in other schools if need be. We are chiefly concerned for the ordinary mortal.

B

He goes on to say:-"The pure child should not be thrown in with the impure, or the refined with the coarse." No doubt. But do pure children only live in certain streets? Are all the pupils in select schools refined? Instances of immorality and vulgarity have been discovered in public schools; the grossest I have ever heard of were in private schools supposed to be high toned. The influence of good teachers, not neighborhood nor social position, must regulate morals in a school. The greatest care does not always prevent evils in schools, any more than it does in other associations. "Now the true duty of a teacher is to favor and help to the utmost the brightest children. While he ought not to neglect the duller children, he should take the most pains with the finest of his material." Now, should he? If a child is not gifted with superior intellect, even if he is dull beyond the average, is it not one of his "inalienable rights" to have at least an equal opportunity with the brighter? We know that the promise of youth is not always fulfilled; and frequently the greatest strength in riper years follows tardy growth in childhood. It would not be safe, even if it were right, for any teacher except those of the most far-reaching judgment "to take most pains with the finest of his material;" and such teachers unfortunately are not always found in elementary schools.

Again, he says:-"One of these roundabout ways [of substituting inexperienced teachers for competent and experienced ones] is the substitution of superintendence for teaching. There is a conspicuous illustra

tion of this very method

in the city of Boston. There used to be at

the head of each of the grammar schools an accomplished and experienced teacher whose personal force was profitably exerted in direct teaching. These gentlemen have been made district superintendents, and their places in the schools have been filled by much less competent persons employed at comparatively low salaries." Each of these districts contains a grammar school and several tributary primary schools grouped around it. There are 1,000 or 1,500 pupils, and twenty or thirty teachers at salaries of $800 or $1,000. The salary of the teacher at the head is $3,500. Suppose the salary to be the measure of each teacher's worth. The pupils in the upper class were very fortunate during that one year. But only a small percentage of the whole number of pupils ever advanced so far. On the rest the superior teaching had no effect.. This is right on the theory of the Brahmins, that "to him that hath shall be given."

The plan was changed as indicated in the above extract. Though the teaching in the upper room is presumed to be inferior, that in every grade below is improved. Not only every pupil-those who drop out as well as those who stay-is better taught through the direct contact and the indirect influence of this superior teacher, but the very class in the upper room will have received more attention from him, than they could have under the old method-and this, not in a single year, but through a long period of their education. This measure, it would seem, might have been classed with the wise economies. More especially ought it to be so classified, since its application in another place has given us an excellent President of Harvard, at the expense of a first-rate teacher of Chemistry.

Among the wise economies, as they are termed, the employment of a larger proportion of male teachers, and permanence of tenure and security of income as essential to the dignity and independence of the teacher's position, are discussed in a manner which cannot fail to produce good results. I heartily endorse it all. But we cannot expect the teacher's office at present to become more secure than any other public position is or ever has been. The minister is settled indeed, but how long does he stay after he has become distasteful to the parishioners? The president of a college, though not subjected to the form of an annual election, finds it convenient to resign if the overseers believe that the institution is not flourishing under his administration. In the very best universities when a new president institutes a new order of things, professors grown gray in the service, retire by a fiat not less imperative than the annual election. Even judges are sometimes disposed of by reorganizing the courts. The tenure of a teacher's place is after all about as secure as that of any other in which the public are concerned. If it be not, and if the Civil service of the United States be not what it should be, one way to aggravate the evil is for the best men to disparage the teacher's position and decry indiscriminately the civil service as our author seems to; for in this way the most capable men are deterred from entering either. There are good men permanently in both; the best way is to talk more about these, that others may join them, and join to stay.

The second wise economy suggested in the article named is, "the justice and expediency of saving public money by collecting from parents of children whose education is carried above a certain level in the public schools, a portion of the cost of that advanced education." The paper goes on to say: "The American free school was devised for and suits a homogeneous community, in which every head of a family is a tax-payer and a voter, and occupations and fortunes are similar or comparable. The free school was at its origin a common want, and was supported by common sacrifices. This description no longer applies to Massachusetts towns and cities. Our population is very heterogeneous as regards race, religion, education, and condition of life. A large part of the population pays no taxes and casts no votes. This part of the population now makes no contribution whatever to the cost of educating their children, even when that education is carried far above the compulsory limit." In answer to some supposed objection to collecting in part the cost of the higher education from the parents of the children educated, the author argues that the sacrifice thus forced upon poor parents for the education of their children, would beget self-reliance and strengthen republican virtues; as though there were not now ample room for such sacrifice and as though republican virtues were not chiefly disappearing from a very different class; and the very bright children of very poor people, he further thinks, might be educated as a superior kind of paupers.

If this "economy" is ever fairly adopted there will be left no foundation on which to rest any public-school education except the mere gush of sentimental benevolence. If the parents of the children educated may be required to pay for the higher, or high school, education in part, the same reasoning would mulct them in the whole cost. And if they would thus pay for the higher education, there is no better reason why they should not pay for the elementary. And this we have distinctly stated in the paper under consideration in the following words :-"It is not unreasonable, though by

*

no means necessary,"-though by no means necessary !—"that the community should bear the whole cost of giving all the children that amount of elementary training on the ground that so much is necessary for the safety of the State." "Our theory is republican, but our practices in several details are fast becoming communistic. There is no distinction in theory between giving all school children their books at the public expense, and giving the children shoes and their parents soup at the public charge."

There is still less difference in theory, I remark, between furnishing school children with books, and furnishing school-houses, apparatus, and instruction, in other words, schools. That is to say, by this logic, schools for nobody or soup for everybody. There can be no flatter antagonism to Mr. Mann's proposition than this. On this proposition the public-school system of Massachusetts has risen to its present proportions and those of other States are similar. The sentiment of that paper, if generally adopted, would overthrow them all. To require teachers to favor and help to the utmost the bright children, is the aristocracy of intellect; to deny all higher education to the poor, except as a sort of charity, is the aristocracy of wealth. Such were not the principles of the old colonists, of Washington and Jefferson, or of Horace Mann.

So large a part of this discussion has been devoted to the Atlantic paper because the authority of such statements of eminent men as already noticed forms the staple arguments of all who adopt that theory; and from his exalted position this eminent scholar speaks with great weight. We acknowledge the authorty of Agassiz in Natural History; I never have heard his great name quoted on either side of a controversy about finance. Von Molkte is a host in war-not necessarily in literature. As a chemist, the writer in question speaks with authority; as a scholar familiar with the history of education he speaks with great weight: but on a question relating to public schools we should perhaps be safer in relying upon the opinion of some thirty-years-veteran in this particular field like the late Superintendent of Schools of Boston. An ex-Governor, for eight or ten years a member of the State Board of Education-whose sole function it is to care for the interests of public schools, once stated before a committee of the Legislature that he had never visited one of those schools in the city where he lived and taught. If not these, he probably had not seen others. A want of perfect knowledge on this subject is not inconsistent, therefore, with great eminence elsewhere. It is quite possible that our author's knowledge of these schools, their needs, and the great body of the people whom they supply, may be purely theoretical; and his theory, consequently, impracticable. Another prominent and able monthly-the Galaxy-recently contained an article on "The Zealot and the Scholar." Here the assumption appears to be that the scholar degrades himself by engaging in the busy affairs of life-that the true scholar leaves to superficial minds the activities of benevolence and of business and retires in a sort of lofty contemplation like Buddha. Here again is the representation of a caste; on this, however, there is no time to dwell.

If from what has been said, it appears that in our education as in society, the spirit of caste is to be seen-if any one is moved to turn more warmly to the true democratic idea, education at the public expense for the whole

people and as far as they will avail themselves of it-then the object of the present essay has been accomplished.

Some confusion having occurred by members and others gathering about the tables of those having circulars to distribute, it was ordered that no circulars, &c., be distributed during the session of the Association.

Miss Grace Bibb, of the St. Louis Normal School, was then introduced, and read the following paper on

THE RELATION OF ART TO EDUCATION.

Art is the expression of spirit in sensuous form; the embodiment of the ideal. In it, man attempts to realize himself and to determine his position in the universe. Its value is dependent upon the closeness of relation between the subjective and objective sides involved in it, quite as much as upon the lofty nature of the enshrined ideal. Art, as art, is subject to its own laws. In its essence it is the creature of no age; it comprehends the spirit of all. In its outward form it is determined almost wholly by the culture of the time in which it originates. The relation of art to education is twofold; it represents, in concrete, the aspiration and thought of the period, and is the flower of its culture, it becomes equally the model after which real life may be fashioned, the goal toward which ideal culture may tend. Spirit vaguely conscious, yet crushed by nature as an overawing, overwhelming power, manifests itself in symbolic art, out of whose sandy desert the sphynx forever vainly questions earth and heaven.

Spirit emancipated from the thralldom of nature, by the transforming of nature into itself, balances equally, form and content, and finds in classic art perfect representation.

Spirit rises to complete knowledge of itself, as eternal in the universe through oneness with the divine, attempts in romantic art to establish its lofty dominion and to give expression to the infinite longing and aspiration of the Christian ideal: no longer oppressed by the burden of its own mysterious destiny, no longer content to be bound up with nature, and to bask in the brief sunshine of mortal life, it stands tip-toe upon earth, striving after the glory which is beyond the stars.

As the free development of spirit art serves as the index of what, in any civilization, represents the highest culture; and it exhibits, consciously or unconsciously, the ideal of its educational systems.

There must, of course, exist material for the work of the creative imagination. This material may be found already combined, as in the perfect human being, the model of Greek art, but more frequently, especially in the realm of romantic art, lies scattered. It exhibits one phase here, another there, reveals itself but partially anywhere, and waits for the master to invent a medium through which that in it which is universal may shine.

Embodied thus in a great picture, a great poem, or a great novel, the ideal `affects its own age and influences subsequent times. Summing up spirit, education and culture, it is, in its turn, the test of each. Comparison with it becomes the ordeal through which all ideal systems must establish their validity.

As represented in its art, symbolism is a period of the struggle of spirit

with matter; it expresses in civilization, the struggle with long existent forms, both in education and in government. The same feeling which led the Egyptian to represent, in a human head crowning a shapeless block of stone, the hopeless struggle of man to free himself from the bondage of nature, led him curiously to combine the theoretical in education with the immediately practical. He rested everything upon firmness, strength, endurance. He longed for freedom and self-knowledge, and sought both, yet shrank back in terror at the moment of their revelation, self assured that man might not see God and live. For us, neither his art nor his culture has direct value, at least by comparison with the Greek.

Greek art is thus far the world's highest art, because of the equality of form and content. Could, however, the modern ideal find as perfect expression, the art form would rise higher. By as much as self recognizing spirit, conscious of its individual freedom and of its infinite possibilities, is more lofty than the classic ideal, by so much would full representation raise the romantic above the classic. Since, however, the recognized forms of plastic art are manifestly inadequate, each having limits beyond which it is powerless, and since poetry, even, which embraces and transcends all other forms, is dwarfed in its capabilities by the necessary imperfections of language, we can hardly hope for any more complete enshrining of the romantic ideal than that which already exists for us in Dante, Shakespeare, and Göthe, to teach of whom, in his own sphere, the divine revealed itself; each of whom is, in his own way, at once the epitome of his age and the teacher of mankind.

Greek sculptural art consists mainly in representation of the human form. To do its work as perfectly as might be, to delineate the grace and beauty of woman, the strength and beauty of man, the divinity and celestial beauty of the gods, to embody in human form, health, joy, and serenity, was its sincere effort, its worthy achievement.

The aim and the success which attend its plastic art are not wanting in the wider field of epic and dramatic poetry. Simplicity, clearness, definiteness-these are its characteristics, and are reproduced from the real world. There is no setting up of huge pyramids, whose very form is a concession to those powers of nature which, in his spiritual exile, fill with vague question and vaguer dread the soul of man; nothing of the yielding in unyieldingness of symbolic art. Nature has been subordinated to man, made one with him almost through his sympathy. He recognizes in himself her crowning glory, and feels himself the inheritor of all the treasures of her entire realm. Practically he enforces Plato's divine precept-"Honor thy soul, as being second only to the gods.

This spirit, free and beautiful both in its ideal and in its activity, pervading all art, dramatic and epic as well as plastic, may fairly be asserted to be but the legitimate expression of the free and beautiful Greek culture which, before it sought enshrinement in monumental marble, wrought itself out entirely in man himself.

"The whole history of Greek art, says Winckelmann, "shows that it owed its elevation to liberty." This liberty was most entire; for first of all, it was untrammelled, or nearly so, by times and seasons. In a climate free from extremes of heat and cold, with no lofty mountains, no great rivers to