system. We and they, working together, will, in the generation which lies ahead, learn more certainly to adjust our schools not only to the capacities and abilities of our pupils, but also to the needs of democracy. Let us hope that we may cooperate in increasing measure with other peoples in the realization of the democratic ideal; for the welfare of humanity is dependent upon the opportunities for education provided for the people of the whole world. THE INTERNATIONAL POINT OF VIEW AS A VITAL VALUE IN EDUCATION— PROGRESS WITH TEACHERS FLORENCE E. ALLEN, JUDGE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF OHIO, CLEVELAND, OHIO Surely the transmutation of ideals into habits of thought and action is the main task of the teacher. The obligation of the teacher through all ages has been to establish a behaviorism, as it were, for the individual and for the race, and one of the colossal tasks which faces mankind Is the establishment of a wholesome behaviorism of some habits of thought and action in the group with reference to international matters. I am well aware and keenly in sympathy with that branch of the movement for world peace which con¬ stantly stresses the fact that you and I must think peace thoughts ; that we must develop habits of personal amity toward members of other nations. The task of the teacher cannot be solved unless he faces squarely the fact that ultimately wars are made by the acts of governments. The ultimatum . which was delivered to Serbia by Austria was an act of government. The mobilization of Russia was an act of government. When the Kaiser declared the German Empire in a state of war, that was an act of government. When Belgium resisted the invasion, that was an act of government. Of the greatest value is the building of peace concepts in the individual, but world peace can never be established unless those concepts are written into governmental policy and law. And so I desire to direct the attention of General Sessions 83 this great body to the practical problem which faces the teachers of the world. Here in this country our task should be, perhaps, a trifle easier than in other countries because of the fact that here the war power and, there¬ fore, the peace power has long resided in the legislative branch of the government. The American Constitution was the first great written constitution. But constitutions written after that time in Europe are still in force, such as those of Belgium and Italy which give the absolute war power to the execu¬ tive. Publicists now agree that the placing of the war power in the hands of the representatives of the people instead of in the hands of kings does indeed, in the words of Mr. Mason, make for “clogging” instead of facilitating war. This century, therefore, has seen the rise of the idea that the entire problem of war and peace belongs not merely to old men who sit in offices and help create the hostilities out of which wars arise, not always deliberately desiring war but too often blundering into war, but that it belongs in the first instance and always to the representatives of the people who bear the burdens of war. In my judgment, the task of the teacher in establishing the international point of view in this country must first be carried out from the standpoint that the war and peace problem in the United States is the people’s problem. When once the growing boys and girls are taught that the people’s idea is to control in international matters, then a large part of the battle in this country will be won. It was a people’s idea that young people should not have their right to live snuffed out at the will of some monarch; that old men and women should not have their grey hairs sent down in sorrow to the grave because of the ambition of some mighty king. The stressing of this American concept, a concept deliberately written into the Constitution of the United States, the change of which was refused upon a vote in the Con¬ stitutional Convention, cannot too often be stressed in the schools of the United States. Now what is the next task of those whose obligation is to transmute ideals into habits of thought and action? What is their next task with reference to international relations? It is nothing less than this, we have to change the entire governmental conception concerning the making of war, and that conception, the old conception, perhaps, never has been better expressed than in Machiavelli’s famous discussion of what a prince should be and do. A prince should have no care or thought but for war and should apply himself exclusively to this as his peculiar province. For war is the sole art looked for in one wrho rules and often enables a man to rise to eminence from private station. A prince, therefore, ought never to allow his attention to be diverted from warlike pursuits and should occupy himself with them even more in peace than in war. This, of course, is the old world’s conception of an executive and his function. Then again, Machiavelli says : 84 National Education Association Here comes another question, whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might, perhaps, be answered that we should wish to be both, but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose be¬ tween them, it is far safer to be feared than to be loved. The old world conception was that the primary duty of government was embodied in the executive and that his primary duty was to make war, to study war, and furthermore, that it was far safer for the executive, that is to say the government, to be feared than to be loved. As a matter of fact, the world does change by the force of ideas. Victor Hugo once said, “The noise of history is caused by silken slippers passing down and wooden sabots climbing up the staircase of time.” No phrase could more succinctly describe the great movements of his¬ tory. The rise and fall of dynasties, the fine progress of the race. Sometimes in our study of history, however, we lose the true music of the spheres by the outward noise of the personal doings of people high in station. Only when we rise above the level of the earth and look from the standpoint of the ego can we appreciate the great human movements at their true value. Now, growing, I suppose, out of this old concept embodied in our own Constitution that the war power was a people’s power, there came that other people’s idea that if individual crime can be repressed, if individual lust for power can be held in leash by the establishment of law based upon ethical consideration, then the establishment of ethical standards into law between the nations of the earth would be the first prerequisite toward the erection and maintenance of world peace. A new note was struck recently in this and every other great country by the Pact of Paris. One of the immediate practical tasks of the teachers in transmuting ideals into habits of thought and action is to implant those very ideals of the Paris Pact solemnly entered into by our country by a vote of eighty-five to one. The Pact of Paris will be found to be a power which makes it distinct from the old-fashioned treaty, hatched in the darkness of the foreign relations’ offices. It promises to gather about it the atmosphere w7hich has been taken on by the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. It w7as not merely the wTork of statesmen, filed in secret archives, known only to rulers and diplomats, to be announced “after the event” to the confusion of the very people involved. It is a people’s treaty and may truly be called the vox populi , an open covenant, openly arrived at. Now what was the achievement of the Pact of Paris? It is very little recognized. It should be taught in every grade, high school, and college in the United States. The Pact of Paris should hang upon our walls with the Declaration of Independence, because it writes for the first time in history new international law, and begins to declare independence against war itself. Article I. The high contracting parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another. General Sessions 85 Article II. The high contracting parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means. Without adverting to the colossal and terrific burden of war, I desire for a moment, from my standpoint as a lawyer, to indicate to you what, in my judgment, is the amazing achievement of the Pact of Paris. It enacted a new law for each of the signatory powers. It cut away the right which nations have hitherto had under international law to resort to war not in self-defense, only, by no means, but for any cause. I could bring you quotations from twenty-five international law texts proving that the right to make war for any purpose has been since the up-growth of nations the prerogative of the sovereign, either expressly admitted or tacitly recog¬ nized by every writer on international law as it actually exists. Historians will say that the multilateral treaty was epoch-making because it wrote international law in a field theretofore neglected by international law and in what surely is the most important field of international relations. The multilateral treaty changes the status of the war power in every foreign office of the signatory powers. It automatically changes every textbook on international law. Where the consensus of the authorities formerly was, as Hall says, that “international law has consequently no alternative but to accept war, independently of the justice of its origin, as a relation which the parties to it may set up if they choose/' now all international law textbooks have to add, “but the great powers have now, in the Pact of Paris, solemnly renounced this right and covenanted to seek the solution of every contro¬ versy of whatever kind or origin only by pacific means." Why do I say that the task of our age is to implant and vitalize this treaty? I say it because a great and distinguished representative of our de¬ fense forces, coming back from England, stated that we had to have a certain number of vessels in order to make war upon Japan, because we would have to travel twice as far to attack Japan as she to attack us, thereby indicating that that treaty was partially, at least, written with the idea that America has not renounced her sovereign right to make war along with the other nations of the world, but that she intends to be armed so that she cannot only defend but attack. If once during the London Conference America had said, “We meant the thing that we wrote in the Pact of Paris; we meant the things that President Hoover said when he said ‘No' to the National Congress; it is law for us ; when you, England, propose to abolish the battleship, we accept your offer," is there any doubt but what the cause of disarmament would have been advanced one hundred years? In addition to emphasis upon the fact that in this country the war power lies with the people and that we nullify our obligation and fail to perform our civic duty unless we cooperate with the President in shaping our foreign policies, in addition to the fact that we have to vitalize the Pact of Paris and 86 National Education Association make it the basis of all future negotiations, we have to bear in mind that without the support of the people, without the support of the electors, great measures in international law will fail in this or any other country. The project No. 30 was submitted at the request of the Governing Board of the Pan-American Union to the International Commission of Jurists and was meant to be submitted at the great Pan-American Conference at Havana. It was drafted by a Commission headed by James Brown Scott, one of the greatest thinkers on international law. This project No. 30 went very far in establishing law with teeth in it for international relations. The law has always been between you and me that if I steal your watch, I get no title to that watch. If I sell your watch to John Jones for $30 and you find that John Jones has your watch, you can go and take your watch from him be¬ cause a thief can have no title to property that he steals. The law has always been with reference to stealing between nations that the nation which con¬ quers and subjugates another territory gets title to that territory. In this great Project No. 30 the thinkers on international law of this hemisphere proposed that we change that rule of international law to accord with sound ethics in every other sphere. This was the project : The American Republics provided that in the future territorial acquisitions obtained by means of war or under the menace of war, or in the presence of armed force, to the detri¬ ment of any American Republic, shall not be lawful, and that consequently territorial acquisitions effected in the future by these means cannot be invoked as conferring title and that those obtained in the future by such means shall be considered null in fact and in law. It was a wonderful proposal. It was a proposal that deserved the support of the entire American nation. But somewhere on the way to Havana it was placed in a pigeon hole and never presented, and when I asked one of the most distinguished men who works in the Pan-American Union whether that project would not have been presented at Havana if America had wanted it passed, he said, “Certainly it would have been because every Central and South American Republic, of course, would accede to that proposal.” The lesson of that happening is that in this country progressive and sub¬ stantial advance will not be made in establishing world peace upon the sound basis of the erection and maintenance of law by the governments unless the people of the country know what projects are proposed and put their strength behind them. So that when the thing comes into the Senate of the United States, or when the proposal is made that it be pigeon-holed, the man who has it in charge will feel as one of our distinguished Senators felt with reference to the Kellogg Pact, that while it was a foolish piece of business, he dared not vote against it because if he did he would be hanged in effigy on every street corner in Missouri. This whole question is the serious task of the teachers of the world. When the teachers of the world teach the practical relationships of the peace problem and the meaning of the great progress made in international law, General Sessions 87 then the peoples of the countries will demand that their governments abide by the covenants into which we have entered. When that time comes, when we abide by this covenant, then we shall begin to build a world community in which there shall be no situation in which the rules of right shall not govern, in which there shall be no group so powerful that it shall be above the moral law. THE HANDICAPS OF LIMITATION W. J. HALE, PRESIDENT, AGRICULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL STATE COLLEGE, NASHVILLE, TENN. I am now engaged in what I call the third of man’s basic problems. I am trying to live for somebody — my family, my race, my state, my country — humanity. A man’s opinions are a reflex of his experiences. My personal experience may have something to do with my interest in handicaps and limitations — and the belief that the world is growing better. Man’s first problem is to live; his next problem is to live with somebody; his third problem is to live for somebody. Civilization is a matter of peaceful and mutually helpful contacts. Educa¬ tion is promoting civilization. The best thought of the past said “live and let live” ; today we say “live and help others to live.” The more clearly we think, the more wisely we act. Limited thought means handicapped action. Wise men have always known the value of wis¬ dom and rich men have always known the power of wealth. The tragic and bloody revolutions of history have come because the rich had little wisdom and the wise had little wealth. But in our day we see wisdom and wealth uniting for human betterment. Leisure and learning are seeking each other’s company. Limitation no longer strangles endeavor. Wealth is removing the handicaps of poverty, and wisdom is fixing the limitations- of wealth. Carnegie and Rockefeller, Duke and Rosenwald are but the harbingers of a glorious dawn. The limited vision of the past has handicapped man’s progress towards that ideal of the ages — peace on earth and goodwill among men. Let us take stock of handicaps that are being removed. Work is no longer a penalty but a privilege, and aimless leisure is no longer a privilege to be coveted but a danger to be avoided. Machinery is killing drudgery. Electricity enables a person to command by his own ef¬ forts, comforts and conveniences that ten thousand slaves could not bring to the tyrants of the past. Conditions of labor are improving. But we have the problems of unemployment. The dispositions of men are growing kinder and more liberal though life is more complex and difficult. Education is our hope. The National Industrial Conference Board has done well in setting for itself the task of inquiring into the nature and extent of the maladjustments 88 National Education Association between industry and the public school system. Not that preparation for industry is to be the sole or even chief aim of public education, but that insofar as all boys and girls are expected to have some part in the work of the world, they should be looking toward the particular occupation in which they are fitted to give their best. With the growing complexity of industrial life, this becomes increasingly difficult, especially when further complicated by the social factors which enter into every child’s future, not to mention the effects of environment which defy forecasting. As has been aptly said : “Wisdom lies in the masterful administration of the unforeseen.’’ Happily, the researches of science have made it possible to know more and more of the future that is in the child itself rather than in its stars. Vocational guidance to which increasing attention is now given by the schools is a step in the direction of the adjustment which the National Industrial Conference Board is seeking. Each man has a right to work. Lowell says: “No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him.’’ Work is man’s greatest blessing, for the worst material misfortune of life is to be out of work. We are living in a new age, the “machine age,” an age of science and discoveries. The industrial revolution has affected our domestic, social, intellectual, political, and economic life. One man with a machine is now doing the work that less than a quarter of a century ago required fifty men. These machines are and must be operated by trained laborers. Are the nations’ citizens of today being trained to meet the new demands? Are the twenty million young people housed in our schools being properly prepared to meet the difficulties of our industrial, social, and economic life? Society today throws out this question for study: Is youth being trained to meet the needs of a changing civilization? This is a challenge to the far¬ sighted statesmen and frontier thinkers of nations today. The school is the only conscious agency employed by society to give the youth of a people ex¬ perience in wholesome living of the most economical sort. Man must be trained to meet the changes about him and adjust himself to changing con¬ ditions. The effectiveness of any nation rises or falls with the competency of its citizens, and no individual, race, or people, lacking proper training, can hold its own in the battle of life. The emergencies created by the World War of 1914, brought many nations face to face with the neglect of proper training in the mechanical arts of its men and, as a result, they failed to meet the definite demands of life with efficiency. Again, education must answer. Health — Modern medicine has placed about the humblest homes defenses against disease and suffering that kings’ palaces knew not of a hundred years ago. Yet we have diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid. We have the knowl¬ edge. Why do we not banish for all these preventable diseases? Since the germs of disease are dreadfully shy of intelligence, sanitation, the public health physician and nurse, the hospital and the full dinner pail, General Sessions 89 and, since the germs of disease are comfortably at home with ignorance and superstition, dark corners, unsanitary homes and communities, would it not be good business to double, or even quadruple the amount being spent on education, sanitation, and public health services, thereby saving millions annually from economic loss? Why limit this service to sections or groups? Again, education must answer. Economics — Economics is one of the oldest and most troublesome prob¬ lems of human contact. When everybody has enough to eat, and everybody is satisfied with enough, the ultimate goal of civilization will be reached. Economics has become a college major but we still have millionaires and paupers. Why? The knowledge that, regardless of one’s aptitudes, one’s achievement must be made in certain restricted areas of human activity tends to deaden one’s aspirations and to paralyze one’s initiative. Why should one with a natural aptitude for mechanics aspire to be technically trained in mechanics, if he knows that the reward is to be a position as an unskilled laborer? The chief handicap of limitation is the development of an attitude of cynicism, which results from denying man an opportunity to develop within the range of his capacities. Intellectual advancement seems a positive fact, and yet intolerance and prejudice are active and dangerous factors of our religious and racial life. It is said that the Sherman mob was led by college youths under twenty-five. Why? Civilization must mark time till education answers! The deepest tragedy of civilization is the attitude of the average mind towards new or unfamiliar truth. Ignorance scents danger in novelty. Edu¬ cation is the only remedy. Education means widening horizons. The point of view is vital. The radii of our circles of interest grow longer and longer as the field nf our vision extends. Intercourse means interdependence. Psy¬ chology breeds as many contagions as pathology. Thought is dynamic. Ideas are explosive. The brotherhood of man comprehends the sisterhood of woman. International exploitation is no safer foundation for peace and pros¬ perity than intranational oppression. There is but one species of man, only one human family, and human welfare is the only legitimate goal of educa¬ tion, the only safe foundation for human endeavor. Intelligence must guide our intentions and love of truth must warm our enthusiasm. Only then will man formulate a creed that will control conduct and establish a government that will do justice. In the last analysis, the benefits of civilization are for all or for none. . How long will men continue to defeat themselves by seeking to limit others? How long will men continue to destroy their own ideals by seeking to deny opportunity to others? Crime and immorality are the great handicaps of our civilization. These handicaps arise from the limitations we have set upon our ethical and eco¬ nomic thinking. As long as men evade the Golden Rule so long will they miss the pearl of great price. 90 National Education Association Limitation is a form of suppressing truth, and suppressed truth is always dangerous. It is firing a boiler without a safety valve. An explosion is always in the offing. One of the great difficulties of the age is to be found in the narrowness of the perspective of people. Our world is too small. Our provincialism limits our vision. Narrowness makes us mean. Breadth of opinion, world outlook, and internationalism break down prejudice, race barriers, and limited grasp. For us to lay claims on education, there must be an international outlook which links men with men, country with country, and nation with nation. In all of this there is a plan of culture which links men into a brotherhood. In speaking of handicaps and limitations being modified, in no section of the whole country is the matter being worked out in a greater degree than in the south. The south is now passing through both an economic and an intellectual renaissance. Pioneer voices have cried in the wilderness for fair play to avail, such men as the late Dr. Wallace Buttrick; Dr. J. H. Dillard of the Jeannes Fund; Commissioner of Education P. L. Harned and Superintendent R. L. Jones of Tennessee; Mr. S. L. Smith of the Rosenwald Fund; Dr. Bruce R. Payne of George Peabody College; Dr. Edwin Mims, author of The Ad¬ vancing South ; and others. A new day is dawning in the south. Coming true is the prophecy of Dr. Edwin Mims in The Advancing South that If to the sentiment, the chivalry, and the hospitality that have characterized the Southern people shall be added the intellectual keenness, the spiritual sensitiveness, and the enlarged freedom of the modern world, the time is not far off when scholar¬ ship, literature, and art shall follow, and when all things that make for the intel¬ lectual and spiritual emancipation of men shall find their home under Southern skies. Both individual men and organizations are daring to think in world terms of social and civic wellbeing. Instead of being content with merely pano¬ ramic views of problems and principles, they have begun to get airplane views of the situations and from above see the picture of humanity as a whole. An ever increasing number of men and women representing the common herd and the finest blood of the artistocratic south is subscribing wholeheartedly to the philosophy that “no man is educated until the last man is educated; no man is free, until all men are free.” Let us, then, cultivate an enthusiasm for the attainable and be patient but persistent. The limitations of prejudice will surely yield to reason. The handicaps of race, religion, and social position will disappear. The world is growing better and the Golden Age is before us, not behind us. In the midst of world civilization is a little child. Take wise and loving care of that child and all human interests are safe ; neglect that child and all human interests are endangered. General Sessions 91 EDUCATION FOR WORLD IMPROVEMENT WALTER R. SIDERS, FIELD REPRESENTATIVE, WORLD FEDERATION OF EDUCA¬ TION ASSOCIATIONS AND CHAIRMAN, BOARD OF TRUSTEES, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. World education rests upon the assumption that all peoples are intelligent and susceptible to education. Those who deny the universal distribution of intelligence must know that heredity contributes but 75 percent to 80 percent of our physical and psychical characteristics. This leaves a margin of from 20 percent to 25 percent of improvement of intelligence through environ¬ ment. Careful experimentation has established beyond doubt that intelligence is improved more rapidly under a favorable environment. We may confi¬ dently hope to uplift the most backward people by the improvement of their surroundings, by making the sciences and the arts of civilized life accessible to them. The resources of the earth are sufficient to keep every creature in com¬ fort. When we make the sciences and the arts of civilization the common property of all mankind, there will be throughout the whole earth such a conquest of environment as will provide food, clothing, shelter, and other fundamental necessities. A civilization may be measured in its attitude toward other people, in the service it renders to humanity. In extending help to other peoples, we should not attempt to make them patterns of ourselves. We should develop their own genius by helping them to help themselves. Compliance with external forms will not affect the desired result. Teaching a man to wear a straw hat in place of a turban does not change his heart, his mind, or his thinking. We can increase the production capacity of all persons through education. The vital wealth of the people of this country is five times the material wealth. Increase in education will increase that multiple. There are people in the world whose vital wealth is barely equal to their material wealth. They consume as fast as they produce. People who can produce goods be¬ yond their daily needs are increasing wealth. Two generations ago it took three persons raising food to keep one man in the factory. Now one-third of the population can raise more food than we need. World education demands an altruistic attitude of equal rights to all men, of appreciation for all men, and such a disposition of wealth and social struc¬ ture as will create equality of opportunity for all men of the world. The most immediate problem for world improvement is to attain for the people in a collective capacity the same moral, ethical, and spiritual plane as is required for the individual. Murder is wrong. War is permissable. They should be equally condemned. It is wrong to steal, but apparently not wrong for a nation to acquire oil wells and desirable bits of territory through acquisition. 92 National Education Association Dante wrote, “Give the people light and they will find the way.” There is a sufficiently large number of intelligent people in every race and clime to understand, to appreciate, and to lay hold of the work of modern civiliza¬ tion. Witness the remarkable progress made by the Japanese. Witness what has been accomplished in the Philippines in a generation. The more intelli¬ gent persons in every race can grasp what the