of sensory and motor activity, and (3) in the charm with which the personality and the methods of the teacher can suffuse the subject. The subject-matter may be condensed to the bare requisites of routine drill, or it may freely partake of the richness of human experience itself. It is at this point that we shall have to reconstruct, if not revolutionize, the curriculum of the normal school. This institution is now halting between two tendencies, namely, either to give no instruction in the ordinary branches of knowledge at all, or to apologize for paying even a little attention to the academic work of other types of schools. Both these tendencies should, I think, be abandoned, and a curriculum formed which shall be a complete reorganization of knowledge in accordance with the vital needs of elementary education. A medical school organizes knowledge in accordance with its own peculiar needs; so does an engineering school; so does every other branch of professional training except the normal school. This is not the place to suggest what the new curriculum should be, but it is perhaps safe to assert that it should not consist of foreign languages and advanced pure mathematics.

The second essential in securing the best voluntary effort of the pupil is the proper balance between intellectual and motor activity; but this is only another aspect of the distinction between clear and vivid ideas. The modern school is beginning to learn that the children have other muscles than those involved in talking and in moving the forefinger, and is devising ways and means for the whole boy to go to school. This was not so necessary when children lived in the country and attained some muscular dexterity thru work. But now, when most children live in cities, the school must supply the muscular training formerly given by farm labor.

As to the charm with which the teacher can invest the work of the school, it may be said that, aside from purely personal qualities, this will depend most upon the richness and compass of her knowledge, as governed by the needs of elementary education, and in her fertility and skill in securing the proper balance between intellectual and motor activities. Ideas will become vivid when they are truly important, properly presented, and duly joined to motor activities.

The secondary-or, better, the cultural-stage of knowledge is by common consent one in which the mind enters a new realm of activities, attacking its problems with new comprehension and a new outlook upon.

It is now that the youth recapitulates in brief the knowledge and experience of the race. This stage extends, not only thru the four years of the high school, but thru that part of the college work which precedes professional study; for during this long period there is no essential change in aim.

It is possible to make cultural education merely an extension of the fixed curriculum of the elementary school, and to rely only upon

the means used in the latter to secure the voluntary efforts of the student. Such has been the custom of the past; such is the procedure of many European schools of today. Not a few men in this country whose opinions are to be respected claim that such is still our true policy:

Whether the voluntary element in education can be wisely stimulated thru the elective principle is a complex question that cannot be finally settled by reference to a single line of arguments, for it involves social as well as psychological and educational considerations.

In giving a summary of the principles to be kept in mind in the discussion of this question, I wish to call attention to the recognized purposes of cultural education, and then to distinguish between the teacher's and the student's conception of the means for reaching these ends.

The aim of cultural education reduces itself finally to the acquisition by the student of such knowledge and skill as will best prepare him for what Herbert Spencer calls "complete living." The problem of the voluntary element, as exemplified in electives, cannot be seriously discussed without considering what knowledge and skill will best help to realize this purpose. Since there is not time to examine the problem of educational values, let it be assumed that cultural education should include such knowledge and training as are fairly representative, not only of the means that conduce to physical survival, but also to those human sciences and capacities which conduce to the social survival of men in institutional life. Two methods of reaching these ends are practiced among civilized nations. The European method is, in general, to bring all cultural education into a single institution, as the German Gymnasium, making it extend over a period of nine or ten years, and then to construct a fixed curriculum to be imposed upon all who undertake this phase of education. The studies, their place in the course, the time to be devoted to each, the relative emphasis to be placed upon them, are all decided by the experience of men who have had a similar training. In such a scheme the personal aptitude or attitude of the learner is not considered. He can do the work as prescribed, or let it alone. Abstractly considered, such a plan may provide a representative study for each important department. of education and for each species of mental and muscular training. Its weakness is that it cannot provide for variation in emphasis, since its relative values are predetermined and fixed. Such courses consider all claims except those of the persons to be educated. It is at this point that the elective system provides a corrective, by allowing the personality of the student to assist in determining the kind and quality of his own education.

This second system of securing a cultural education that shall con

duce to complete living limits the selective function of experienced adults to a specification of the departments of knowledge and skill that are necessary to a fairly complete equipment for life. It permits the student to place the emphasis where he will; to select studies within departments in accordance with his own desires as determined by taste, ability, and probable calling in life.

These personal preferences are not mere caprices, even tho they may be short-sighted and often not for the best; for we must distinguish between the teacher's and the student's ideal of complete living. The first has some experience and much tradition behind it; the second is compounded of hereditary and environmental influences. But these are precisely the forces that must be reckoned with if the teacher is to have the whole-souled co-operation of the student. In the first place, election of studies conduces powerfully to the development of vivid ideas, for the student elects his studies in accordance with the interests already formed, or for the accomplishment of ends having a high degree of personal valuation. A boy bent on mechanical engineering has a far different attitude toward higher algebra than one is likely to have who is trying to meet the teacher's ideal of mental training. In the one case the ideas become vivid, whereas in the other they are at best but clear.

Again, all fixed curriculums tend to overemphasize the subjects that are easiest to teach, and hence are usually best taught. These subjects are by common consent languages and mathematics. The student who studies four foreign languages learns four sets of symbols for one set of ideas; he has repeated three times the grammatical training he obtained from his first language. It is surely superstition to imagine that his four languages have given him a fourfold mental training. For many students, perhaps for most young men, this iteration of old ideas under new symbols is destructive to vividness, and tends to make education an ordeal to be endured, rather than a pursuit of infinite zest, as it should be. With a little skill on the part of parents and teachers, there is no danger that the student will miss altogether any of the necessary types of training, for they are really few: mathematics, language, history, literature, economics, a physical and an evolutionary science, and some form of motor training. In the six or eight years usually devoted to cultural education there is ample time to secure at least enough attention to each of these subjects to make the student intelligent in it and to be sure that he does not miss the forms of education for which he has the most ability and desire. The right studies, for him, are those that awaken most effectively all his native powers. If education can become a passion with him in a few studies, it is easy to arouse in him an associated or induced interest in all needful accessory studies.

A social reason why we cannot profitably hold to the European plan

of a fixed curriculum is that cultural education in our country is democratic in the broadest sense of the term. It is democratic in that all secondary education is, with a few exceptions, given in one type of schools, and, further, in that the possibility of such training is open to all who finish the elementary education in the common schools. In other words, we have the educational ladder, which, in general, European schools have not. Again, the fixed curriculum in Europe makes it necessary to multiply types of schools in order to secure the variety in education demanded by modern conditions. Each class of occupations has schools peculiar to it, thus fixing and extending the caste or undemocratic tendencies of these countries. Europeans, therefore, if they would elect anything, must elect schools; whereas with us, since in general there is but one type of high school, variety must be secured by the election of studies. Even were fixed curriculums always of superior educational quality, which is by no means conceded, our democratic conditions make imperative the elective system. We must offer cultural education of all varieties to all classes of our population; and, to do this, we must have one high school with many types of elective studies.

For the reasons given above, it is seen that the elective system helps to preserve the spirit of our institutions, and conduces more than does a rigid system to the best development of each individual.

But a word can be said of the third, or professional, realm of education. The voluntary element here enters upon a different phase; for it is no longer studies, but courses of study, that can be elective. The man who elects engineering necessarily elects the studies that naturally belong in that course. The same is true of agriculture, forestry, law, or medicine. The nearness of all such professional study to actual life brings about spontaneously that vividness which is often so difficult of attainment in elementary and secondary education. While the student in the cultural stage clamors for variety and light work, the student in professional courses submits cheerfully to large amounts of difficult study.

In the way of summary, it may be said that in general the need of stimulating the voluntary element in education rests upon the need of relating learning to life thru the development of vivid ideas, and upon the needs of a democratic society, which seeks to use every influence to induce each individual to carry his development to the highest possible point. Furthermore, there are three phases to the application of the voluntary element in education. In the elementary school it is to be awakened thru richness of subject-matter, union of intellectual and motor training, and charm of teaching; in cultural education it takes the form of elective studies in addition to the means already enumerated; while in the professional schools it appears again as the choice of courses.

THE SAVING OF TIME IN ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY

EDUCATION
I

THOMAS M. BALLIET, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SPRINGFIELD, MASS.

Within the last thirty years our colleges have been steadily raising their standard of admission, and throwing more and more work upon the secondary schools; and the secondary schools have been obliged in turn to make greater demands upon the elementary schools. The colleges, moreover, are attempting, during the last two years of their course, to do more or less of the work usually done in foreign countries by the universities. Some of our best professional schools have also raised their standards, and now require graduation from a college or a technical school as a condition of admission. These various factors combined, besides raising a number of other questions of fundamental importance, which it is not the province of this paper to discuss, have made it necessary for the student who desires the best professional training to prolong his course to an unusual, if not an unreasonable, length. His course is longer by nearly two years than that of the student in many foreign countries, and is no more thoro. This lengthening of the course below the professional school is due in part to the organization of our elementary and secondary schools, and in part to the somewhat chaotic condition of our higher education; and the question of shortening it is therefore not only one of readjustment of the elementary and secondary schools, but also one of reorganizing higher education. The various efforts in recent years, under the lead of Harvard and Chicago universities, to shorten the college course, show how widely this larger aspect of the problem. is becoming recognized today. Not many years ago its solution was supposed to lie wholly in the abridgment of the course in our grammar schools; there alone the waste was thought to exist. Now it is coming to be recognized very generally that there is waste in the college as well, and the problem has assumed a less simple form. which this discussion must confine itself is, therefore, larger and a much more complex one: How can the course of study in the elementary and secondary schools be shortened? Before attempting a solution we must make sure that we clearly apprehend all the elements of the problem.

The question to only a part of a

In this country all pupils who attend the public schools, whether they desire to fit for college or to enter practical life at the end of the grammarschool course, attend the same elementary schools and pursue the same course of study. This involves the necessity of keeping both the gifted and the dull in the same schools and largely in the same classes; as also the keeping in the same classes and schools of those who have so widely