clear to him that "though he speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, he is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." As a citizen, too, he will realize that it is not prosperity, "it is not piety but righteousness that exalteth a nation." While possessed of the spirit of righteousness, he will not be devoid of piety. He will have the allpervading piety that Dr. Harris speaks of "the piety not merely of the heart, but the piety of the intellect that beholds the truth, the piety of the will that does good deeds wisely, the piety of the senses that sees the beautiful and realizes it in works of art."

My friends, as I said in the beginning that it seemed a work of supererogation to urge co-operation of school and library before this body of alert and advanced educators, so, in conclusion, I must offer the overpowering importance of the subject as my excuse for giving final emphasis to a thought which I hope is never wholly absent from our minds and is the guiding influence of our lives-the supreme importance of the work intrusted to us. As Wendell Phillips said: “Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man."

In Louise Jordan Miln's Little Folk of Many Lands I find this striking presentation of the thought I wish to leave with you in closing. As she and her father were seated on the Italian seashore one day, "he pointed to the half-clad children playing near. 'There is nothing in all the world so important as children,' he said, 'nothing so interesting. If you ever wish to go in for some philanthropy, if you ever wish to be of any real use in the world, do something for children. If you ever yearn to be truly wise, study children. We can dress the sore, bandage the wounded, imprison the criminal, heal the sick, and bury the dead; but there is always a chance that we can save a child. If the great army of philanthropists ever exterminate sin and pestilence, ever work our race's salvation, it will be because a little child has led them."

SOME OF OUR MISTAKES

PRINCIPAL G. M. GRANT, QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, KINGSTON, ONTARIO,

CANADA

This is a safe subject to take when addressing an educational association anywhere, whose object must be mutual criticism rather than mutual admiration. Is not the object of all true educators to stimulate thought and correct mistakes, that we may profit by the shortcomings of the past and make present life more complete? It may, indeed, be said that I know too little of the United States to speak with any authority concerning their mistakes. That is perfectly true, and you must, therefore, consider that my speech refers mainly to Canada, tho, as all here are fellowworkers and the conditions of the two countries are in the main alike, I

may be permitted to take the position of confessing common sins, instead of acting as the "ill bird which fouls its own nest." You are the older, wealthier, and more populous country, and it may even be, thru our giving you that sincerest form of flattery known as imitation, that you are responsible for our mistakes, as well as for your own, in educational as in commercial matters. As regards the latter, by affinity to Great Britain. and tradition, as well as by reason, we are free-traders; but you are steadily influencing us into becoming protectionists; and tho our wall against your products and manufactures is not yet anything like so bad as your wall against us, it is clear to me that ours will get worse if yours does not get better. We sympathize, you see, with the brotherliness of the moderate drinker who, going home with unsteady gait, saw a more thorogoing toper lying in the ditch: "I cannot help you up, my dear fellow, but I can lie down beside you."

Our first great mistake is that we have systematically undervalued the teaching profession. If mind is greater than the body, if ideas are more important than dollars, and character of more consequence than anything else, then only the best and the best-trained men and women should be allowed to teach, and these should be honored above every other class in the community. How dreadfully we have failed here! Public-school teachers are often no better taught and no better paid than clerks or millgirls; some high-school teachers have not even our easily attained college degree, and not a few university professors would not be allowed a post in a German gymnasium. We think that anyone can teach our children, and, therefore, those who offer to teach for the smallest salaries are preferred by boards of trustees.

As the history of the world is the judgment of the world, let us ask what its judgment is regarding the importance of teachers. According to its verdict, they have been the great benefactors of the world both in the East and in the West. To this day, the educated youth of Britain, of the United States, and of Europe sit at the feet of those two great teachers, Plato and Aristotle, when studying for the highest degree in literae humaniores. Plato and Aristotle again were the disciples of that genuine teacher, Socrates, who taught the youth of Athens so effectually that they gave him hemlock to drink, a reward such as was usually given to the prophets of Israel. What a tribute to the intellectual supremacy of Socrates have the centuries steadily paid, because he insisted on getting to a rational foundation for life and tested every other foundation with quiet, remorseless dialectic! His spirit, thru his disciples, has ruled all the western world from his urn for more than 2,000 years. The phrase which the Greeks used with regard also to their great dramatists was that Æschylus taught this, that Sophocles taught this, that Euripides taught this. In other words, each play was a lesson, and the poet was a teacher. Go to the East, and the record is the same. Buddhism is the most widely

spread religion there. The Buddha was simply a teacher, one who taught his disciples the secret of life and character, making the deepest truths familiar to all by means of parables, like Him of whom it was said that without a parable he taught nothing. Who, again, is the man that the teeming millions of China have revered for twenty-five centuries, to whom they raise temples, and who has molded their compact civilization? Confucius, who from first to last was a teacher, who, while secretary of state or prime minister, based his successful administration on what he had taught his disciples, and who retired from his high office to resume the work of teaching, when his aim was deemed too high by a sovereign who had yielded to sensual temptations. Going higher still, by what title was Jesus known, during all his public life? By the title of rabbi, or teacher. He taught the inner circle of his disciples and the multitudes, "without hasting, without resting."

What was the great characteristic of all these teachers? They taught with authority. Every one of them knew his subject, took it seriously, loved it for its own sake, continually found new wealth in it, was enthusiastic about it, and so made his disciples enthusiastic. To come in contact with such a mind is of itself a liberal education. That is what Garfield meant when he defined a college as President Hopkins sitting on one end of a log and he on the other end. Such a teacher makes his subject interesting to his scholars, unless they are hopelessly bad or hopelessly imbecile. Because we seldom get such teachers, we demand subjects of study which in themselves are interesting, such as dime novels, shilling shockers, penny dreadfuls, Henty's histories, and the sporting columns of yellow journals. Fond parents, seeing the dear children. devouring literature of this kind, are filled with admiration at their devotion to books and love of learning, and sigh over the educational advantages which this generation has, compared with the condition of things. in their days. The scholars should, of course, be interested. But there is a great difference between interesting by inspiring and by amusing or exciting. We seldom attempt more than the latter. We have substituted for discipline merely interest.

Here I touch on the second great error we have made. Thru not caring to get the best teachers and not valuing the best, we are continually on the hunt for a royal road to knowledge. There is no royal. road. To become educated, a man must work, and work is what the natural man hates. Unless we overcome that bad, deep-seated instinct, we do not educate. Nothing is so destructive to manhood or womanhood as laziness. There has been much talk in our day of the dangers of strong drink, and of the thousands ruined by drunkenness. It would be more to the purpose to talk of the danger of idleness, and of the tens of thousands it ruins. Everyone can see that drunkenness is a sin, but few see the sin of mental inertia. A good school is one that has a good

teacher; and the good teacher, when he is allowed a free hand, does not let children pick and choose what they themselves find interesting, but makes them learn accurately what has been thought out as the best course for mental discipline and character-building. As Professor Münsterberg, in an article on "School Reform" in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1900, puts it:

He who is allowed always to follow the paths of least resistance never develops the power to overcome resistance; he remains utterly unprepared for life. To do what we like to do, that needs no pedagogical encouragement; water always runs down hill. Our whole public and social life shows the working of this impulse, and our institutions outbid one another in catering to the taste of the public. The school alone has the power to develop the opposite tendency, to encourage and train the belief in duties and obligations, to inspire devotion to better things than those to which we are drawn by our lower instincts. Yes, water runs down hill all the time; and yet all the earth were sterile and dead if water could not ascend again to the clouds and supply rain to the field which brings us the harvest. We see only the streams going down to the ocean; we do not see how the ocean sends up the waters to bless our fields. Just so do we see in the streams of life the human emotions following the impulses down to selfishness and pleasure and enjoyment, but we do not see how the human emotions ascend again to the ideals - ascend in feelings of duty and enthusiasm; and yet without this upward movement our fields were dry, our harvest lost. That invisible work is the sacred mission of the school; it is the school that must raise man's mind from his likings to his belief in duties, from his instincts to his ideals, that art and science, national honor and morality, friendship and religion may spring from the ground and blossom.

Our third great error is that we have imagined that there is a royal road to the making of good teachers. There is not. Good teachers cannot be extemporized or made in a hurry. They cannot be made by the mere teaching of psychology, pedagogy, or methods. Something infinitely more important is needed. Content is always more important than form. What is the good of your method, if you have nothing to teach ? A good teacher must know thoroly what he has to teach. it is English, he should know English literature, and to know that he must be a classical scholar, must know and love the great masters, and have made at least one epoch or department his own, so that he might write intelligently regarding its relations to the whole. So with every other subject that he may be called on to teach. Here again Münsterberg has some words of wisdom for us :

I had no teacher who hastily learned one day what he must teach me the next; who was satisfied with second-hand knowledge, which is quite pretty for entertainment and orientation, but which is so intolerable and inane when we come to distribute it and to give it to others. I had from my ninth year [the age at which German boys usually enter the gymnasium] no teacher in any subject who had not completed three years' work in the graduate school. Even the first elements of Greek and mathematics, of history and geography, were given to us by men who had reached the level of the doctorate, and who had the perspective of their own fields. . . . . A great poet once said that any man who has ever really loved in his youth can never become quite unhappy in life. A man who has ever really taken a scholarly view of his science can never find in that science anything which is quite uninteresting. Such enthusiasm is contagious. We boys felt

that our teachers believed with the fullness of their hearts in the inner value of the subjects, and every new bit of knowledge was thus for us a new revelation. We did not ask whether it would bake bread for us. We were eager for it, on account of its own inner richness and value.

"We did not ask whether it would bake bread for us"! How unpractical! How unlike the British author, who, writing recently on what he calls "the curse of education," says: "The children of agricultural laborers and small farmers are given instruction which will be of no earthly use to them in the occupation for which they are naturally fitted." Of course, they should from infancy be taught only how to dig and scrub. Why should they be sent to school at all? "French and mathematics," he says, "are equally valueless accomplishments for the carting of manure." The London Spectator very naturally asks: "Does he want them taught to cart manure ?" In Canada as in the States, we get our best students from the farms. This so-called "practical" mode of teaching existed in full perfection at Dotheboys Hall. Mr. Squeers expounded it to his assistant, Mr. Nickleby:

"First boy-c-l-e-a-n, clean; w-i-n-d-e-r, winder; go and clean the winder. Where's the second boy?" "Please, sir, he's weeding the garden." "To be sure, so he is. That's our system, Nickleby. B-o-t, bot; t-i-n, tin; n-e-y, ney; bottinney. When he knows that out of a book, he goes into the garden. Third boy-what's a horse?" "A beast, sir." "So it is. Now, as you're perfect in that, go and look after my horse, and rub him down well, or I'll rub you down."

This educational system of Mr. Squeers is systematized now in some places and dignified by the name of manual or technical training. In my day we got what is good in it from our jack-knives and fishing rods, in the playground or the garden or the woods, and the school hours were taken up with serious work; but I suppose 66 new occasions teach new duties." In Germany a man must have passed the exit examination of the gymnasium, equal to our B.A. or M.A., and then studied three or four years in the university before he can teach in a German gymnasium; but we do not need to engage university men to instruct children in the use of tools or in the mysteries of the kitchen. the school is the place for such departments. social system for the house and the workshop. best kind we do need, but their work should be based on a sound general education, given in the common and high school and-for those who are to be leaders in modern industries and professions—in the university.

I myself doubt whether There is still room in our Technical schools of the

As to the education a teacher requires, nothing can take the place of a university training, where the student is taught to think, but it is folly for him to go there until he has been drilled into accurate scholarship at a good secondary school, like the English public school or the German gymnasium. The modern craze for psychology, as the one thing needful for teachers, has its origin in our consciousness that something has been