And all the while in Halifax, in China, or in Guatemala the Civilian Relief of the American Red Cross goes quietly on its way without advertisement, turning every hill of difficulty, every path of distress and hardship into a Jericho road of helpfulness and sympathy.

And what of the future? Is war alone to call out such magnificent manifestations of the spirit as your American Red Cross? One cannot believe it possible. There will remain, when the last war note has sounded and the battle flags are furled, the way of reconstruction-reconstruction for other lands for a period not now possible to estimate, as the stricken soils of Belgium, Armenia, Servia, Italy, and France are restored and smile once more with the fruits of free citizens' labor. It means work, but we must help.

And reconstruction for America no less. Even if dreaded war eagles never hover over our rich cities there will be much to do in the way of reconstruction. To bring up the submerged groups out of poverty into self-support, to prevent by common control the return in successive generations and spread of the great plagues of mankind: feeblemindness, undernourishment, starvation, crimes of ignorance, crimes of disease, preventable mortality. The imagination falters in trying to measure the possibilities of such volunteer power as exists in the Red Cross of today.

Leaders of American education! The preparation for all this great program of betterment of which many men and women are dreaming must be of but one kind-beginning thru activities by education to prepare future citizens to undertake such work. This, I take it, will be the field of the Junior Red Cross of the future. May we all live to see the day when the Red Cross spirit has become a vitalizing force in the American educational program.

SCOUTING EDUCATION FOR GIRLS

ABBY PORTER LELAND, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GIRL SCOUTS, NEW YORK, N.Y. In this world-wide crisis of stress, storm, and suffering the educator of vision and wisdom thruout the land is weighing in the balance the school curriculum and asking himself, Does this curriculum which I am advocating train for citizenship? What kind of citizenship? Is the child, because he has been thru our schools, more capable, honest, and reliable? As willing to accept responsibility as he is to recognize his rights?

The Girl Scout organization, which it is my privilege to represent here today, recognizes keenly that the girlhood of America stands in urgent need of training for vigorous responsible womanhood and loyal, intelligent citizenship. This organization is an outgrowth of the Girl Guides of England. When Sir Robert Baden-Powell organized the Boy Scouts he found, besides the thousands of boys clamoring to be enroled, no less than six thousand girls. Wisely deciding against a single organization for both sexes, Sir Robert called on his sister, Miss Agnes Baden-Powell, to enrol

the girls as Girl Guides after a plan identical in fundamental aims and principles with the Boy Scouts, but entirely distinct in organization. The differences in detail in the application of the principles underlying scouting education are due to the differences, psychological and social, existing between girls and boys.

Working with Miss Baden-Powell was Mrs. Juliette Low, an American woman long resident in England. When in 1912 Mrs. Low returned to her native city of Savannah she was urged by Miss Baden-Powell and Sir Robert to organize Girl Guides in this country. She did so, forming the first troops in Savannah. But the girls, secure in the knowledge of the origin of the movement and reflecting the spirit of America, insisted upon being known as Girl Scouts and thus they were incorporated in Washington in 1915.

Girl Scouts are now organized in 510 cities and towns in the United States in cooperation with schools and parishes and as lone troops. Only four states are without troops. The growth of the movement has been as sound as it has been rapid. Its principles and methods have the indorsement and cooperation of leaders in education and human affairs all over the country; for example, the Department of Education of the state of New York accepts the Girl Scout work in lieu of three of the four hours required per week in physical training and recreation.

The scout movement does not contemplate the establishment of a new coordinate organization for the development of childhood alongside of the home, the church, the school, and the place of business. It is rather an enterprise calculated to combine all of these institutions upon the basis of the girl or the boy who lives in the home, the church, the school, and the workshop, and who in each of these places could be a better son or daughter, a better church member, a better pupil, a better employe, because he or she has embraced the principles of scouting and is working according to its program-a program that is real, flexible, and vigorous, that gives concrete expression to a high code of honor.

Dean Russell, of Teachers College, from his first-hand experience as chairman of the National Executive Board of Girl Scouts writes of the program as follows:

Scouting differs from all other work for girls that I know about in that its primary aim is good citizenship. It seeks to develop physical strength, right posture, and grace of movement because these are essential to good health, to dignify the daily duties of the household because the home is made by woman, to care for the sick and protect young children because these are women's rights, to do good unto others whenever occasion offers because this is the law of love, and to train its members to keep mentally awake and morally straight because this is the way to grow. Other organizations, however, may claim as much. But the glory of scouting is that it makes these aims merely means to ends. The supreme end is service to God and Country.

Dr. William L. Rabenort, in whose large junior high school there are Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops, believes in the scout movement as one

of the great educational discoveries of our time. He suggests that since the school aims at the employment of existing agencies for education thru their vitalization and modernization rather than at the introduction of new activities or new agencies thoughtful school leaders may well pause to consider scouting for girls. To use Dr. Rabenort's educational terminology, "Scouting is the modern, spontaneous curriculum which children voluntarily embrace."

In the schools the curriculum has been selected for the children, who have to take what the schools prefer to give. Is it not a well-known fact that many children, while present in the classroom in body, are decidedly absent in spirit? Who can estimate the number of our grammar-school children who, because of no choice of what they shall study, have elected not to study at all? Furthermore are there not many supervisors and teachers, especially now when we are being forst back upon real things, discouraged at times because they feel that many plodding, faithful pupils under their care are acquiring merely words-a vocabulary sediment as it were?

Girl Scout education leads; it does not coerce. Hence its program is always such as will appeal to the instincts for play, for life in the open, for companionship, for altruistic service and novel experience, so as to attract, win, and hold its followers. Contrast the opportunities of scouting, therefore, with those of the school to develop initiative, responsibility, and leadership!

Scouting succeeds because girls like it. While for the girl the first interests are largely recreational, as opposed to the worklike routine of home and school, and social, as giving opportunity for companionship and for doing together real things, the deeper aim, as understood by the troop captains and other leaders and eventually appreciated by the girl herself, is "to promote, thru organization and cooperation with other agencies, the virtues of womanhood by training girls to recognize their obligations to God and Country, to prepare for the duties devolving upon women in the home, in society and the state, and to guide others in ways conducive to personal honor and public good." In other words, scouting opens to girls pleasures which satisfy their natural healthy impulses and imagination and at the same time affords them a stimulating share in the interests and pursuits of adults. It is this, motivated by a high code of personal ethics developt thru the Scout laws that retains the interest of girls and gives final worth to the movement.

Every activity of the program of Girl Scouts, from the simple tests of the initiate to the standardized requirements of the first-class scout, connects directly with that same activity in adult life. It is a woman's job cut down to a girl's size, its difficulties so graduated as to put the rewards of achievement within the capacity of youth. These activities, covering

Constitution, Article II.

the wide range of health, home, vocation, avocation, and citizenship, have been judged fundamentally sound by practical educators; their appeal to girls' interests and their reactions on girls' characters have been tested by trained workers in experimentation on widely differing groups. They consistently stress, not the rights of the girl, but her responsibilities.

The Girl Scout plan utilizes thruout the group-spirit. At no time does it emphasize the individual girl. Every activity tends to train her as a member of a group, responsible to a larger group, to the home, to the community, and to the nation. We find the troop the unit of organization doing the community a good turn. The troop undertakes certain sustained duties and executes them as a troop. It is the troop that volunteers to sweep the Red Cross workroom every day; consequently the individual scout whose turn it is to do the work has the honor of her whole troop behind her broom. It is the troop flag that is decorated with the war badge when the troop has achieved satisfactory results judged qualitatively and quantitatively in accordance with specified standards. Thru such special war activities as well as thru the more normal civic activities scouting teaches the young girl the law of service thru working in cooperation with others for the welfare of the community and the nation.

Civic consciousness, the sine qua non of intelligent citizenship, is gained by constant cooperation with civic organizations. Girl Scouts gain an understanding of the working of civic and social institutions from service to them. The product of their troop garden is sent to the community kitchen; the result of their canning work is given to the school lunch committee; the jams which they make from berries pickt in the woods last summer are intrusted to the district nurse for distribution. Every contribution either of service or of kind establishes a point of contact between these agencies and the individual girl. These points of contact increase and strengthen steadily during the girl's entire scouting experience, and their influence inevitably carries over into adult life. The active Girl Scout of today is the vigorous, clear-visioned, well-informed civic leader of tomorrow.

The nationalism of the Girl Scout organization is, it seems to me, one of its most urgent claims to attention. The unification of individuals and groups on a nation-wide scale for a great common purpose is an enormously valuable influence in the lives of young girls. It has been a great inspiration to the leaders in this work to observe how the national sense of these young girls has grown thru their participation as a national organization in the activities of our national life. The pride the widely separated units feel in the recognition Girl Scouts have received from the Department of Education, the Food Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the America First Committee, and the Women's Liberty Loan Committee has had an immediate and definite reaction on the troops and on the girls. Their purposes have steadied, their outlook has widened-they see beyond

themselves and their communities. When a troop plans a patriotic entertainment and invites the foreign-born women of the community as honored guests it senses in its undertaking a deeper significance than the surface. manifestation.

National Headquarters, Girl Scouts, believes genuinely in training girls for citizenship thru scouting, i.e., thru apprenticeship, thru the actual participation of the girl in the real work of the community and nation. It offers to you, our educational leaders, its best facilities of cooperation in the preparation of the girls of America for the opportunities and responsibilities that lie ahead of them, in the preparation of the coming generation of women to take its part in the rebuilding of the world.

COUNCIL OF STATE DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION

A. CONFERENCE OF STATE SUPERINTENDENTS

THE NEW RESPONSIBILITIES AND OPPORTUNITIES WHICH THE WAR SITUATION HAS BROUGHT TO THE STATE DEPARTMENT AND THE SCHOOLS

FRED L. KEELER, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, LANSING, MICH.

I shall dispose of the first part of this topic by stating that the schools. have no new responsibilities. Bankers and business men having under way some project in connection with the winning of the war often approach school teachers and school superintendents with an apology something like this: "We realize that we are putting you to a good deal of trouble. This business will take a good deal of time from your regular work." I believe, therefore, that it would be wise to make plain what our regular work is.

We are all familiar with the advice given annually to the graduates of our public schools when they receive their diplomas. The boys and girls are always askt to consider the great expenditure the community has made in order that they may have an education. They are askt to go out and demonstrate to the world that the expenditure has been wise. It is well that boys and girls be imprest with the fact that the community has done well by them. At the same time the patrons and taxpayers should understand clearly that not one cent of school tax was ever paid primarily for the education of these young people in order to equip them for personal The story is told of the Connecticut farmer who when askt by the collector to pay his school tax replied, "I will not pay the tax. You have no more right to ask me to pay for the education of my neighbor's

success.