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ous stages of advancement in that subject. If he is not specially gifted, his teacher will keep him moving forward. He will not become a repeater. That teacher of algebra would not have thought of keeping the girl sauntering, if his daily experience had stretched along thru three years of work in mathematics.

The greatest objection to the vertical plan is that it precludes the possibility of teaching children in droves or herds of forty, fifty, or sixty. As teachers discover the possibilities in individuals, they develop what might be termed an educational conscience, and are constrained to give mind a better opportunity.

Ineffectual approaches to subject-matter, methods of treatment of subjects that are evolved out of nothing and lead nowhere, are useless in every stage of education. Elementary and secondary education cannot be differentiated until the second of the two sets of conditions involved in the problem is considered. That set of conditions is named the "course of study." The chaotic situation as regards the course of study has resulted largely from the reaction against the rigid college preparatory requirements that long dominated the ideal of education in the school. The struggle and victory of the scientists in the war against classical learning to the exclusion of scientific investigation have effected elementary education more than secondary. The secondary school snuggled under the wing of the college so long that the college in coming out from the contest with the scientists has greater flexibility than the secondary school. It is the elementary school, with its nature study, household arts, manual training, and parents' associations, that has stood for the scientific reformation below the college and has for a long time perplexed the secondary school. The latter has, however, taken on some of the arts of the common people and has begun to comprehend their significance in education.

The colleges have broken away from their single list of requirements for admission. Today in the more progressive universities there are groups of required preparatory studies leading to nearly every department of learning known to the modern mind.

The college and technological preparatory courses are so arranged that the manual training, household economics, the beginnings of science, and the training in art and literature should find thru them an entrance into desired advance work. The time has come when elementary and secondary education must be unified and then differentiated. The great course of study must be reduced to reasonable proportions, and then intelligently apportioned between the grammar and the high school, with a clear understanding of the relations and responsibilities involved. The preparatory courses for college, and those in manual training, household economics, nature study, and school arts, offer abundant material for continuous lines of work. Every elementary subject should be so planned

as to lead naturally and necessarily into advanced study in that same subject in the secondary school; that secondary study should necessarily lead into the treatment peculiar to the college.

The high-school courses are now arranged in elective groups; the grammar-school courses should be so arranged in their last three years. Something of the kind obtains in cities in which modern languages and Latin are taught in the seventh and eighth grades: excepting that the child taking an extra language is usually forced to take it in addition to the rest of the course. If we could break away from the fear of having classes in which all of the members of the grade do not recite in every subject, it would not be difficult to arrange these groups. They would settle the question of the course of study for the children intending to go into practical life at the end of the eighth grade, and for those in the same class intending to go to the high school.

The National Council could do nothing greater than to set a body of competent men and women to working out the course of study for elementary and secondary education. It would accomplish little if the elementary-school teachers were left voiceless. Experience in the great. educational movements of the last quarter of a century, sound scholarship, and organizing power should be brought to bear on this problem of saving time, improving the quality of the work, and not overcrowding the children in the elementary and secondary schools. Whether an effective solution will be soon secured or long delayed is an open question. The attitude of this Council will have great influence in the decision.

DISCUSSION

PROFESSOR CALVIN M. WOODWARD, St. Louis, Mo.-I have enjoyed the papers exceedingly. They are full of suggestions, and would easily provoke a long discussion. I have, however, only three points to make.

I heartily approve of Mrs. Young's notion of a vertical arrangement of study whereby there is secured a definite relation between the parts of the subject, whether it be Latin or Mathematics or any other sequential study. I fancy, however, that this plan is much interfered with by superintendents or school authorities who specify just where a teacher shall begin and where she shall end in a specified time.

While agreeing with Superintendent Balliet in nearly all he said, I think he classifies high-school children in two different ways which are inconsistent. He first classifies them as "gifted" and as "dull," and he gives the gifted a shorter course and the dull ones a longer course. Again he classifies them as "those proposing to go on to college" and "those intending to stop at the end of the elementary or secondary course." Now, it happens that the gifted people are not always rich, nor are all the poor people dull, and therefore the two classifications are conflicting. In short, I object to classifying pupils with reference to any future course. The moment a boy or a girl enters a course of study especially designed for those who are not going to college, literary or technical, then the way to a higher education is closed to him. I do not believe in that. I believe that every way of advancement should be open at the top, and that a boy is at any time and at every time on the way to higher education if it shall turn out to be possible to him. I object to any system which virtually closes the door against him.

JAMES M. GREEN.-I have listened with interest to the papers of Dr. Balliet and Mrs. Young, and have found them very suggestive. I think, however, that it would add - greatly to the discussion if they would put their suggestions in terms of subjects of study. To say that the secondary course of study for one who is to enter college must differ from that for one who is not to enter college is not sufficiently definite. We should like to hear a specific statement of the particulars in which they should differ.

We have recently had in college circles a very general discussion on the length of the B.A. course of study-whether or not it should be shortened, and what effect its treatment one way or the other would have on the secondary course. Here again we should be helped if those leading the discussion would speak in terms of subject matter. For instance, how much Latin prepares for the college course, and how much additional Latin prepares for the university course? Paralleling this inquiry in English, mathematics, history, etc., we are better able to understand what would be expected in the different schools and the different courses of study.

The term "liberal education," like the term "culture," is very indefinite, and is not a sufficient warrant to those who are called upon to ask states for the expenditure of large sums of money in carrying out their courses. What we need is to show that a certain study and a certain amount of that study are necessary to the accomplishment of certain definite ends.

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MRS. YOUNG. Some speakers have read their ideas on departmental teaching into my paper. Nowhere did I suggest limiting a teacher to instructing in one subject. It is desirable in the grammar grades that a teacher instruct in more than one subject, but not in so many subjects that in the evening she must prepare lessons in geography, history, arithmetic, drawing, music, nature study, English, and readings in literature. It is also desirable that a child's work spread over more than the few subjects that any one person can teach extremely well. Attention to these two desirable conditions will give a class of children the same teachers in some subjects three or four years. This arrangement will insure continuity in the work. Power gained by the children will be used in attacking new questions with the same teachers year after year, and so be capitalized continuously. There is all the difference in the world between this continuity and the finishing off of a half-year's or a year's work with one teacher. One speaker says that twenty-five years ago he tried departmental teaching and found it a failure. He seems to remember it merely as a right-about-change-of-teachers-every-half-hour. I know a school principal who likes to narrate his one experience with departmental teaching. Two weak teachers were assigned to his school. He knew they were incompetent, and so gave them charge of the music and penmanship. Those teachers proved his opinion about the foolishness of dividing the work by departments to be correct. They were failures, and he has not permitted departmental teaching in his school since they were dropped for incompetency, thirty years ago.

The objection has been raised here that departmental work does not care for the child's moral well-being. Does morality depend upon associating with one person only? I supposed that a sturdy morality was developed by means of intelligence; that intelligence makes our wishes sane, moral. If the judgment is better developed when children are studying all day with one teacher who teaches some things well, others indifferently, and others badly, than it is when they are working thruout the day with different teachers who teach their special subjects well, then there is little connection between intelligence and morality.

In speaking of the reconstruction of the course of study I had the continuity of subjectmatter in mind. I thought of a committee on geography, for instance, consisting of two or three teachers of geography from the primary grades, two or three from the grammar grades, some from the high school, and a recognized authority from a college or university. Such a group could never present a course leading at various stages into blind alleys.

The same kind of a committee in making up a course in mathematics would not set children of tender years to studying the intricacies of banking, because they are not going to college. The failure to make conditions such that the child's power gained will be the active factor in conquering the new, and the failure to make conditions such that the subject-matter studied will always lead into something beyond, are the causes of the necessity for discussing this question of saving time.

I have met the usual difficulty in making suggestions by means of old terms-old meanings have been read into them. Some day continuity will be recognized as the chief element in the solution of the question of the morning.

THOMAS M. BALLIET, Springfield, Mass.- I agree heartily with Professor Woodward in saying that all courses in the elementary and secondary schools should be kept open at the top. No course ought to lead into byways. Every child should have the opportunity, when he has finished a lower grade of school, to enter some course in the next higher, and I meant to suggest nothing in my paper which would not be entirely in harmony with this fundamental principle. As to the separation of pupils in such a way that the bright and the dull may not be kept together, I would say that such separation must always be imperfect; but, as a practical matter, any separation, however crude, is better than none. Every high-school teacher knows that there is a much larger percentage of gifted pupils in the classes which fit for college and technical schools than in the classes which do not fit for a higher institution. To separate those who fit for college from those who do not effects, therefore, altho in a crude way, a separation of the bright from the dull. I say "in a crude way," because we all know that some of the brightest pupils are, for financial reasons, unable to go to college, and some pupils of inferior ability enter the college-fitting

courses.

So far as the elementary schools are concerned, there is more of dawdling at present than of rushing or of overwork. The brightest pupils in the elementary schools could, without injury to health and with much profit to their intellectual growth, do fully twice as much work as they are now doing; and the same is true of a limited number of pupils in every high school. It is intellectually demoralizing for any pupil to have less to do than he can easily do. It demoralizes his intellectual habits and begets intellectual indolence. I am aware that there is considerable complaint on the part of parents of overwork in the schools; but what such parents really mean is that their children are given too much "home work" and have to devote to the preparation of lessons out of school hours which should be given to exercise and play. In this parents are in most cases entirely right, but this is not the same thing as too much work. If children were made to work harder in school, they would not be obliged to work as long hours as they do now.

There ought to be fewer pupils per teacher in our schools, and we ought to be able to secure more forceful, energetic, and stimulating teaching. Five hours per day of earnest, intellectual work, including the necessary intermissions, is enough for any boy or girl below the high school. Our American school system is so organized as to do more for the average and for the dull child than is done in any other country; but it also does less for the exceptionally bright child than is done in any other highly civilized country. We sacrifice too much the interests of the brightest to the interests of the average and the dull, and we mistake this for true democracy. No nation can afford either to neglect or to sacrifice its best talent, and we must organize our system of education in such a way as to give brilliant boys and girls an opportunity to advance at the rate at which they are capable of advancing, without being held back by the less gifted who must progress at a slower pace.

I do not believe that we shall effect the saving of time at which we are aiming, except thru a separation early in the course of those who are to fit for higher institutions from those who are to end their education in the elementary schools. The question essentially resolves itself into the question as to whether all pupils, no matter what their aims may be

as to their future training, should, in the elementary schools, pursue the same course. It is a question as to whether the best preparation for college is also the best preparation for life. The teachers in our colleges in an offhand way assume that there is only an affirmative answer possible to this question. I feel strongly convinced that a negative answer is the true one. This is the answer which all foreign nations have given to this question. There is no nation in Europe which gives the two classes of pupils the same course of training, It does not follow at all that those things which are taught in the elementary schools and are necessary to the pupil who is to go to college afterward are necessary to the pupil who is to end his education in the elementary school. Indeed, it is my conviction that for pupils who are not to go beyond the grammar schools a very much better course can be prepared than a course which would be calculated to fit a pupil in the quickest way for admission to college.

THE EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS OF THE YEAR 1902-1903

WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE, PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE,
BRUNSWICK, ME.

As the officers of an ocean steamer each day take observations and report the run of the last twenty-four hours, it is my privilege to report observations, kindly made for me by school and college officers in all parts of the country, on the educational progress of the year.

First of all I must record the promotion of Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer from the ranks of our working force to

"the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence."

Principal of a high school at twenty-two; professor in a college at twenty-four; college president at twenty-six; member of a state board of education; organizer of the women's department of a great university; counselor and helper of the women's college connected with our oldest university; trustee of a seminary for women; advocate and friend of every form of educational progress: she united a delicate, feminine capacity to give herself responsively, devotedly to persons and institutions who sought her help, with the energy and determination of a field marshal to push to a successful issue every interest intrusted to her hands. She had the tact to carry conservative boards unanimously for progressive measures; the confidence which transforms seeming impossibilities into accomplished facts; the courage to say to incompetence, stupidity, or inefficiency, when it was blocking the wheels of progress, the hard words: "Thou art the man!" yes, the harder words to say and to get understood: "Thou art the woman!" Thus she has left us the ideal of the educated woman scholarship without a particle of pedantry; optimism with no blinking of unpleasant facts; efficiency unsevered from winsomeness; power unspoiled by pride; all rooted, as woman's best influence must

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