well-defined quantity of a special thing? In other words, the college holds that only certain studies educate. A student may be a giant mentally, but cannot be admitted to college because he has trained with the wrong crowd.

While I am on this particular phase of my subject I wish to say a few words in favor of allowing the commercial student to elect manual training. As a general proposition the commercial students are the ones who would be benefited most by that subject. They would be more helpful around the home of the parents and later on in life would be much better home-makers. By all means allow these pupils the right to take manual training. Education is a kind of life preparation that our country gives to its future citizens and rulers and should not be so hedged in as to prevent any one class from gaining its benefits. We were not all created free and equal, the United States Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, and we cannot be changed and molded by educational methods so as to be similar products. So long as these educational straight jackets are inforced, the loss and waste will continue. The intelligent manufacturer has learned that which he formerly wasted has now become one of his greatest sources of income.

When are we educators going to learn this same lesson, and turn this tremendous loss into a splendid, finished, self-sustaining, and independent product?

DISCUSSION

S. R. HOOVER, director of Commercial Department, West High School, Cleveland, Ohio. We heard much yesterday of statistics wherein it was shown how small a percentage of those who enter the first grade emerge from the eighth; of these how few enter the high school; the still further decrease in the number who ever enter any college. All this is true. But let us not forget that among those who dominate the civilization of the world as leaders in matters political, literary, scientific, and commercial, the college man is very predominantly in evidence. While it is the few who complete a virile college course, it takes only a few to lead, and it is so vitally important that these few shall lead aright in the blazing of trails which the multitudes may safely follow that the value of the higher education cannot be estimated by the number who secure it but by the things for which they stand.

There remains here and there a moss-backed croaker who has no use for college training, but he is such a rara avis that he can very properly be classed as a mere antique. The college man has become the leader in the business world. It becomes a pertinent question if it shuts its gates, holds up its hands, and calls a halt against those students who reach it by any other road than the one from which most others have been admitted, what the college is for? With its laboratories, museums, libraries, and other expensive equipment does it meet the measure of its duties if those who knock at its gates are denied admission because, forsooth, they happen to have reached their present state of development and inquiry without a knowledge of Latin or Greek?

On the one extreme is the college which shouts "impossible" to the ambitious commercial student because a hard and fast, iron-clad "course" is laid down and he has the misfortune not to fit exactly into the first cogs of the wheels which compose it. On the other is the institution which makes the whole curriculum an elective "go as you please," and is humiliated by the necessity of turning out graduates who have picked out just enough of the easy subjects to make the minimum of passing units. One is too narrow and the

other too broad. A system of elective groups by semesters, each containing opportunity for reasonable selection yet requiring the pursuit of such combinations as would involve approximately an equal result in culture from all, would obviate both of these difficulties. There was a time within the memory of most of those present when the pupil who was too weak for any other course or failed somewhere else was shifted to the commercial course because “anybody could pass in that course." But that time is no more. The commercial course has been enriched and strengthened until the pupil who has taken it is crowding the classical and scientific pupil tremendously for the commencement program and the valedictory-and he is taking them oftener than his turn comes. He is worth a place in the college, and when he desires that place the college must give it to him. The same system of grouping electives in the high-school course as suggested for the college will go a long way toward clearing the fog that has surrounded us. We are to serve all the people, both those who may find themselves able to go to higher institutions and those who are under the necessity of going to work at an earlier or later date in their course. Both pay their taxes, and we must neglect neither.

PREPARATION AND IMPROVEMENT OF COMMERCIAL TEACHERS

CHEESMAN A. HERRICK, DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF COMMERCE, CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA

At the meeting of the Department of Business Education in 1901 a committee was authorized, to which was later assigned the task of preparing a monograph on commercial education in the American public schools. After numerous meetings and discussions the report of this committee took the form of a suggested curriculum for public high schools, with a discussion on the educational value of the several subjects of this curriculum.

The report above mentioned was presented in tolerably complete form at the 1903 meeting of this Department, and the committee was further directed to proceed with its completion and publication. The report was later brought out as a monograph by the University of the State of New York at Albany, and it is fair to say that this monograph has had a wide circulation, and that it has served a useful purpose in establishing sound notions on commercial education in high schools.

But no sooner was the monograph on commercial studies completed than there was an obvious necessity of doing something more definite to aid in the preparation and improvement of the teachers of commercial subjects, and at the 1905 meeting of this Department a resolution was adopted as follows:

We look upon the preparation of teachers for commercial schools and departments as a pressing problem of commercial education, and we commend this question to our higher schools of commerce and university schools of education, to our normal schools and to further consideration by this body.

At the same meeting a committee on the preparation of commercial teachers was appointed, and this committee was empowered to add to its numbers, and was directed to make a study of the whole question, and to report back to the Department.

The failure to hold a meeting in 1906 delayed somewhat the discussion on

the preparation of commercial teachers, but at Los Angeles, in 1907, it was made the main topic of discussion, and it is being further considered in 1908. It is the hope of the committee that, at an early date, a well-rounded study may be made ready for publication.

The needs for such a study as is proposed are obvious. From every side are evidences of a deep concern in the professional equipment and continuing improvement of teachers, and at the present time other departments of this association are devoting themselves to a topic very similar to that here being discussed.

Some of us have had the duty of selecting teachers of commercial subjects in our own schools, and it is not an unusual experience to be requested to suggest eligible persons for vacancies elsewhere, and we all know how difficult it is to name someone who seems to have the proper preceding preparation and in whom we have confidence. The rapidity with which commercial schools and courses have been inaugurated threatens a teacher-famine and should give much concern. If capable teachers are not secured for commercial subjects their introduction into the public high school is a mistake. There is nothing in the subject matter of commercial education which will prevent incompetent and unsympathetic teachers from making a failure of an enterprise for which they have neither aptitude nor inclination.

Up to the present the ranks of commercial teachers in high schools have been recruited mainly from private business schools. Similarly, commercial high schools, at the first, adopted the textbooks and methods of private schools; but these were in many particulars illy suited for the ends to be attained or the means used to accomplish these ends, and later the textbooks have been modified so as to furnish a body of material for instruction purposes which is suited to the aims and methods of work in high schools. It is no criticism upon the private schools to say that teachers who may be well suited for work in them may not be suited for service in the high schools. By almost common agreement, those who have made a study of the preparation of teachers for high schools have held that those who serve in these schools should have at least a college education. This standard is none too high, and a commercial high school cannot afford to fall below it. Not that there is any mysterious power in the college education, but that it represents the breadth of view, the outlook, and the educational sympathy which should be possessed by one who has to train young people through the four years of a high-school course. The private schools are almost exclusively practical and the work in them is sure to be mechanical; high schools are primarily academic and whenever practical studies find a place in them there is need of a breadth of view in the teaching than can come only from a liberal education of the teacher. It must be granted that some private-school teachers without a college education, who have come into positions as commercial teachers in high schools, have done well. They have "sized up" to the educational meaning of the work and have fitted into the scheme being carried out; but a somewhat extended observation

leads to the conviction that private-school teachers, as a class, do not satis factorily meet the requirements of high-school positions.

Two observations should be made at this point. Private-school teachers show much desire to get into the public high schools and they have been thus far almost the only source of supply. In general public high schools pay better salaries, they require fewer hours in the teaching day, offer longer vacations, and more secure tenure of office than do private schools. It is not strange then that private-school teachers have so largely secured places with the public schools as seriously to cripple the private schools. If one sets for himself the standard that commercial teachers are to be college graduates, he limits his choice to a very few persons. The writer has been made aware of this repeatedly in the last ten years, but never more so than when a principal of a normal school, which is to inaugurate a course for the preparation of commercial teachers, recently requested, as a directing head, a college graduate who had an acquaintance with technical business subjects. Within the past year requests have been made twenty times at least to name a man of this sort, in most cases at salaries from $1,500 to $1,800 a year, and there are almost no men to meet the requirement. At the same time numbers of good men are seeking position as teachers in the old-line subjects. If it were not for some striking exceptions one might almost proclaim that the liberal training and the technical commercial studies are as impossible of being united as are the tra ditional oil and water, and yet there is nothing in the nature of the subjects that should make this true. More regard for the real needs of those being educated, better appreciation of their own interests on the part of prospective teachers, and a correction of the false notion of the dignity and importance of commercial subjects: these and other influences are sure to operate in changing present conditions.

One error has carefully to be guarded against; namely, that because one knows a subject he is thereby qualified to teach it. Of course one cannot teach a subject without knowing it; but knowing a subject is no guarantee of an ability to teach it. One familiar with a foreign tongue is not necessarily a good instructor in that tongue as is evidenced by the unsatisfactory experience in American high schools with native teachers of French and German. It would be a strange educational doctrine that one who knew English is perforce qualified to teach this language. But the statement is no more false than is the one that a carpenter is prepared to teach woodwork or a blacksmith forgepractice in a manual training high school; or that a bookkeeper is prepared to teach bookkeeping or a stenographer shorthand writing in a commercial high school. There are fundamental laws of these subjects which should be understood by those who are to guide others in the attempts at their mastery, and equally important, there is a necessary knowledge of the one being taught if the instruction is to be most effective.

It is not possible to escape from the necessity of preparing and improving commercial teachers by seeking refuge in the fallacy that "teachers are born

and not made." The United States Commissioner of Education has come nearer to the truth in a statement that teachers are both born and made and that above all else they must be discovered. What commercial education particularly needs at the present time is provision for the preliminary preparation of commercial teachers and some well-thought-out plans for the improvement of those already at work.

The ideal is obvious, first, as broad an academic training as possible; a general college course first, with special preparation afterward both in the technical subject-matter and the methodology of presentation is not too much. Higher schools of commerce that parallel the traditional college course would also seem a good preparation. Many studies in the higher commercial schools are the same as are those presented in more elementary form in high schools, and the studying of these in the advanced institutions gives much in suggestion for their presentation in the secondary schools; but the plea for college education, whether college of commerce or otherwise, is not alone for subject-matter. The college course gives a general "setting up" which is desirable for one who is to stand for high ideals in secondary schools.

What seems a second indispensable qualification is a familiarity with practical matters and an acquaintance with men of affairs. The one who looks forward to a commercial teachership should travel as widely as possible and know at first-hand the conditions and life in and products of different sections of his own country and some of the other principal countries of the world. Then the commercial teacher should have had experience with practical business matters. He should be willing to serve gratuitously as an employee, and, if need, be to pay for the privilege of getting behind the scenes and learning how business is carried on; and a man trained and alert, who knows what he wants, will be prompt at learning the practical aspects of business. Not only might the one making his preparation for a teaching position use his vacations for gaining insight into business, but those actually engaged in teaching might also do this with profit.

A desirable course to be followed in connection with or supplementary to that mentioned above is found in studies in education and the art of teaching either in universities, normal schools, or other institutions now turning their attention to this matter. Schools of the sort just mentioned have demonstrated their right to be, and commercial studies cannot afford to remain an exception to the range of training which they supply. Evidences are not wanting that schools of education are giving themselves to a new regard for practical studies; some normal schools have announced departments for preparing commercial teachers, and have gone to the extent of introducing technical courses for training in the subject-matter for such studies as bookkeeping and shorthand. Some of the private institutes and certain of the normal schools have announced short courses of one year which are designed to give professional finish and which are opened only to mature persons who are prepared to profit by them. Thus, in the present tendencies, there is much