as one of a crowd, not as one of a company, but as an intimate trusted younger friend, seems to me is going to double and treble and quadruple the progress of that student. You say, "Very good, but how is it to be done? It is an enormously expensive thing, and we are doing all we can now." So we are with what we have, in the way we are doing it. But I venture to suggest that an improvement can be made with little or no expense for introducing this tutorial system in the schools. The germ of it is already at work in some of our schools, and most satisfactorily, by the employment of the so-called pupilteacher. How shall I put it? Suppose you take any school with its number of weekly exercises. Then let us subtract from those weekly exercises onefourth. Take the risk. It seems a great risk, but it is not so great as it seems. Hand over those class-periods for this other purpose. You say, "Yes, but where are the teachers?" Where but in the upper grades? Where but among those who have already nearly finished their school work with high success? There will be in a large school of a thousand, let us say, perhaps fifty such boys and girls, in the last year or two of the course, who could be relieved from some of the routine and assigned to some of these defective, irregular students, at any rate. In some schools more could be done. It does seem to me that the chance of doing good is so great that it is well worth while to try that method. We need not hesitate. I have seen the experiment of trying the preceptorial teaching in my own college in the last four years. We cut off about one-fourth of the class exercises and assigned that fourth to this intimate, personal conference; and I do not hesitate to say that the result has been that the lowest part of the class has disappeared, and not by destruction but by its elevation. I can hardly tell you what a transformation it has made in the rank and file of our students to find that they have personal friends to whom they may go, who do not mark them, but who are their guides and their counselors, who reënforce "on the side" the instruction of the classroom. It is that personal nearness which enables the preceptor to fit his counsel and help to the special need of the student. If the fault of purely individual education has been that it overlooks the need of class instruction, the training of men in their great common resemblances, which must always be a fundamental thing; if at the same time the fault of exclusive class instruction is that it neglects the peculiarities and difficulties of individuals-then it seems to me the solution of the question is to have and keep both class instruction and individual instruction, making the class instruction the fundamental thing, animated, toned, and adapted, however, in the class teaching by the close personal mode of recitation, and then make the tutorial teaching the supplementary and reënforcing thing. Thus you will solve the problem of teaching the student in relation to his fellows and in his own self. Then we may remove from the class teaching all the little irritations and difficulties due to the peculiarities of one and another pupil, and transfer them to the proper place for treatment; for hospital treatment, if necessary. Here it seems to me is the place where the American school education, and college education too, may receive new vitalization. That vitalization is to be gained by fostering strong individuality both in teacher and in scholar-but in the teacher first. I feel more than I can tell, that if we are suffering as a country, notwithstanding all our achievements and exertions, we are suffering from the lack of independent individual strength in men. Men are getting too subservient to public opinion; they are too willing to be run by machines, or to be a part of machinery. They are too willing to be led rather than to lead; they are too willing to take their opinions at second hand rather than at first hand. In things political and things religious, as in things educational, it does seem to be a fact (and let us be our own severe critics in this) that the American people is too much in the way of taking the "lockstep" in everything. For the sake of our country is it not a great deal better that every boy in our schools should have the utmost provision made for him, even if it entail vast expense, so that the most sacred thing in all education, his own self, shall be invigorated, lifted, rescued, perfected, and ennobled by that personal touch in teaching? And so it all comes back to the personality of the teacher. Give me a good teacher, a good man or a good woman of noble nature, and I am comparatively indifferent to his or her scholarly attainments. The attainments will follow, like the "other things" added when the Kingdom of Heaven is sought first. Of what use, for educating our boys and girls, would it be to have the most gifted historian or linguist or physicist or teacher of any art, if that teacher is himself a small-natured, mean-natured, close-natured, littlenatured soul? For educational purposes of what use is it in science, in philosophy, in anything, that men should make their discoveries, if the men who teach these things to students really amount to very little in themselves? The main effect on the student is the effect of the man. I do not care much for the scientific conclusions or the philosophical conclusions or the literary performances of men of poor judgment or bad taste or selfish nature. I distrust them because they are the observations they have made with faulty eyes; and when the eyes are discolored by prejudice or passion or meanness, what difference does it make how great the attainments are if the man himself has not attained to being worthy of what he studies? And so we come back to the old theme. It is the personality of the teacher that counts, not the machinery of the school. Every weak teacher leans on the machinery. Every strong teacher can get along if there is no machinery at all. What a test it is of the nobility of education when a great teacher arises, be it man or woman in the lowest or the highest grade of our education, and needs nothing but his own native power to grasp, enchain, lift and lead any student who may be brought before him. That is what makes the school; and if that is what makes the school, that is what must make our country. And as in all teaching, so in all human affairs, the personal power of the man finally determines the worth of his achievement, and the old Greek proverb remains true, that "the workman is greater than his work." These last few days our nation has mourned in reverential sorrow one who supremely illustrates this plain, old-fashioned, indestructible truth. Grover Cleveland's whole career was filled with work, hard work, unrewarded work, intimate personal work. He did not seek great things for himself, but he did great things for us, and he was himself greater than what he did. So I ask every American boy in school to think of him as the great man who has spelled out for each of us personally the meaning of these words: wise, patient, rugged, honest, modest, loving, fearless. Greatheart has crost the River; and as we wait here in the thick of the struggle for the things that are true and honorable, for manhood against. machinery, for personal independence against servility, let us hearten ourselves by his example. The words he said, if haply words there were, To some poor, humble business of to-day. "That humble, simple duty of the day Perform," he bids; "ask not if small or great. Serve in thy post; be faithful and obey. Who serves her truly, sometimes saves the State." THE PERSONAL POWER OF THE TEACHER IN PUBLICSCHOOL WORK WILLIAM H. MAXWELL, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CITY OF NEW YORK One day not long ago in the very heart of the tenement-house region in what is known as the Lower East Side of New York, a young woman who had just left the large school of which she is principal, was slowly picking her way through the crowded street. Her progress was slow for the sidewalks were crowded with people, and the street, except a small driveway in the center, was filled with the pushcarts of peddlers. To an observer it would have been at once apparent that the young woman was a person of great consequence in that Yiddish-speaking crowd, for the children's faces were glad when they saw her, and the large boys touched their caps, and not a few of the longbearded men standing beside the pushcarts, greeted her with, "Good afternoon, Miss K." Presently a woman of rather better appearance than the rest, stopped alongside of Miss K. and began to walk with her. With the unmistakable Yiddish accent she exclaimed, laying a respectful hand on Miss K.'s arm: I cannot help seeing how these children, they love you. You know my Bennie and Rosie? They're in your school. You are such a help to me at home. Some time Bennie, Miss K. says he say he wont. Then he quick stop and he say: "All right, mamma. it is right that I should obey." Do you know, lady, when you stand on that platform in the school and you say someting it is just like when God speaks. Whether it is because of the repression that existed in the foreign lands. from which they are gathered or because of the racial sadness that seems to have been their heritage since they wept by the waters of Babylon, there is no class of people who do so much honor to the teacher, particularly if she is one not of their own race, as do the Jews. Some twenty-five years ago a man became principal of a school in what was then one of the lowest slums of New York. It was in the days before tenement-house reform, and the abodes from which his pupils came were as a rule devoid of those necessities of life-fresh air, light, sufficient space, and sanitary arrangements. The district was crowded with saloons of the lowest class and along the river front were scores of dives frequented by sailors and those who profited by their weaknesses. It was also in the days before the law required that all teachers should be trained and that appointment should be made for merit alone. And so the school like its neighborhood was in sorry condition with a weak corps of teachers, for had not every one of them been a political appointment? The new principal, however, was not only a man of great force of character, but he had had a broad college and university training. Before the year was out he had routed the politicians and ever afterward not an appointment was made in his school except on his recommendation. How did he do it? Not by letters to the newspapers, not by denunciation of the politicians, not by lifting up his voice in lamentation over the degeneracy of the times, but by the simplest course imaginable-he so won the respect of the community that the politicians did not dare to interfere with his school, and soon they were all helping him. Instead of asking for the appointment of their sisters and their cousins and their aunts as teachers, they began to “acquire merit" by offering medals to the pupils for proficiency and by raising money to help along students who, the principal said, had the brains to study in higher institutions. He was a constant visitor in the wretched homes of his pupils. He was a familiar figure in every street and alley. Careless, negligent parents he threatened or cajoled. He found the means to clothe the child who was naked and feed the child who was hungry. He found employment after school hours for those who could continue in school in no. other way. He discovered that so-called athletic clubs were hiring the larger boys in his school to pummel each other into insensibility in the presence of hundreds of brutalized men; but it took only one visit from him to each club to break it up. When with figure drawn up to its full height, tense muscles, and the stern voice of command, he invoked the terrors of the law if any pupil of his was ever entered again in a boxing bout, there was not a ruffian in the gang who was not cowed. He saw that there were children to whom books did not appeal, and for them he devised hand work. He was, I believe, the first man in the United States to introduce genuine manual training into an elementary school. His school became, as every public school ought to be, not merely a place of learning but a social center from which uplifting influences constantly radiated. Today in the humble lives of the laborer and the artisan, in the walks of business and politics, in the ranks of the lawyers, the doctors, the teachers, and the clergymen, there are thousands who attribute their success in life to the schoolmaster, Henry O'Neil. I have cited these two cases in order to bring before your minds the peculiar conditions under which teaching in New York City must be conducted. The first of these conditions is our vast foreign population. There are more Jews in New York than in Palestine, more Italians than in Rome, and enough foreigners of other nationalities to make a city as big as St. Louis. Of the 75,000 new pupils who enter the New York schools every year, probably two-thirds cannot speak a word of English. In one school I counted children of twenty-nine different nationalities who spoke twenty-nine different languages or dialects. To the other difficulties of school work, must, therefore, be added this, that to the majority of pupils the English language must be taught as a foreign language. The second condition peculiar to New York is the extreme congestion of population in parts of Manhattan Island and Brooklyn. In certain large sections the population is the densest in the world rising as high as 1,000 persons to the acre. They live, on account of extremely high rents, in enormous tenement houses; as many as forty families-and the families are always large-under one roof. A low plane of living, proneness to disease, particularly tuberculosis, and the absence of domestic privacy, are the necessary consequences. From these tenements the children, often insufficiently or improperly fed, weary through lack of sleep, with their nerves on edge, come to the public schools. The third condition, peculiar to New York is the constant shifting of population. In the tenement districts, because of the continuous migration of families a child seldom spends all of its school years in one school, generally not more than one or two years. Of course, out of 15,000 classes there are thousands in which the ordinary conditions of school life are to be found; but in other centers, the vast foreign population, the congestion of population, and the shifting of population, create conditions of difficulty for the teacher such as are not to be found in the same degree in any other quarter of the globe. In other words the New York City teachers are confronted with the difficulty not only of teaching an enormous mass of children-there are 600,000 pupils in the city schools-but of converting, under the most difficult conditions possible, a great horde of foreigners chiefly from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, alien in language, alien in thought, alien in habits, into loyal American citizens. To supplement the work of the day schools the Board of Education has established several other agencies-evening schools, evening recreation centers, vacation schools, and playgrounds, lectures to workingmen |