4. In the large school for children from twelve to fourteen years of age, which may be here called the intermediate school, much of the teaching will be on a departmental basis. Certainly all shop and practical arts teaching, and the commercial subjects, will be departmentalized. At least half the teaching force for the boys will be men, selected partly with reference to their capacity to teach such subjects as arithmetic, history, and shop subjects, and partly with a view to the influence of their personality upon the pupils. The school will be in charge of a principal, giving his entire time to organization, administration, and supervision.

5. In the intermediate school will be found considerable flexibility of courses. Certain subjects, such as English expression, literature, history, hygiene, and the like, will be taken in common by all pupils, special classes being formed for those who are retarded. Other subjects, such as manual training, household arts, elementary commercial subjects, practical science, music, foreign languages, and mathematics, will be elective, it being required only that each pupil shall carry a substantial program of work.

6. In every case, while retarded pupils will have special classes adjusted to their needs in such subjects as arithmetic and English, they will also be permitted to work with advanced pupils in other subjects, such a shop studies, for which they may be qualified.

7. The intermediate school in many cases will be located adjacent to the high school. In some cases it will occupy the same building, altho it is not expected that teachers in the intermediate school will be college graduates, as will be necessarily the case with highschool teachers. An ideal arrangement for many communities would be to have the high school and intermediate school in proximity, so that, to some extent, the same shop equipment and playgrounds could be used.

LEONARD P. AYRES, director, Division of Education, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, N.Y.-We need differentiated courses in our schools because our schools are filled with differentiated children. We are just awakening to the significance of this condition. A few years ago educators began to discover the facts concerning the ages of the children in the different grades. This brought to light the astonishing fact that there are children of almost every school age in every grade. In every large school system we found that the oldest children in the first grade were older than the youngest children in the eighth grade.

A few years later we began to study the progress of children thru the grades and we found similar extreme variations in every school system. In every city we found slow children in the first grade who had been in school longer than the brightest children in the eighth grade. Indeed it was often found that there were children in the lower grades who had begun attending school before some of their classmates were born.

With the growing mastery of measurements in education, attention now turned to the measurement of classroom products, and here again a similar situation was brought to light. When we began to test children for their arithmetical ability, we found that the best children in the second and third grades made better scores than the poorest ones in the eighth grade. When attention turned to spelling, we found that the best children in the second grade spelled correctly words on which the poorest of the eighth grade children failed. In every branch in which reliable scales for measuring results have been developed the same situation has been brought to light. In handwriting the best children in the lower grades do better work than the poorest in the upper grades. The best drawing in the second and third grades is better than the poorest in the seventh and eighth. The brightest children in the third grade write better English compositions than the least gifted in the seventh and eighth grades.

In broad general terms this condition is a constant and universal one. It does not apply merely to the rare and exceptional children. On the contrary, it maintains everywhere, among all children, in every subject, and in a relatively constant degree. Everywhere and in every subject we find about the same proportion of poor students, medium students, and superior students. The reason why we have not realized this before is that

it is only recently that we have developed moderately accurate methods of measuring classroom achievements. But now, even with the crude scales and tests that have been developed, these evidences of the universal and inherent natural differentiation among children are becoming ever-increasingly convincing.

Nor is this the only or perhaps the most important lesson taught thru the application of scientific methods to educational problems. Whenever we measure the attainments of children in more than one intellectual product and compare the results, we find that children who excel in one sort of ability strongly tend to excel in other sorts of achievement. The abilities which the human race considers desirable abilities generally accompany each other in the same individuals. Nature has not decreed any law of human compensation whereby the individuals who are strong in certain attributes are weak in others, while those weak in some are strong in others.

Disappointment and disillusionment await those educators who believe that children of marked ability in performing abstract book work will generally prove deficient in concrete shop work and that those who are deficient in abstract work will excel in shop work. Such a compensatory law does not exist, for, in the long run, nature bestows her intellectual endowments upon her chosen favorites instead of scattering them impartially among all.

These conditions mean that we need differentiated courses because we have differentiated children. We have them everywhere and in all subjects. Whenever we measure educational products we find three fundamentally significant conditions. The first is that in every school system there is greater difference in classroom ability between different members of the same grade than there is between the abilities of the average children in the lowest and the average children in the highest grades. The second significant fact is that everywhere in every sort of measurable ability we find fairly constant and definite proportions of bright, medium, and slow children. The third significant fact is that different sorts of intellectual abilities tend to accompany each other in the same individuals. Nature has made no compensatory law of equality but has on the contrary decreed a universal and inherent inequality whereby the well endowed in one sort of ability are apt to be well endowed in other sorts also.

All this means that if we are to give all the children the best and fullest sort of educational opportunity we must differentiate our courses so as to fit them to the needs and abilities of the differentiated children. We must locate our brightest children in groups with other bright children and give them work of sufficient thoroness and scope so that they may develop thru earnest application instead of deteriorating thru easy achievement. For our children of average abilities, we must organize classes and courses that will give them work within their power to accomplish but requiring their best efforts. For the slowest children, we must organize courses composed of essentials so simplified that in their mastery the children may acquire the habit of success instead of being trained in the habit of failure. We must differentiate our courses because our courses are made for our children, and our children are differentiated by nature.

W. L. ETTINGER, associate city superintendent of schools, New York, N.Y.—In discussing the question of prevocational work, Mr. Ettinger gave as his definition that prevocational work is trade preparatory work, plus academic work, plus vocational guidance. He also sounded a note of warning in respect to the assumption that children in the same class or grade are differently endowed because they respond unequally to the same test. In other words, the slow child of the first-year grades may be more liberally endowed in the upper grades, and, again, the pupil who seemed to be slow and backward in the elementary grades may do very good work in the high-school grades. Slowness and so-called dulness may be a condition of the mind at some particular time in a period marked by physiologic and psychologic changes.

JOHN H. HAAREN, associate city superintendent of schools, New York, N.Y.-As this round-table conference is an experience meeting, it will not be out of place to speak of some things in the line of vocational instruction, which the city of New York is doing. Our idea is to organize the prevocational work in the regular elementary schools, with pupils of the seventh and eighth years of the school course. These are to be tried for nine weeks at a time in several industrial courses, in order to ascertain any special aptitude. Three hours daily are to be devoted to industrial work and three hours daily to academic work. The subjects so far introduced in the girls' school are sewing and dressmaking, millinery, embroidery, novelty work, care of invalids, homemaking. The course in the boys' school is to consist of metal work, woodwork, joinery, turning, and electrical work. In the regular vocational schools, practically all of the industries mentioned in the course of this discussion are introduced, with the exception of bricklaying, painting, and plastering; instead, there is work in printing, including linotype and monotype operating. I might state here that there is the warmest interest in prevocational instruction in the city of New York at the present time. It is receiving the heartiest encouragement of the very progressive president of the Board of Education, Thomas W. Churchill. He has concerned himself not alone with this work, but with what may be considered a branch of it, the continuation classes, which are being established in the mornings in department stores. In these classes, the pupils are being taught the things necessary to increase their efficiency, and, of course, their salaries, and to make them eligible for promotion to the next higher step in the business.

M. H. STUART, principal, Manual Training High School, Indianapolis, Ind.-In the reorganization of the school system whereby we introduce vocational courses into the grammar and high school, it is of the greatest importance that teachers be selected who are masters of their field. Our teachers for this work will doubtless be selected in two ways. We can take our good teachers who are of a practical inclination and send them to industrial schools and also to the industries, or we may go to the industries and select tradesmen who possess in our judgment the natural qualifications for teaching but who lack the academic and professional training. These tradesmen may be sent to professional schools and may thereby become vocational teachers. Since our school system is under the control of school men, it seems easier for us to preserve the proper balance and establish vocational courses by the second method. A school man can take a tradesman and train him day by day to the school point of view easier than he can take a school man and push him out into the industrial field to the point where he will command the respect of the men who possess skill. In order that the vocational movement, therefore, may make its full contribution to our educational problem, I believe we should be willing at the outset to tolerate in our faculty tradesmen with only a moderate degree of academic and professional training.

ROUND TABLE OF SUPERINTENDENTS IN CITIES WITH A POPULATION UNDER 25,000

HOW SHALL THE SUPERINTENDENT MEASURE HIS OWN EFFICIENCY WILLIAM MCK. VANCE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, DELAWARE, OHIO

In these days of scales and standards or norms, when there is a burning desire to reduce everything in the pedagogical universe to the fraction of something else, and then to hold it up to public view as a percentage, or a graph, or a segmented line, or a sectored circle, or groups thereof, one device seems to have escaped the inventive diabolism of the

experts, namely, a contrivance whereby the superintendent of schools may take his own measure, quickly, accurately, privately. Other people are constantly doing it for him, with no nice scruples of accuracy or privacy, and they write his Mene Tekel Upharsin wholly regardless of the Ayers scale; they compose “pro bono publico" contributions for the local press, unmindful of Hillegas and Thorndike, and they plot the superintendent's curve of efficiency with absolutely no reference to its co-ordinates.

But how is he to do this himself? How can he anticipate the inquisitorial methods of some Holy Office of a Survey? How shall he project himself out of himself so that, from some point of view sufficiently apart to give a proper perspective, he may look upon himself and his work with unclouded vision and study both with the micrometric methods of the laboratory?

You are conversant with the use of the Binet-Simon scale by which the inmates of institutions for the feeble-minded are tested and graded. A pupil of twelve or fourteen may grade only six years of age in average mental capacity. Sometimes the abnormality of a single trait exhibits great maturity; again certain functions may be normal. Now it is not my task nor my purpose to construct a scale of this sort which will reveal to the superintendent his professional status-whether normal, sub-, or supernormal--whether behind, abreast, or ahead of his times. But it is my purpose to state a few fundamental qualities of the successful superintendent and a few features of his work which, all will agree, must characterize the equipment and output of any efficient man, and whose absence indicates partial or total failure.

First, he must come into his position with adequate preparation and in the right manner. No man can do effective work who lacks the training of two schools: the school of real scholarship, whether obtained in a fresh-water or a tide-water university, or in no university, and whether he have many, or few, or no degrees; and the school of successful experience in earlier and more elementary situations. Nor can he do his best work in a field which he has entered in any surreptitious, haphazard, bargaining, or compromising manner. He deserves not to survive such a handicap. Sometimes a good man, by a combination of circumstances, the nature of which is beyond his ken, is placed in a wrong position. He may be as square as a die, but the hole in which he finds himself is round or rhomboidal or irregularly polygonal, and the friction is dreadful. The only thing to do is to get out and get fitted elsewhere; and such extrication and readjustment may be accomplished with entire dignity and self-respect.

The second essential is that the superintendent's heart must be right. The stethoscope of conscience must show that it beats true to every high ideal and purpose and practice. Only an incomplete success can be hoped for by the man who is careless of even the conventions of life; but he who despises the weightier matters of the law, however scrupulously he may tithe the mint, anise, and cumin of accepted social standards, is doomed to certain failure. Honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, and personal purity are old-fashioned virtues, but they are the corner stones of every man's life who is built foursquare. The breaking-down of any one of them throws the superstructure out of plumb and threatens ruin. How supremely absurd it is for any school man to think that he can cheat a little, lie a little, drink a little, and break the seventh commandment a little! "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; but fools despise wisdom and instruction."

Third, the efficient superintendent is a man of ideals, and these ideals, it goes without saying, should be intrinsically worthy. No enduring work can be modeled on lines that depart from the standards of art and beauty. He has a profound feeling for the best there is in the educational world, and he has his antennae out like the wires of a Marconi station to catch all messages that are attuned to this feeling. He instinctively rejects the unworthy in educational theory and practice, or, rather, they never touch him, for, to carry the figure a step farther, his soul, like the coherer of the Marconi instrument, is

set to a higher note. He packs his life full of everything big and good and great. And so he reads the best books, hears the best music, sees the best pictures, visits the best schools, studies the best methods and programs, makes close and intimate friendships with the best superintendents, is alert to the best in school architecture, school hygiene, school ethics, school texts and literature-in short, he demands only the best of everything for the immortal work committed to his charge. He has his moments of satisfaction when he realizes that a cherished ideal has, thru his efforts, been wrought into the organic structure of his schools, and he is disposed to measure his efficiency by the number of such ideals thus incorporated; but, when the issue is otherwise, he has the bitter reflection of those who have loved and lost, and this is indeed "sorrow's crown of sorrow."

Nothing contributes more to any department or phase of school work than a fine ideal finely worked out. For example, “order for order's sake" was the slogan of disciplinarians of a certain type, now happily almost extinct, and the means to that end were the rod, the dunce-stool, brutal sarcasm, and expulsion. Repression, fear, lack of initiative, sullen subjection, or its antonym, dogged defiance, were the prominent characteristics of such a régime. Now, on the other hand, "order for the sake of the school as a community" is altogether a finer ideal. This sets a powerful motive in the mind of the pupils as citizens of the school republic; it furnishes a consideration of values by the pupils resulting in acts of judgment which almost invariably are on the side of good order; it tends to stimulate children to organize all of the facts that have to do with conduct in its larger aspects, and thus contributes much to the morale of the child; and, lastly, instead of repression, and sullen subjection, or open defiance, the successful operation of this ideal gives the entire school an abounding life in which the graces of initiative, courage, and every other manly quality find fullest development.

The superintendent of ideals has, of course, imagination—the ability to see things in their higher and more subtle relations-and the constructive imagination is, we all know, one of the most practical things in life.

The poem hangs in the berry bush
Till it catches the poet's eye;
And all the street is a masquerade
When Shakespeare marches by.

Fourth, our self-testing superintendent should be a man of affairs. By this I mean not only that he should know the details of the school plant and equipment, from pens and ink to plumbing fixtures and vacuum cleaners, but that he should be an expert in warming, ventilating, school-seating, decorating, and landscape gardening. It would be well also if he should possess more than a mere amateur's knowledge of the special departments of study over which supervisors and special teachers are usually placed-music, drawing, manual training, domestic science, and physical culture. In cities of less than 25,000, he is frequently the purchasing agent of the board of education, and hence he must be a compendium of school and office supplies. Catalogs, samples, and price-lists comprehensively filed are at his finger-tips. He familiarizes himself with the quality of the manufactured output of the various houses. He inspects the school grounds, basements, furnace and engine rooms, toilets-the entire realm of which the janitor is king, and even ventures a suggestion or a correction, if need be, to that potentate. Whenever the need of a new school building arises, he sets forth the facts and needs to the board of education in fullest detail, with tentative plans based on a careful preliminary study. To this end, he is a close student of school architecture and has visited and inspected the latest notable examples of this art in a radius of some hundreds of miles. The physical well-being of the children is his constant care.

In his relations to the board of education the superintendent will scrupulously maintain the best traditions and customs of his office. As an educational expert and adviser, and as the executive officer of the board, he commonly receives all the respect that is his