methods of choosing the pupils as well as our too exclusively literary methods of training them. At present we are largely ignoring, to our peril, the possibilities of developing two-thirds of the capacity fund of the nation. There is still a deal too much of natural selection in our schools except in one direction. The problem of all problems for the scientific educator of the future is to organize the selection.

There is one very effectual way by which an excessive production of any particular type of workman could be guarded against, and that is the creation of central local committees for the various groups of trades. Such committees might contain among other representatives an equal number of delegates from the employers and the trades unions in the particular trades concerned. Their main functions might consist in advising on curricula, or the selection of teachers, as well as the granting of leaving certificates which would be recognized by the Trade. They might further assist in the formation of employment bureaus for placing out the pupils. Such a committee has already been formed in London under the auspices of the County Council, to deal with the book-binding trade, and at the moment of writing this address, it appears that the printing trades were also equally anxious for the formation of a committee, while the chairman of the subcommittee dealing with this section of the Council's work is particularly keen on seeing as wide an extension of the movement as possible.

The need of a large number of trade or vocational schools for London, and for all urban districts generally, is vividly brought out by the Council's report on apprenticeship and by Booth's Life and Labor in London. We learn from these documents that the skilled trades in London are largely recruited by immigrants to the serious detriment of the London boy who is largely relegated to the position of the unskilled laborer. We are turning out from our schools in thousands today, boys with excellent moral qualities, but through the lack of any preliminary skilled training they too often inevitably fall into the ranks of the unskilled, or still worse into those parasitical forms of employment for which the worker is actually too old at 20.

Looking very far ahead I believe that the establishment of the vocational school in which employers and trade unionists would necessarily take an ever and increasing active interest, will possibly lead through the school acting as a sort of selective agency, to the gradual reorganization of modern industry on a rational scale. The industrial anarchy produced by the industrial revolution has lasted far too long. The present scramble for employment, of all against all, is really a waste of the national energies in all countries where the work to be done is, though capable of expansion, more or less limited, and where some channels of employment are blocked, others, only ahead for skilled labor.

Huxley has defined the perfect school as a capacity-catching machine; he should have added, I think, that it should also be cap acity-developing. The vocational school should, if rightly organized, possess this twofold quality of

discovering the divers elements in the aptitude-fund of the nation and of cultivating them to their full advantage. One possible result of this organization of the selection may be the re-establishment of something like the system of the ancient Guilds, shorn of their former objectionable features, but reviving the love of good workmanship with an added sense of the dignity of manual labor, that will best come, if it comes at all, from the sense that training in intelligent craftsmanship is a training in culture, and so is really and truly a liberal education in itself.

THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND

EFFICIENCY

ANDREW S. DRAPER, COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK Mr. President and Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Education Association, and, incidentally but particularly, you, my long-time friends of the Cleveland public schools:

The honor of a summons to address this association, so completely representative of American schools, so great in its history, so wide in its influence, is accompanied by an obligation which one may well accept with hesitation and approach with humility. And when the subject assigned is one which has the attention of the nation and looks to the decisive re-forming of the schools, and particularly when it is one which lends itself to the round-table much better than to the general assembly, and, more particularly still, when you evince such a decided preference for song and violin as you have tonight, one must bespeak your consideration if he does not fall upon his knees and plead for your patience.

We are within the territory which the first great moral act of the Republic, looking to the upbuilding of the nation, in words as solemn as any a statute could employ, dedicated to freedom, to virtue, and to learning forever. We are met at the very heart of the "Reserve" where New England and New York pioneers, as sincere and forceful men and women as ever came out of the mass to seek opportunity and advance civilization, in prayer and act even more meaningful than an ordinance of congress, dedicated themselves and their posterity to the propositions that men and women are created with equality of moral and intellectual, as well as of legal right; that government is a common need and a common good when moved by moral sense; and that government for any other end than the moral good of the governed deserves the enmity, rather than the adhesion, of men. We are met in a great, busy, prosperous city. which has never given over its moral sense, which has always been alert about its freedom, and which has therefore never been indifferent about its schools.

And, while I well know that not a very large number will understand it, I am glad to feel assured that there are still some good people in this great throbbing city, and not a few fine teachers in its excellent schools, who will believe that grateful memories and fruitful recollections crowd to the fore as I

look over this radiant assembly and offer another word about the things which this association and this city hold to be of first concern.

A MESSAGE FROM ENGLAND

We have just had an illuminating message from an accomplished officer of the English schools. His distinguished service to education, our undimmed recollections of the inspiring address he gave us seven years ago, and his resultful work since then in relating schools to industries, have led us to insist that he cross the sea again and speak to us once more upon the subject which is claiming the first attention of our people and our schools. His message is timely because it comes out of the full information and the sagacious outlook of a man who has put his own country and our country under obligations to him: it is more helpful than it otherwise would be because it comes out of the life of a mighty people, whose established habits of industry, whose sane and steady thinking, and whose unbending passion for freedom and for right, have given point and force to their influence upon every sea and in every land.

His message is none the less instructive because our national temperaments and political philosophies are at some points divergent, and because our dissimilarity of industrial conditions makes it impossible to adopt it in every detail. It will be even more instructive if we are able to associate the universality of fundamental principles with inevitable national differences in political and material situations. It would be as fatal for us to assume that a scheme of school organization or a plan of procedure which is adapted to one country must be adapted to another, as it would be to refuse to believe that the universal laws of sense, and the universal gospel of work are as binding upon one people as upon another.

Half a dozen years ago it was my pleasure to show another distinguished officer of the English schools about one of our American free universities. We wandered through offices, and classrooms, and laboratories, and libraries, and shops, and gymnasiums, and then we drove through long avenues of shade trees, until he asked me to stop that he might look about and get a comprehensive view of the whole at once. As it all gathered in his mind he said, "And do you say that all this is free to all the people, and supported by selfimposed taxes upon all the people?" "Yes," I said, "and it is the tax which is voted without dissent, and of which one never hears." He raised his face and hand, in expression more significant than his words, when he said, "There is nothing like it in human history."

Even true, it was not all of the truth. One must have an eye quickened by the American spirit and clarified by American history to see at once all the parts of the educational temple of which that university is but one gem in a resplendent crown. No other eye can take in at a glance the universal systems of primary, and secondary, and collegiate, and professional schools, associated in an educational plan of unprecedented symmetry, closeness, and completeness, which affords to all the equal chance declared in our laws and enshrined in the hearts of all true Americans.

Other peoples do many things better than we do. In some directions their schools are more definite and efficient than ours. It is surely so with the simple schools for the peasant people. But there are no peasants in America. No other nation grasps the doctrine of all education for all the people as we do. We will never let go of that. It is the hope and the heritage of the nation. It is the boon which our democracy holds out to the honest, the ambitious, and the oppressed, in all the world.

It creates difficulties, and we must admit them. All education for all the people has been self-expansive and has come to be expressed in new ways with the advancement of the nation. We all know how situations and needs change in America. Plans laid yesterday have to be modified today. And remedy can not follow upon need as quickly in a country where conclusions must be reached through popular discussion, and opinion must crystallize in free legislation, as in a country where a few do the most of the thinking and a minister or a cabinet exercises the political power for all of the rest.

My friend who has preceded me will not imagine that I am so unmindful of English history as to assume that Britain is a nation where a few men do the thinking and exercise the power for all of the rest. She settled that at Runnymede and again at Naseby, and Dunbar, and Marston Moor, and more than once on Tower Hill. She not only settled it for herself but for us. And since England's best writer of history, in the best history of the American Revolution that has been written, says that American heroism saved English freedom, my English friend will not mind if I say that we settled the question, for England as well as for ourselves, at Saratoga and at Trenton and at Yorktown, and then at Plattsburgh and again at New Orleans, and many times by the gallantry of a little navy upon the high seas. The proudest jewel in England's crown doubtless is that we learned so well the great lessons which her statesmen and heroes taught us and then supplemented them with some experiences and some independence of our own. All the stars upon our flag are the brighter because we have defended our democracy and our security so well. The foundations and the buttresses of law are as firmly laid in America as in Britain, and they are no better grounded in any land. We are as sensitive about the learning and the independence of the courts as are the people who look up with keenest pride to the red cross of Saint George-and more than that can not be claimed in any land.

England has always set us a fine example of industry. She has not juggled with opportuneness so much as we have, perhaps because she has had less disposition to juggle, and less opportuneness to juggle with. Democracy, opportunities, and optimism have to be reckoned with in America: they often cause us to be misunderstood in England.

Whether or not we have a fateful craze for wealth, we hold in special honor riches justly gained and sanely used. Our adventurers and our weaklings gamble much upon the unlimited chances which the conditions present; a few win; the greater number go to "the deeps that are dumb." But the country

is not all adventurer or weakling. The overwhelming sentiment is sane, and sound, and strong. We believe in capacity more than in chance, and in work more than in opportunity. We put manhood above either riches or poverty. We know that labor, and skill, and prudence, and steadiness, rather than great wealth, make the reliable character and the substantial citizen, and that these spring in the largest numbers and in the most virile type out of all education for the laborer just as much as for the millionaire, and for the commoner just as much as for the prince.

Britain has something of that to learn, and so with her constitutionalism and with the unfettered intellectual freedom of the Saxon race she has educational difficulties as well as we. If the mother country has fewer new situations to deal with, she seems to have greater difficulty about the principles which will have to be applied to all situations. The fact that her situations do not change so often is offset by the other fact that her more settled political and social organization yields less easily to the inevitable advance of the common people: and perhaps it is more than offset by the further fact that her statesmen are not quite as responsive to the democratic advance as ours, and that she does not change statesmen as often nor as easily as we. But we will both console ourselves with the reflection that educational troubles are the proof of educational energy and the assurance of educational progress; and we will be happy in the oneness of purpose which enables us to balance one another and quicken education in all the vast domains where the people understand the English tongue.

LACK OF INDUSTRIALISM IN THE SCHOOLS

Americans are as free in their right of censure as in any other of their freedoms. The elementary schools are everywhere, and often they find themselves within the intellectual limitations of senseless criticism. The loosening obligations of domestic duty and the very weaknesses of the schools have produced an undue supply of people of superficial culture and of "professionals" without employment; and the universal interest in education makes it quite possible for these to occupy themselves and perhaps gain a little standing by endless propositions about the schools. There is evidence enough that they are not slow to take advantage of it. The factors which these people have added and would add to the schools are the essential cause of a widespread difficulty to which it is high time that we address ourselves with determination and with force.

When but one-third of the children remain to the end of the elementary course in a country where education is such a universal passion, there is something the matter with the schools. When half of the men who are responsible for the business activities and who are guiding the political life of the country tell us that children from the elementary schools are not able to do definite things required in the world's real affairs, there is something the matter with the schools. When work seeks workers, and young men and women are indif