They feel that our textbooks full of generalizations underThey feel that the westward

clude more and more detail of the life-story of the American people. They feel, and feel rightly, that many teachers and writers, either thru ignorance or thru slavery to custom, or thru a desire to save time and space, have failed to get the most interesting, most virile, most important conceptions emphatically to the student. and our teachers' minds are standable to the scholar only. movement, which, by the way, has been really the greatest single factor in the making of America, has been sorely neglected, that the simpler economic and social details of our history have often been all but omitted, and that, therefore, the student has been denied the knowledge of the rich heritage which the past has given him. What we want, we say, is more of the story of the plain people given with such vivid picturing that any child of America may easily place himself in the life of the past in the home, on the street, in the town meeting, in the legislative assembly, in the church, in the battle, on the farm, on the untamed frontier or in the surging currents of modern city life.

History is of value chiefly because of the light it throws upon the present. If we are to understand the present and appreciate the privileges of the present we must live again the struggles, the sorrows, the hardships, the dangers, defeats and mistakes, the joys, the victories and the works of achievement out of which the present has come. In order to thus re-live history we must have brought before us vividly pictures of the people and the country in which they lived. These pictures must first of all be true pictures, and they must cover the wide range of activities in which the people engaged. They will tell us what folks were doing for a living; what they ate; what they wrought with their hands and tools; how they drest; how they fought enemies within and without the group; how they worked, played, worshipt, married, hewed, built, bought, sold, argued, traveled and cooperated in satisfying common needs-in short, how they lived.

In and thru this story of how the plain people have subdued a raw continent and brought its great resources into the channels of trade in varied form and quality, runs the strong thread of the development of American Democracy and the jealous guarding of those priceless civil and political rights and privileges which ten generations of Americans have preserved to us. If American life is revealed in rich detail, instead of in the usual bare-boned fashion, American youth, foreign born or not, will learn to love it, with all its faults, and even fight for it not only in times of peace, but in such times of danger from without as that in which we now live.

Lastly, there are those who believe that history may be rejuvenated by shaping up and teaching definite courses in state and local history. They believe that thru such history a paved path may be built into the larger past. This has much to commend it, especially in the material which it furnishes for stories in elementary history. These materials lie near at hand and are, therefore, more understandable to the child than stories of life in other sections, especially if the geographic and economic conditions in those other sections differ widely from those found in the home region. But commendable and desirable tho this may be, it should not be forgotten that there are pit-falls to be avoided in working up such a course. Not the least important is the danger that the student may fail to see that the state whose history he reads or hears is a political unit with artificial boundaries within which life developed not very differently—if differently in any important respects-from the life in other states in the same geographic region. Must we not see the necessity of building more national patriotism rather than more state patriotism? Must we not see that state history, as such, has no place and should have no place separate and apart from sectional history, but that state and local history as a segment of sectional and national history has a great place and function?

The need of a real rejuvenation of history teaching in this country is a crying need. It is a crying need in every state. Its rejuvenation must come at the hands of the younger men

and women. We must not make a mistake in this critical time. If the great, fundamental rights and privileges, the story of whose development runs strongly in all of America's story, are right, it would be nothing short of a crime against humanity—such a mistake as German Kulturists have made -to distort them in the direction of flamboyant patriotism. Furthermore, as pointed out by some recent writers, such as Charles Altschul in his book, The American revolution in our school textbooks, our books encourage bias by their incompleteness and superficiality. It almost goes without saying, that superficiality and incompleteness of statement have led and will continue to lead to very inaccurate impressions and even to prejudice.

We need only the truth-the truth in the history of our dealings with other nations and their dealings with us. We need only the truth in the wonderful story of American life in all of its past phases revealed in such rich, picture-making detail that children can see and understand and re-live American life as it was. All history is true. If a story is not true it is not history. In such history as this lies one of the greatest factors in teaching patriotism. Not a small part of the responsibility of preserving the best in America for America and for the world lies upon the shoulders of the writer and teacher of history. Will they fail to see it, or seeing it cowardly shirk it?

STATE NORMAL SCHOOL RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN

WALTER B. DAVISON .

III

JUNIOR COLLEGES IN CALIFORNIA

An educational development, now in progress in California' sanctioned and encouraged by the State University, is of distinct interest; it involves the creation of a large number of junior colleges in extension of the high school system of the

state.

The idea of the junior college is by no means entirely new, and a brief survey of its earlier history may indicate wherein the present situation in California coincides with efforts previously made, wherein it involves new problems. Some fourteen years ago there was initiated under the leadership of President Harper of Chicago, and the presidents of other state universities of the Middle West, a movement to throw off the ballast of their two lower classes, freshman and sophomore, on the ground that they desired to free their institutions of work that was essentially of secondary school type; it was urged that many high schools were able to carry on this work quite as effectively with their existing organization. At that initial meeting, and again somewhat later in a detailed article,' the present writer recorded his objections to the scheme, and in the light of recent developments he finds that his criticism still applies.

The movement in the Middle West has not been successful. It disregarded the nature of the teaching that was appropriate to the pupils' stage of maturity, and it failed to weigh the qualifications of our secondary teachers. It assumed, furthermore, as fundamental the axiom that work of the freshman and sophomore stage in college is carried on with the teaching methods that prevail in the secondary school. Such an assumption is not at all well founded, for the early college 1 EDUCATIONAL Review, xxx, p. 488 ff.

work involves a type of procedure distinctly in advance of any effort that is within reach of the secondary school. The college instructor of freshmen and sophomores creates for the presentation of his special subject a technique that is peculiar and specific in character. It calls for something more than the relatively elementary stage of insight which we meet in the secondary pupil. Wisely administered it is "secondary work in a stage of transition to the liberal aspects of a higher stage of information, and as such may be made culturally most effective."2 On the other hand, with a quality all its own it differs from the comprehensive, all-around survey that is appropriate to university instruction, a survey that leads either to a philosophic outlook on the bearings of a subject in its entirety, or to a specific professional application of the subject to a vocational end.

We have developed thru the last century a technique of college methods that corresponds to the greater maturity of our students in point of mental development and that invites them to a larger outlook in the matter of specific information. This technique differs from the sequence of intellectual advance that is practised in foreign schools, but we have no reason to discard it. It is well to remember that its distinctive features have imprest some foreign scholars like Michael Sadler and Paulsen, and have given rise in their minds to the query whether the conduct of our college work does not represent a type worthy of serious consideration. In college courses that are properly planned and successfully developed the instructors are working for an ideal that is divergent from the goal of secondary school work; they call for something more in their pupils than mere responsiveness to a plan of study that progresses in carefully elaborated stages from point to point. They have a right to demand a certain intellectual resilience in their pupils, a capacity to undertake independent observation, to reach out into the sphere of constructive and individual combination-in plain words, the capacity to think logically, to strive for the underlying philosophy in the subject in hand.

* EDUCATIONAL Review, xxx, p. 493.