at least, and to consider whether the flag of the public school may not be withdrawn from a few provinces without disadvantage or dishonor.

Dr. McMurry's adoption of the principle of interest, even in a modified sense, as a test of the subject-matter introduced, may be questioned. I am not prepared to accord to his principle of interest equal validity with the other factors named, in the determination of admissions to, or exclusions from, the course of study. If the subject-matter conforms to the other two requirements laid down; if it is adapted to the child's comprehension, and provides that which is required by the civilization into which he is born, it seems to me that the question of interest should be considered solved, except of course so far as concerns that kind of interest which properly belongs to method rather than matter.

I heartily indorse Dr. McMurry's suggestions in his treatment of thoroness. He presents here a fruitful theme for our consideration. Unquestionably, the proper organization of subject-matter in text-book and in recitation, so that nonessentials shall be omitted, will serve to abbreviate our school courses, and will thereby result in economy of time and effort.

Right here I wish to suggest another criterion which, in my judgment, should not be overlooked-one that has not been suggested in the paper, unless it is implied in "social needs and requirements."

In the biological field the selective principle seizes upon the permanently useful rather than the fleeting and the temporary. Those individual variations that contribute to the permanent welfare of the species are appropriated by the colony, while those characteristics of the species that cease to be of service become atrophied and disappear. The young animal, as it comes into the world, finds its inheritance stored in its physical organism. Its individual life, therefore, consists merely in the discharge of this stored battery. The human child finds its inheritance principally outside of its physical organism, stored in civil and social institutions, in history, literature, science, and art. It is the business of the school to induct the child thru self-activity into this external inheritance. The appropriation of this vast heritage of the race which we call civilization is impossible. Besides, all the elements of this civilization are not equally important; all social demands are not equally imperative. Some of these elements are temporary and ephemeral, while others are constant and permanent elements of progress. In our selection, shall we consider only that which may prove useful to the individual, or shall we not regard those elements which tend to promote the permanent welfare of the race, as equal, if not greater, in value? Those elements which are permanently useful and conform to the highest ideals of the race should be embodied in our school programs. This leads us to an ethical criterion for the evaluation of material. All elements, therefore, that are not ethically sound, and are not permanently useful to the race, should be eliminated from the curriculum. It seems to me that we need the ethical principle today to supplement the principle of utility, which too often has regard for expediency and temporary social ends. We need to apply more rigidly to our courses the criterion of ethical and spiritual values-a criterion which transcends in importance the test of social needs and requirements. We should demand in our school programs, not simply that which is within the comprehension of the child and t at which embodies the demands of the society of today, but also that which is ethically pure and calculated to lift the individual into the highest and richest spiritual life of the race.

The application of this principle to the several subjects in our courses of study will place some of the omissions suggested in the paper in a new light. In arithmetic, for instance, money values would play a less important part, and the commercial ideal would gradually become dethroned. We should have fewer problems in interest, profit and loss, and brokerage, and more in measurement and quantitative nature study. In geography, the memorizing of a mass of ephemeral facts, and a multitude of details that change with each decennial census, would be abandoned; the geographical attainment dictated

by social needs could be acquired more rationally in connection with history during the last two years of the elementary course.

Under the application of the ethical criterion, a vast amount of useless, and even demoralizing, material could be profitably omitted in the study of history. The military ideal would be less prominent, and heroism would not be confined to the battlefield. From one-third to one-half of the average text-book in United States history now used is devoted to war and bloodshed. The application of the ethical principle would reduce the treatment of wars to a statement of their causes, the names of decisive battles, the personnel of the commanders of the contending armies, and the general results. In biography and literature the principle would find wide application, and much of the rubbish now passing as literature in the schools would be omitted because it lacks the elements of permanency and ethical value. The omissions thus made within each topic, together with the improved presentation of subject-matter as suggested by the paper, would probably reduce the average elementary-school program so that at least one year could be saved to the pupil in the accomplishment of the work.

CLINTON S. MARSH, superintendent of schools, Auburn, N. Y.—The child acquires thru his five senses all that he comes to know; his home experiences open for him to a very limited degree the commonest avenues of life thru which he acquires a small vocabulary. To him, sense-training is as necessary to unfoldment as oxygen to the lungs. By touch and muscular sense he adjusts himself thru the kindergarten and manual training; and in the adjusting of his brain-cells and muscular sense he shapes objects in clay, wood, iron, raffia, and other materials to correspond to the things that are not a part of himself, and gains a knowledge of relations of things, without which training he sees things apart, just as he sees a play upon the stage which he can in no sense reproduce. "To increase rational joy is one of the objects which public education should always keep in sight."

The subjects below the high school that have become quite commonly established may be classified into five correlated groups: (1) reading, spelling, literature and language, history, and geography; (2) history, geography, nature study, and language; (3) kindergarten, manual training, drawing, nature study, and number; (4) music and literature; (5) number apart from its connection with other subjects.

Eliminate number from the first two grades, except as an incident of the schoolroom and life.

If it can be done without too greatly disturbing present standards and calculations of engineering and science, substitute the metric system for our compound system of numbers, and thus save nearly three years in the study of arithmetic.

Grammar must be simplified so that pupils shall acquire by the drill of the last two years below the high school the parts of speech, case-relation, inflection, principal parts of verbs, and classification of phrases and clauses. The time usually given in earlier years to grammar should be devoted to expression, oral and written.

Geography should be treated as a separate subject from the fifth to the seventh grade only, and then in such a way that place and mathematical relations are but an addition to the scientific, historical, and general knowledge gotten by correlation to other subjects. Spelling should be taught largely as a part of reading and language, and the study of lists should be confined to Grades V to VII only.

With arithmetic thus reduced to five years (or to six, if we supplement it in the seventh and eighth years with algebra); with formal grammar reduced to two years, by emphasizing at the proper psychological period the elements of English grammar, and by trusting to the study of foreign languages in the high school to formulate further grammatical principles; with spelling largely taught as a part of language work, and with emphasis placed on geography as a separate subject in the fifth to the seventh year, we make these the drill periods in the essentials of knowledge; emphasize, not minimize drill, and by elimination free the program from overcrowding. Two important factors to make these better taught

than they have ever been taught are correlation and a method of teaching that shall teach the pupil how to study. It is true that children no not know how to study. I believe the great factors responsible are three: (1) poor preparation of the lesson on the part of the teaching force, and a failure on its part to grasp the pupil's mental attitude; (2) overcrowded schoolrooms; (3) two divisions or sets of pupils in a room. By far the greatest error is the last. Any system that seeks the brightest pupil, rather than every individual, is to that extent a failure. The number of pupils per teacher should be reduced to thirtyfive or forty; but, far more, the teacher should stand before one set of pupils, holding every moment the attention of every pupil in recitation or in study-the latter quite as much as the former.

Every superintendent and teacher should recognize the oneness of reading, literature, spelling; the oneness of literature, spelling, composition; the oneness of composition and every other subject in school, by giving credit in composition for written work well done in history, geography, arithmetic, domestic science, and every interest of school and life; the oneness of drawing, nature study, and manual training, by making the supervisior of drawing the correlator of manual training to his subject, by having the pupils do all the mechanical and decorative drawing of the manual-training department in the graderooms as part of the drawing lesson, and by recognizing that drawing is a method of selfexpression in its application to nature study. Three things are necessary for successful treatment of nature study in the public schools: correlation of nature study to language, correlation of nature study to home geography, and correlation of nature study to drawing. It is not necessary to give any time to nature study outside of the three studies named. Let reading in the grades become, not an art, but a means to the end of acquiring acquaintance with literature, history, geography, art, and language.

Thru a full comprehension of the possibilities in the principle of unity of interest in related subjects, by elimination of topics, by regarding the psychological period for study and drill upon any given topic, and by attention to teaching the pupil how to study, the ourses of study of the grades should not be overcrowded.

ATHLETICS AND COLLATERAL ACTIVITIES IN
SECONDARY SCHOOLS

F. D. BOYNTON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, ITHACA, N. Y. We all have a somewhat definite notion of what is meant by the term "athletics," but the phrase "collateral activities" is all-comprehensive and may include everything outside of regular class-work. For the purpose of this discussion, the term "collateral activities" will be made to include the work of musical and literary clubs; concerts and theatricals given by the students; the work of congresses and debating societies; and the social functions of the school, such as receptions at which dancing is permitted. Under "athletics" will be included football, baseball, basket-ball, track-work, tennis, hockey, golf, and rowing.

It is conceded that the public-school system is the bulwark of American institutions; that without it the problems resulting from immigration could not be solved; that without it American institutions would soon become Europeanized. For strength to perform this fundamental task, it relies chiefly upon its hold on the affections of the American people. To the boys

and girls in the schools today it must look for a continuation of that future support which its enlarged field and increased burdens demand. I hold, therefore, that those activities that tend to make the public schools more useful by increasing the attendance, that tend to endear them as institutions to the hearts of our boys and girls, will also tend to retain for them the love and enthusiastic support of these boys and girls when a few added years shall have made them men and women, and make more certain the perpetuity of American institutions. To encourage such activities is not only legitimate, but the only sensible thing to do.

That such activities do attract and hold in school many students who would not otherwise continue, probably few teachers who have been closely associated with student life will deny. This is an age of doing. The spirit of doing seizes a lad long before he has outgrown the compulsory-education law. In obedience to this spirit, many a boy who has been misunderstood at school has entered prematurely the ranks of wage-earners rather than submit to the monotonous grind of an educational machine. This spirit of wanting to do something is a force ever present in the boy of parts, and often dictates and controls his actions. We want such boys in the schools; and not them only, but their less gifted brothers as well. It is not true that we are educating too many people. It is the business of the schools to educate, so far as possible, all the people that are not actually abnormal-the poor and the rich, the mentally strong and the mentally weak, the morally good and the morally bad. We want the people in the schools. If it is necessary to have concerts and lectures and debates and receptions and athletics "to have and to hold " them, by all means let us have these things. In adding them we are only following the precedent we have already established by admitting to our schools the elective system.

In the last twenty-five years the curriculum of the public school has been revolutionized. It has been broadened and enriched in order to better train the pupil for citizenship. Training for citizenship is the supreme test, the ultimate aim of popular education; it is this result which justifies the state in expending public money in the support of schools and warrants local taxation to supplement the efforts of the state. In order to train for citizenship, we must do more than cultivate the intellect. The school must be more than an intellectual machine. Great as is the intellectual work to be done for the boys and girls in our public schools, it is only a part of the program. More and more must our schools look after the moral, the spiritual, the economic, and the social welfare of their pupils. The signs are so plain that he who runs may read. Witness music, drawing, sewing, cooking, manual training, permanently added to our school programs. Note the breaking away from tradition shown in the liberalizing of the high-school programs, the increase in the number of courses of study, the injection of electives into all of them, the addition of bookkeeping, typewriting, stenography, and of all that the laboratory stands for. Horace Greeley, were he living today, would

change his advice to young men. He would say, not "go west," but "go to school;" for school now means a multiplied contact with life. We no longer hold that a subject is educationally valueless in proportion as it is practically valuable. On the contrary, we now think that a subject that La no connection with the real issues of life, that furnishes nothing but an opportunity for mental gymnastics, is a waste of time; and we have no time

to waste.

Now, the widening of school activity along the lines we are here considering is only an extension of this movement. The question to be asked in regard to it all is: Is it educative? Does it subserve the purpose for which the public school exists? If so, then time should be found, or made, for the education of our pupils along these lines not set down in books and not represented in the class-room. Personally, I am persuaded that a secondary school that has no musical clubs, no literary or debating societies; that does not give concerts, receptions, simple theatricals, public debates, lectures, declamation contests, and the like; and that devotes no time to the various forms of physical training, falls far short of what it should be, and of what the secondary school of the future is going to be. In or out of school such activities are bound to exist, or some substitute, possibly a dangerous one, to be found for them. Properly guided and controlled by the school authorities, they can be made a valuable means toward the education of our pupils. Such guidance requires the expenditure of additional time and energy on the part of the teachers, and the objection is always raised that teachers have quite as much as they can attend to already. Unquestionably, much the easiest course would be to shut our eyes to the existence of such activities. But that is impossible; we have already passed beyond that stage of the question. The time is not far distant when teachers who are unwilling to devote time "out of hours" to the proper development, guidance, and control of such student activities, will need to seek employment in another occupation.

My position, then, is this: I would countenance the existence in all secondary schools of musical, literary, and similar clubs and societies, and such other activities as above mentioned; in addition, I would sanction all the previously mentioned forms of athletics; but I would have athletics and collateral activities as much under the direction of the teachers of the school as are the classes in algebra. I would have them all conducted at the school building, or at such places and at such times as the authorities of the school should designate: and a teacher would always be present to direct the policy of the organization, whether in the school building during school hours, or outside the school building or the town, outside of school hours.

But the interest in this subject centers chiefly around athletics. So long as it is a question of extending the countenance of school authority merely to such activities as those of debating, musical, and literary societies, little opposition develops. The connection of these organizations with the former ideals of the school as a place for the intellectual training of youth is obvious