GENERAL SESSIONS OF THE ASSOCIATION

ADDRESSES OF WELCOME

HON. JOHN L. BATES, GOVERNOR OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS

[STENOGRAPHIC REPORT]

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

If I had the voice of Niagara, and of all its waters, I could not in the three minutes assigned to me express the welcome of Massachusetts, even tho I could speak ten thousand words a minute.

We are glad to see you within our borders. We hope you will receive pleasure from this coming together, and we hope as the result of yourdeliberations there will be profit for all mankind.

I welcome you as a phalanx that carries lanterns to bring light into dark places, as an army that carries swords to cut down superstition, and spears to defeat the enemies of the American republic.

I welcome you as men and women engaged in one great organization for the uplifting of humanity. I welcome you as men and women engaged in a calling that takes hold of the future, and thereby makes for immortality. I welcome you to the commonwealth of Massachusetts-to the land where the Puritans lived, who, forgetful of their poverty, built colleges for the expansion of the mind. I welcome you to the rocks that the Pilgrims trod, who, forgetful of the palaces of earth, built more stately mansions for the soul.

I welcome you to the state that has set in the place of honor at the right of the entrance of its capitol a bronze statue of Horace Mann, the educator.

Welcome to the old Bay State! And with this word of welcome take the hand, and with the hand goes the heart.

HON. PATRICK A. COLLINS, MAYOR OF THE CITY OF BOSTON

[STENOGRAPHIC REPORT]

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Educational Association:

An official word of welcome to Boston is superfluous. Boston has already given you a welcome, louder, stronger, more genuine than any chief magistrate can speak. Indeed, I very much question whether you

need any sort of welcome, for in the freest way that I ever knew men and women to act, you have taken Boston by storm. Whether that was the intention, or whether it was contrived by the committee that prepared the most admirable plan of reception-and is executing it most admirably or whether it came from your innate belief that Boston was an easy city to capture, it is hard to tell; but Boston is yours today. Very little has Boston as a corporation been permitted to have as an agency in this reception. Thanks to the great organization that invited you here, thanks to the intelligence, the judgment, the spirit, and the enthusiasm of the gentlemen who have the management, there is very little for official Boston to do except to stand and look on—and admire. It is common report that nine out of ten delegates to this convention are women. That is the most gratifying intelligence that has reached the city hall in School street since I have been mayor. Not that we are in great need of women in Boston, but we need just your kind of women.

I have noticed tonight, and I think it must have also passed under the observation of everybody on the platform, that Dr. Hale tested whether you, engaged in secular employment and in imparting secular education, have still a grip upon the spiritual. But that was settled when you joined in repeating Our Lord's Prayer.

I need say no more, because an official welcome is entirely unnecessary. One word, however : while you are in Boston if the state authorities, who have some control over the city, don't quite behave themselves to your liking, come down to the city hall, and we will try to rectify that, as we have rectified a good many other things.

HENRY S. PRITCHETT, PRESIDENT OF THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, BOSTON

[STENOGRAPHIc report]

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

From his excellency, the governor, and from his honor, the mayor, you have already had a most cordial welcome to the hospitality of Massachusetts and of Boston. It remains for me only to tender to you the educational hospitality of the city as well; for just as there is an educational and an intellectual sincerity, a quality of mind which will not admit the idea which rings false, so also is there the intellectual hospitality and mental quality which welcomes cordially the new idea, which gives it an entrance at least to the antechamber of the mind, where it may find warmth, comfort, and shelter.

Boston will not be altogether immodest if she claims some pre-eminence in this intellectual hospitality. For a hundred years in politics, in religion, and, as you have heard so well said, in education, all those facile birds of the air which fly in the intellectual realm have been finding here.

a homing place; for they know there is in Boston, for the idea at least, a friendly twig.

On the other hand, your convention represents such an intellectual gathering as no other body in this country can bring together. There is represented here, not only the college, the technical school, and the university, but the high school, the normal school, and the kindergarten. Every reach and every prospect of human study which man may undertake are within the province of those who belong to this organization; and therefore I think that my welcome ought to mean more to you even than that of the governor of the commonwealth or that of the mayor; for, after all, the welcome to the schools and institutions of Massachusetts and of Boston is the heartiest and greatest the state and the city can bring.

You will find here institutions which represent every phase of our educational development. Nowhere else in these United States can you study a college two hundred and fifty years old; and yet in this same community -and when I speak of Boston I mean always that greater Boston which includes some million and a half of people-in this Boston you will find one of the newest colleges, founded to increase the facilities for women to prepare for the practical callings of life.

You will find here in this greater Boston a college in the suburban quiet growing year by year in numbers and strength, and you will find a university also growing year by year in power-a university one of whose alumni has today greeted you as the governor of the commonwealth, and which stands in the very heart and in the midst of the city. You will find the old Boston Latin School, with its long roll of famous names, among them the name of him whose blessing and benediction you have just received, whom Boston loves above any other citizen, and who may well be called the friend of all the world. You will find this old Latin School, and you will find by the side of it the new Mechanics Art School, to represent the new idea in education.

And at all these institutions, whether they be of one kind or another, whether at Harvard or the Boston University, whether at the Institute of Technology or Tufts College, whether at Boston College, Radcliffe, or Simmons College, whether at the high school, the common school, or the kindergarten to all of you who come to this convention there stands open the door of welcome.

Therefore, in behalf of all these educational institutions, I offer to you, in the most hearty, the most genuine, and the warmest possible spirit, the educational hospitality of greater Boston.

RESPONSES

ALBERT G. LANE, CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, CHICAGO, ILL.

Mr. President:

[STENOGRAPHIC REPORT]

The cordial and gracious words of welcome from the governor of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the mayor of the city of Boston, and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are gratefully received. On behalf of the members of the National Educational Association, I wish to extend to them, and to the citizens and teachers of this city and vicinity, the thanks of the Association for the successful preparations for this great meeting. Boston and Massachusetts have set standards in education that have been followed by the cities and states of this country, and especially of the great West. I may name as among these standards the first beginnings of the distinctively free-school system; the grading of schools; the establishment of normal schools; the plan of city supervision; of state superintendence; of the enforcement of the rights of children thru compulsory-attendance laws; the establishment of parental schools; the introduction of manual and technical training in education; the beginning of the kindergarten; the study of psychology and its application in teaching; and the strong, cultivating, diffusing, controlling influence of college training.

These questions are still before this country, and with other vital questions need consideration. Earnest, noble men and women thruout this land are studying these questions with reference to the development of the love of truth and of the higher life in the community. Twenty thousand at least of the teachers of this country come to join the thousands of progressive teachers of New England in discussing the questions presented on the program, which has been arranged by Massachusetts' most distinguished educator, the honored president of this Association.

WM. T. HARRIS, U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

Your Excellency the Governor of the State of Massachusetts, and Your Honor the Mayor of Boston:

In response to the gracious welcome that you have extended to this national association of teachers, supervisors, and directors of education, I return thanks in the name of the nation. Some three hundred thousand educators have sent hither a tenth of their number to represent them on this occasion. More than seventeen millions of school children have been enrolled in the schools, public and private, of the nation during the past

year. The teachers of the middle and western states have mostly descended from ancestors that migrated from New England. They return bringing with them their dear friends, the teachers and superintendents of the south Atlantic and south central states, full of enthusiasm in the great work which they are accomplishing in the schools of their native states.

This Association comes to see the places which have been gilded by the imaginations of your native poets-places wedded by history to immortal deeds and marked by a grateful posterity with fitting and impressive monuments. They will not only visit the memorials of colonial history and of the War of the Revolution, but they will visit the beginnings of great educational movements, the parent of all our colleges and universities, as Ralph Waldo Emerson named Harvard University, which counts over six hundred Colleges and Universities in its progeny. The first public high school in the United States, the Boston Latin School, now counts in the United States over six thousand public high schools in the train of its followers; the first normal school founded in the United States now counts two hundred normal schools as its children; some forty thousand graded-school buildings have for their original model the Quincy schoolhouse built here in 1847, the first structure happily adapted to a large graded school, fitted so as to secure good order without harshness and brutal severity in discipline.

When one wonders at the educational reforms that have had their origin here, and have been gladly adopted from Massachusetts by the remotest cities of the land, he understands on a visit to your people why they were so successful; for they were purified here of their crudeness by a sevenfold heated furnace of intelligent criticism on the part of the advocates of the old order, and they had their dross of imperfection eliminated before they set out on their journey across the continent.

Thru your bountiful provision for us, which has extended even to prodigality, you have made our visit a festival of pleasure and profit both to body and soul never to be forgotten; and not only to our profit, but to the profit of millions of children living in distant states and territories.