fully weighed and balanced. It trains the pupil to reach conclusions based upon considerations of a complex character. The syllogism of mathematics is not the syllogism of every-day life. The man of affairs cannot proceed from absolutely fixed premises to definite and unvarying conclusions. The value of his judgment will depend upon the ability to give proper weight to a variety of elements which make up his premises. For training in this practical sort of reasoning a better subject than economics could not be selected. Closely related to economics is economic or commercial geography. The latter throws into broad relief the division of labor-perhaps the most marked feature of modern industrial conditions, and the fundamental basis of trade and

commerce.

Thus far we have spoken of the typical secondary subjects common in all good high schools, with the single exception of economics. A program of studies in a commercial school would not in a mere statement of the subjects differ very much from the program in the ordinary high school. What is insisted upon is that they should be taught as far as possible with a commercial bias.

There remains for our consideration the group of studies which are directly and immediately commercial. The business activities of today require from those who would undertake them the ability to write a good hand, to use. figures with accuracy and dispatch, to keep accounts with intelligence and economy of time and effort. To these equipments may be added a familiarity with business forms and documents, the laws governing their use, and some knowledge of office economy. In many instances a knowledge of stenography and typewriting is essential, and in any case it is a valuable addition to the young business man's equipment. The commercial course should therefore include business writing and business arithmetic, bookkeeping, business correspondence, and office practice, commercial law, and stenography and typewriting. Business writing and business arithmetic should come early in the course to find their steady application in the later work of the school. Bookkeeping is by no means an easy study if properly taught. It does not seem advisable to begin it before the second year of the course, and provision should be made for its study in the third and fourth years. Competent observers feel that bookkeeping as usually taught is not made to show its real educational value. It is certainly possible to make the instruction in accounts center about certain definite principles. It is by no means necessary for the pupil merely to follow a model in the spirit of an unthinking imitator. In commercial law, also, that instruction cannot be called successful which aims only at giving the pupil a certain body of facts. The subject lends itself to a treatment. which is in no small degree scientific. It has been the fashion in four-year commercial courses to postpone the study of stenography to the late years of the course. This is hardly defensible. Pupils in the first and second years may with profit pursue the study of shorthand, and the many opportunities for its use in school makes it possible for them to secure a practical training,

insuring speed and accuracy at graduation. Business correspondence and office practice come more properly after a preliminary training which has made the pupil familiar with many details of business usage. It is perhaps not unwise to place them in the fourth year of the program.

Briefly stated, it should be the aim of the commercial school to give the requisite technical equipment for business, but also to go far beyond that, and by a wise application of practically all the standard secondary subjects to commercial uses to give a depth and breadth of preparation that will insure an all-around efficiency, an easy adaptability to new and important tasks, and a degree of initiative. The graduate of the commercial high school will be by no means a finished business man. But no law school expects its graduates to be finished lawyers, and no medical school assumes that its graduates will be finished physicians. There is much that the successful business man must know, which no school can teach, just as there is much in the practice of law for which no law school offers a prescription. And yet the day has gone by when law is learned by reading in a lawyer's office. The law school has become practically indispensable. And the day is fast passing with the remarkable specialization of all commercial and industrial activities when a desirable all-around training in business can be secured in a business house. The new recruit is assigned to some restricted task, with small outlook into other fields, and unless he has more than ordinary energy and initiative, or is possessed of influence, he is likely to have little opportunity for broader experience.

European countries have made great strides in the matter of providing thoro business training. Germany alone has more than two hundred commercial schools. The United States has hitherto relied chiefly upon the socalled "business colleges." These institutions have been and still are extremely useful, but the demand is now for a business training which involves much more intensive and extensive study than is possible with the highly specialized curriculum of the business college, and in the very brief time which such institutions demand and secure from their pupils. It falls to the secondary school to undertake this work, and I venture to say that the most notable expansion of secondary instruction in the next decade is to be along the line. of commercial education.

EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAN NAVY

REAR ADMIRAL CASPAR F. GOODRICH, U. S. N., DELEGATE FROM THE UNITED STATES NAVY DEPARTMENT TO THE FORTY-THIRD CONVENTION OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION

I. INTRODUCTORY

The peculiar sociological development of the United States has imposed upon the Navy Department an extended and ramified system of education. The necessity for this undertaking may be found in the fundamental fact that

ours is not a maritime nation. Whatever delight and profit our forefathers, a hundred years ago more or less, may have taken in a seafaring life, their descendants have sought and seized the larger opportunities offered by agricultural and industrial pursuits for gaining a living, for fostering and elevating. the home, and for raising themselves and their families to a plane of existence which grows, from year to year higher and more elaborate, and a way of living which grows, pari passu, more costly.

In a general way, it may be stated that whatever of special training the navy needs it must itself supply. The navy alone is capable of providing the means and opportunity by which it secures men capable of handling its guns and ammunition and of laying its batteries with accuracy upon the target. But there are a great number of occupations, trades, professions, etc., represented in the crew of every naval vessel which are so well compensated in civil life that, with the scant pay allowed, the service must either evolve these particular talents out of its own personnel or go without them. I might run thru the long list of trades represented in a typical ship's company and point out their active duties and their passive or reserved duties, for both of which the men must be competent. It is only by taking willing and intelligent men, who are disposed to go to sea with us, and then schooling them in the particular way we need, that we succeed in maintaining the efficiency of our ships.

You will note that the education of the blue-jacket is in large measure not so much education in the generally accepted sense of the word as training in a number of trades. The education of the officer, however, falls more readily under the generally accepted classification. It is effected in a manner less diverse and more progressive, and vastly more extended, for it ends only with life itself.

II. NAVY CORPS AND THEIR EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

The officers on board a ship are divided into certain classes according to the nature of their duties. One class commands and maneuvers the ship, drills the men, fires the guns, and operates the engines. Its members are called "line officers," and with them solely lies succession to command. This corps is recruited from the graduates of the Naval Academy.

We have also surgeons, drawn from civil life and admitted to the navy after the most searching examination.

Inasmuch as the ship consumes large quantities of provisions, ammunition, coal, and other stores, and is in itself a small community wherein each member works for hire, it is necessary to have the business side of life represented; and so she carries a pay officer, with his clerk and assistants.

The special care of the ship's engines, boilers, and the wilderness of auxiliaries rests with the officers detailed for that particular duty, who are at present line officers as well as engineers.

The marine officers were at one time graduates of the Naval Academy, but since the enormous expansion of the navy has set in, this institution has been

unable to supply even the demands of the line, so that the recent additions to the list of marine officers are drawn from civil life.

Lastly, among the commissioned officers are the chaplains, who are taken into the service on the diploma or certificate of a theological college or seminary.

It goes without saying that all officers are compelled to undergo a rigid physical examination before being commissioned.

III. THE EDUCATION OF THE LINE OFFICER

The most important as well as the oldest educational enterprise which the navy has undertaken is the training of the midshipman at the Naval Academy to become an officer of the line. Without confining myself too closely to figures, which may change from one year to another, I may say broadly that today every senator, representative, and delegate in Congress is entitled to have two midshipmen at the Naval Academy, while the president can appoint five each year. This he does by nominating the individual to the Navy Department, and the Navy Department examines the lad. If he can pass the prescribed physical and mental examination, he becomes a midshipman, enters the Naval Academy, and begins his course of instruction.

The boy spends four years in all at Annapolis, and then goes into the service for a probationary term of two years, after which a final examination ensues; and, if he passes satisfactorily, he receives a commission in the navy as ensign, the lowest grade of line officers. He is now on the way to the highest rung of the ladder, the admiralcy. Eight months of every year are devoted at Annapolis to the study of the elementary branches, mechanical drawing, English, chemistry, history, mechanics, mathematics, physics, French, Spanish, seamanship, ordnance, gunnery, marine engineering, navigation, and other professional matters. Three months are spent in the practice cruise on board a ship, by which the boys get their sea-legs, or sea-stomach, and the sea-habitmost important of all. For one month each year they are granted leave, corresponding to the vacation in ordinary schools. Altho the Naval Academy does not pretend to a very exalted grade of education, still in its special lines it goes very far, and the pace is very rapid, so that the boy who finishes the four-year course must be one of average intelligence and rather more than average industry. An inspection of the program of studies will reveal the great preponderance of the mathematical branches. This preponderance is a natural sequence of the fact that today a naval officer's duties are to a large extent intimately associated with engineering and navigation, both of which have mathematics for their basis.

I am not singular in believing that the weak point in our entire scheme of education of this country lies in the primary school. It is the rarest thing in the world to find boys and girls of, say, fourteen years, who can read and write and spell and cipher with even tolerable accuracy. This same complaint of incomplete preparation in English branches comes from every college and university in the land.

The Academy pretends only to lay the foundation of an education-to supply the irreducible mininum, as the diplomats say, of schooling. It can, indeed, do no more. As a fact, like others, we only learn our profession by practicing it. It is on board ship and in carrying on the duties of ordinary ship life that the young man gradually widens his mental horizon and becomes familiar with all the duties of the naval officer. This would be abundantly true were the naval profession fixed and immutable. How much more true must it therefore be when we reflect that everything about the navy, material and moral, is changing from day to day, and that so keen is the competition that we must work hard, long, and unremittingly to maintain our place in the procession.

In the lower grades the line officer becomes accustomed to consider the questions which lie ahead of him-those of command; and when in command of a single ship, especially if cruising in a squadron, he reaches still farther out and touches the problems of flag rank-the command and maneuvering of the fleet.

I may remark that our ships are designed by and constructed under the supervision of a corps of naval constructors, graduates of the Naval Academy, who learn their special trade either abroad at the Polytechnique in Paris, the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, the Glasgow School of Marine Architecture; or at home, under a recent arrangement, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We have also in the navy an institution to which I have the honor of standing as godfather-the Naval War College, at Newport, R. I., where officers of higher rank meet and discuss questions of strategy, tactics, and the art of naval warfare. At this college there is little of teaching, so called; it is rather by meeting together and discussing the points mentioned that progress is secured. Every year a general problem of strategy is laid before the officers who attend the course, and much hard and faithful work is done during the entire summer in threshing out the main and the incidental questions. Cases and schemes of tactics are also discussed by them, and situations in international politics presented as well, with a view of illustrating the principles of international law by concrete examples. Next to actual experience afloat, the Naval War College is the most important factor in our training of captains and admirals.

Newly appointed assistant surgeons are put thru a special course at the Naval Medical School in Washington, and young marine officers spend the best part of a year at the School of Application in Annapolis.

IV. THE APPRENTICE SYSTEM

Just as one set of boys is taken to Annapolis and trained to become officers, so is another set taken to Newport, R. I., enlisted as apprentices, and taught the trade of the common sailor. They spend six months on shore in commodious, well-arranged barracks, where they are instructed in the rudiments of English, and, above all, in the care of their persons, their clothes, their bedding,