Boston which was carried on by an association of churches in that city. All the teachers were volunteers. The equipment was very meager, and the physical surroundings deplorable; but it was good pioneer work, and showed the way toward the somewhat ample organization of evening schools which now makes part of the Boston public school system. The fundamental idea of the evening schools is to continue and supplement for individuals the school training which was too early broken off. They are continuation schools. They are schools for boys and girls who have already worked many hours during the day. Experience seems to have proved that for such pupils, so occupied during the day, manual and laboratory subjects and methods are to be preferred to book methods. Such pupils can be taught from things better than from words and phrases. They can more easily attend strenuously to exercises which involve the use of the hands as well as of the eyes. In such schools the elective or optional method is indispensable; for the pupil gets more. profit from a single subject than from many, and that single subject should be one which naturally enlists his interest and zeal. It is interesting to observe that the present program of the Boston Evening High School is a longer and richer program than is provided for the day high. schools, and that the system is thoroly elective, not only for short-term pupils, but for the long-term pupils who seek the diploma of their school. Thus the total amount of instruction offered by the school in all its subjects represents eighty-three points on the program; but to attain the diploma of the school only twenty-four points are required. The evening schools offer a continuation of instruction to boys and girls who have been obliged to leave school at the conclusion of the eighth grade, or even earlier. They offer additional instruction to boys who have been obliged at too early an age to become apprentices in shops and factories. The evening school ought to be a refuge and refreshment for an apprentice. The objection to apprenticeship is that the interest of the shop or factory is constantly in collision with the interest of the apprentice. It is the interest of the shop that the apprentice should learn to do a few things well and stop there; it is the interest of the apprentice to learn to do many things and to understand many more-to comprehend a whole machine, and not that part only to the production of which he day after day contributes. The evening school should enable him to widen hist knowledge; to understand principles as well as practice; and to escape from the contracting influence of automatic repetition.

The moment we come to consider what the subjects are which may be most profitably taught during the evening in our, at present, unoccupied schoolhouses we shall see that some modification of the arrangement of the rooms and of the furniture in the rooms will ordinarily be needed. There will be needed, for example, rooms in which conveniently to teach drawing, both free-hand and mechanical. The

value of drawing as training does not seem to me fully appreciated by the ordinary American school superintendent and school-teacher. In the first place, drawing is a mode of expression which is universally useful in all callings or occupations. There is no mechanical art or trade and no learned profession in which a capacity to draw is not a source of power as well as of enjoyment. Drawing develops the perception of beauty and of the sources of beauty, and cultivates in a quick and effective way mental accuracy and habitual regard for truth. As a means of conveying ideas and of recording impressions it can be compared only to language, and is often far more convenient than language. Those of us who cannot draw-and I fear that we are a great majority in this meeting of superintendents—are seldom impressed with a more disagreeable sense of personal inferiority than when we watch a man or a woman who uses a pencil effectively in sketching or designing, or a blackboard and crayon in lecturing. Who of us has not watched with great delight, but with a sense of hopeless personal inferiority, an artist depicting with rapid strokes a landscape or a person, or the mobile surface of the sea? It is by practice in drawing, and particularly in free-hand drawing, that the intelligent young artisan may most easily be brought to unite artistic and technical capacity. After drawing come clay modeling, pattern-making for the parts of machinery, and the experimental study of electricity and electrical apparatus, as useful subjects for boys in the evening schools, and for girls sewing, cooking, household economics, dressmaking, millinery, and embroidery. All these arts have much educational as well as industrial value; they train the mind as well as the hand, and they may all impart habits of accurate observation, just reasoning, and moral rectitude.

The next enlargement of the use now made of school buildings should be their use for vacation schools, not for a short term of four or five weeks, but for seven or eight weeks during July and August. Vacation schools, like evening schools, were first established by private enterprise, and with a view to keeping children off the streets and giving them congenial and improving occupations. They have been adopted by some American cities, and have uniformly succeeded wherever adopted; but they ought to become a regular part of every urban school system, and they should be as numerous and as well-sustained as the public schools which are open the rest of the year, altho the resort to them will not be so large as it is to the ordinary schools maintained from September to July. In these schools the instruction should chiefly concern things, and not language, just as in the evening schools. The pupils need something to do with their eyes and their hands; hence the same subjects which are used in evening schools should form the staple of instruction in vacation schools. In many cases the evening-school teachers from September to June can be employed for the vacation schools, for this staff can very well take its vacation in June.

We should not imagine that either the evening school or the vacation school is to be regarded as play; on the contrary, both are real work. · Both provide a serious mental training, and both ought to have an excellent effect on the moral quality of their pupils. The pupils' minds should gain in accuracy of observation and clearness of conception. The culti vation of good judgment in productive labor may be more successfully carried on in manual operations than in mathematical operations or in the study of languages. Whatever illustrates and inculcates good judgment in work during youth will add to the industrial efficiency of the nation. when the youth become adult. There is no well-directed manual labor or laboratory work which does not give valuable training in the power of application, in the capacity to give keen attention and to grasp quickly and firmly the gist of the matter under consideration. This power of application may be as well developed in the classes appropriate to an evening school or a vacation school as it can be in the classes appropri ate to an ordinary day school; indeed, for some minds this invaluable power of application can be developed only thru manual training and laboratory processes.

I have said that there is strong moral training in the work appropriate to evening schools and vacation schools. Let me illustrate this proposition: To make a true joint between two pieces of wood or a true socket for a square stanchion is a process in which may be displayed all degrees of accuracy in planning and of conscientiousness in work. As a test of honesty in labor I know nothing better than the preparing of a plane piece of metal, proved to be plane by the application in all directions across it of a veritable straight-edge. The foreman of a school shop in which such work is done has, in my opinion, better means of ascertaining the moral quality of the pupils under his charge, with all its various shad. ings and gradings, than the teacher has in an ordinary schoolroom where language, geography, and history are taught. In all good workmanship there is a large element of morality,, and this fact comes out very strikingly in every evening school and vacation school where the proper manual and laboratory subjects are utilized. This is a strong argument in favor of vacation schools; for the contrast between the kind of mental and moral training which they supply and the effect on idle children of the sights and sounds of thronged city streets is a very striking one.

The next additional use of schoolhouses is evening use for adults as well as children. This use is described by the phrase "the schoolhouse an educational center." It regards the school building as the center of various instructive entertainments offered gratuitously to the people of the neighborhood, but particularly to the families and friends of the school children. These entertainments comprehend singing classes, performances by local choruses, bands, and small orchestras, readings of poetry, fiction, travel, and the drama by good readers, men, women, or

children; the acting of simple plays by children or adults, and lectures, illustrated by the lantern, on architecture, sculpture, city government, landscape, history, biography, the useful arts, and social questions. The illustrated lecture has in recent years been brought to great perfection, and has become a very interesting and profitable mode of teaching. It used to be laughed at as an easy method, fit only for children and other inattentive persons; but it has firmly established itself as superior in all subjects to any written lecture without illustration, not only for popular audiences, but for university audiences. Nowadays even Latin and Greek cannot be taught well without the lantern as a means of illustration. All the sciences need it, and the teaching of history can be effectively vivified by it. For these instructive entertainments in great variety the assembly room of all modern schoolhouses can be advantageously used four or five nights out of every week from the 1st of November to the 1st of May. In a densely populated city the schoolhouse can thus be made the center of an active, intellectual interest for persons of all ages, from the child of fourteen to the grandmother and the grandfather. The schoolhouse should be the most active social center of the neighborhood, kept so by the interest in the music, recitations, plays, readings, and illustrated lectures which there can be enjoyed. This work needs a sympathetic director who knows how to enlist in it all the available talent of the neighborhood and much outside talent besides. If it be objected to this suggestion that it is a new function for the public school to provide pleasures for the populace, I reply that the adding of pleasures, joys, and satisfactions to human life ought always to have been recognized as the principal function of every school and of all education.

Finally, the school yard or playground ought to be utilized by the neighborhood whenever the school is not in session. For this purpose the playground ought to be decorated at its borders, with vines and shrubs, and provided with seats. It should, of course, have a large asphalt or gravel surface, in order to secure quick movements of the children during recesses, and this surface should be accessible for free games to all the children of the neighborhood, when the school is not in session. There ought also to be provided in every school yard sand-boxes in which babies. can play at all times of the day when the weather is mild. The mothers of the neighborhood should be encouraged to come and sit in the school yard with their babies or little children, whenever the weather permits. In short, the school playground should be an open-air parlor for the neighborhood, and should be kept accordingly with perfect tidiness and with the utmost possible provision of pleasant objects for the eye on and about the neighboring walls and buildings. It is astonishing how much can be done to adorn commonplace or even dilapidated and forlorn buildings by means of vines, hanging baskets, and window-boxes, and it is often easy to interest the occupants of such buildings in this sort of decoration,

particularly if they belong to any Latin race, or have come from the southern half of Europe. Every such playground would require careful watching by a man who had the double duty, first of keeping it tidy, and secondly of seeing that nothing rude was done there. It is an axiom that every piece of public ground, large or small, must be effectively. policed.

You perceive that all this larger use of school playgrounds involves an expenditure of money; but such expenditure is the only true economy. It is an abominable waste to use a very costly piece of open city ground only during the recesses of a day school. Such breathing-places should not be used for any highly competitive sports in which the few play and the many look on; they should be chiefly used for free, spontaneous, active games which require very little apparatus and no elaborate training. These remarks apply most directly to city school playgrounds. Your own minds will suggest the modifications which would be needed in the country. The surroundings of a country school ought to be beautiful. They should be thoughtfully contrived to exhibit successive beauties as the season of the year advances; and they ought to make ample provision for quick-moving spontaneons games. A fortunate movement to this end is already well advanced in various parts of the country, and we hope that before long Whittier's description of the country school as a ragged beggar" will no longer be applicable.

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You are all well aware that I have made in this discourse not a single original or novel suggestion. Every idea or plan I have mentioned has already been put into execution in some part or other of the United States. What I have desired here to urge on school superintendents and school committees is that the full utilization of a public school plant is the only true economy; that the present inadequate use of schoolhouses. is wasteful precisely in proportion to the costliness of the grounds and buildings, and that reform in this respect means a larger and better yield, physically, mentally, and morally, from the public schools, and therefore a significant addition to the health and wealth of the nation and to the public happiness.

SEVEN-YEAR COURSE of stuDY FOR WARD-SCHOOL PUPILS

JAMES M. GREENWOOD, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, KANSAS CITY, MO.

In this discussion I am obliged to deal with conditions of things rather than with laws of thought, and I flatter myself that I have been cautiously conservative rather than rashly radical in advancing and defending the views I maintain. My object is to have you look at a course of study from another's experience, and to weigh the facts presented in the