JAMES M. GREEN.-I have listened with interest to the papers of Dr. Balliet and Mrs. Young, and have found them very suggestive. I think, however, that it would add greatly to the discussion if they would put their suggestions in terms of subjects of study. To say that the secondary course of study for one who is to enter college must differ from that for one who is not to enter college is not sufficiently definite. We should like to hear a specific statement of the particulars in which they should differ.

We have recently had in college circles a very general discussion on the length of the B.A. course of study-whether or not it should be shortened, and what effect its treatment one way or the other would have on the secondary course. Here again we should be helped if those leading the discussion would speak in terms of subject matter. For instance, how much Latin prepares for the college course, and how much additional Latin prepares for the university course? Paralleling this inquiry in English, mathematics, history, etc., we are better able to understand what would be expected in the different schools and the different courses of study.

The term "liberal education," like the term "culture," is very indefinite, and is not a sufficient warrant to those who are called upon to ask states for the expenditure of large sums of money in carrying out their courses. What we need is to show that a certain study and a certain amount of that study are necessary to the accomplishment of certain definite ends.

MRS. YOUNG.-Some speakers have read their ideas on departmental teaching into my paper. Nowhere did I suggest limiting a teacher to instructing in one subject. It is desirable in the grammar grades that a teacher instruct in more than one subject, but not in so many subjects that in the evening she must prepare lessons in geography, history, arithmetic, drawing, music, nature study, English, and readings in literature. It is also desirable that a child's work spread over more than the few subjects that any one person can teach extremely well. Attention to these two desirable conditions will give a class of children the same teachers in some subjects three or four years. This arrangement will insure continuity in the work. Power gained by the children will be used in attacking new questions with the same teachers year after year, and so be capitalized continuously. There is all the difference in the world between this continuity and the finishing off of a half-year's or a year's work with one teacher. One speaker says that twenty-five years ago he tried departmental teaching and found it a failure. He seems to remember it merely as a right-about-change-of-teachers-every-half-hour. I know a school principal who likes to narrate his one experience with departmental teaching. Two weak teachers were assigned to his school. He knew they were incompetent, and so gave them charge of the music and penmanship. Those teachers proved his opinion about the foolishness of dividing the work by departments to be correct. They were failures, and he has not permitted departmental teaching in his school since they were dropped for incompetency, thirty years ago.

The objection has been raised here that departmental work does not care for the child's moral well-being. Does morality depend upon associating with one person only ? I supposed that a sturdy morality was developed by means of intelligence; that intelligence makes our wishes sane, moral. If the judgment is better developed when children are studying all day with one teacher who teaches some things well, others indifferently, and others badly, than it is when they are working thruout the day with different teachers who teach their special subjects well, then there is little connection between intelligence and morality.

In speaking of the reconstruction of the course of study I had the continuity of subjectmatter in mind. I thought of a committee on geography, for instance, consisting of two or three teachers of geography from the primary grades, two or three from the grammar grades, some from the high school, and a recognized authority from a college or university. Such a group could never present a course leading at various stages into blind alleys.

The same kind of a committee in making up a course in mathematics would not set children of tender years to studying the intricacies of banking, because they are not going to college. The failure to make conditions such that the child's power gained will be the active factor in conquering the new, and the failure to make conditions such that the subject-matter studied will always lead into something beyond, are the causes of the necessity for discussing this question of saving time.

I have met the usual difficulty in making suggestions by means of old terms-old meanings have been read into them. Some day continuity will be recognized as the chief element in the solution of the question of the morning.

THOMAS M. BALLIET, Springfield, Mass.- I agree heartily with Professor Woodward in saying that all courses in the elementary and secondary schools should be kept open at the top. No course ought to lead into byways. Every child should have the opportunity, when he has finished a lower grade of school, to enter some course in the next higher, and I meant to suggest nothing in my paper which would not be entirely in harmony with this fundamental principle. As to the separation of pupils in such a way that the bright and the dull may not be kept together, I would say that such separation must always be imperfect; but, as a practical matter, any separation, however crude, is better than none. Every high-school teacher knows that there is a much larger percentage of gifted pupils in the classes which fit for college and technical schools than in the classes which do not fit for a higher institution. To separate those who fit for college from those who do not effects, therefore, altho in a crude way, a separation of the bright from the dull. I say “in a crude way," because we all know that some of the brightest pupils are, for financial reasons, unable to go to college, and some pupils of inferior ability enter the college-fitting

courses.

So far as the elementary schools are concerned, there is more of dawdling at present than of rushing or of overwork. The brightest pupils in the elementary schools could, without injury to health and with much profit to their intellectual growth, do fully twice as much work as they are now doing; and the same is true of a limited number of pupils in every high school. It is intellectually demoralizing for any pupil to have less to do than he can easily do. It demoralizes his intellectual habits and begets intellectual indolence. I am aware that there is considerable complaint on the part of parents of overwork in the schools; but what such parents really mean is that their children are given too much "home work" and have to devote to the preparation of lessons out of school hours which should be given to exercise and play. In this parents are in most cases entirely right, but this is not the same thing as too much work. If children were made to work harder in school, they would not be obliged to work as long hours as they do now.

There ought to be fewer pupils per teacher in our schools, and we ought to be able to secure more forceful, energetic, and stimulating teaching. Five hours per day of earnest, intellectual work, including the necessary intermissions, is enough for any boy or girl below the high school. Our American school system is so organized as to do more for the average and for the dull child than is done in any other country; but it also does less for the exceptionally bright child than is done in any other highly civilized country. We sacrifice too much the interests of the brightest to the interests of the average and the dull, and we mistake this for true democracy. No nation can afford either to neglect or to sacrifice its best talent, and we must organize our system of education in such a way as to give brilliant boys and girls an opportunity to advance at the rate at which they are capable of advancing, without being held back by the less gifted who must progress at a slower pace.

I do not believe that we shall effect the saving of time at which we are aiming, except thru a separation early in the course of those who are to fit for higher institutions from those who are to end their education in the elementary schools. The question essentially resolves itself into the question as to whether all pupils, no matter what their aims may be

as to their future training, should, in the elementary schools, pursue the same course. It is a question as to whether the best preparation for college is also the best preparation for life. The teachers in our colleges in an offhand way assume that there is only an affirmative answer possible to this question. I feel strongly convinced that a negative answer is the true one. This is the answer which all foreign nations have given to this question. There is no nation in Europe which gives the two classes of pupils the same course of training, It does not follow at all that those things which are taught in the elementary schools and are necessary to the pupil who is to go to college afterward are necessary to the pupil who is to end his education in the elementary school. Indeed, it is my conviction that for pupils who are not to go beyond the grammar schools a very much better course can be prepared than a course which would be calculated to fit a pupil in the quickest way for admission to college.

THE EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS OF THE YEAR 1902–1903

WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE, PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE,
BRUNSWICK, ME.

As the officers of an ocean steamer each day take observations and report the run of the last twenty-four hours, it is my privilege to report observations, kindly made for me by school and college officers in all parts of the country, on the educational progress of the year.

First of all I must record the promotion of Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer from the ranks of our working force to

"the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence."

Principal of a high school at twenty-two; professor in a college at twenty-four; college president at twenty-six; member of a state board of education; organizer of the women's department of a great university; counselor and helper of the women's college connected with our oldest university; trustee of a seminary for women; advocate and friend of every form of educational progress: she united a delicate, feminine capacity to give herself responsively, devotedly to persons and institutions who sought her help, with the energy and determination of a field marshal to push to a successful issue every interest intrusted to her hands. She had the tact to carry conservative boards unanimously for progressive measures; the confidence which transforms seeming impossibilities into accomplished facts; the courage to say to incompetence, stupidity, or inefficiency, when it was blocking the wheels of progress, the hard words: "Thou art the man!" yes, the harder words to say and to get understood: "Thou art the woman!" Thus she has left us the ideal of the educated woman scholarship without a particle of pedantry; optimism with no blinking of unpleasant facts; efficiency unsevered from winsomeness; power unspoiled by pride; all rooted, as woman's best influence must.

ever be, in the affections of a loving heart, and radiating from its normal center in a happy home.

Thruout the South, under the wise guidance of the Southern Education Board, with the judicious aid of the General Education Board, and mainly thru the heroic efforts of the southern men and women themselves, a movement is going on which has all the enthusiasm, the diversified agencies, the massing of forces, the raising and expenditure of money, the distribution of literature, the organization of conferences, the utilization of the press, which mark a great political campaign. Out of this united effort are coming increased appropriations by the states, a great extension of local taxation, improved schoolhouses, consolidated schools, great free summer schools for teachers, improved courses, lengthened terms, higher salaries, better teaching, expert supervision. This is the most hopeful feature of the educational progress of the year; and at this meeting of the National Educational Association in New England, here in this city of the Puritans, it is an especial privilege to award the well-earned palm of greatest educational progress during the year to the splendid labors of our brothers and sisters of the South.

Where new ideas have been unsupported by adequate teaching or equipment, there have been wholesome reactions. Where science in the secondary schools has failed to impart thoro discipline, Latin has been restored to more than its former prominence. Where sentimentalism had offered amusement, or utilitarianism had demanded information, there is a return to substantial drill.

Didactic teaching is more freely used to supplement the laboratory method in science. The best reaction, however, is from the pedantic refinements of methodology imposed on the country by the normal schools of ten or a dozen years ago, to an increasing appreciation of the rights of the individual teacher to get results in her own individual way, and the demand for accurate, organized, advanced knowledge on the part of the teacher as the first and foremost essential of good teaching.

The kindergarten has had a steady growth, both in the increase in its own numbers and in its influence on the general practice of elementary education, by uniting the home and the school in mutual helpfulness, and making self-activity the basis of all education. The two-session kindergarten, where the same teachers meet the same children twice a day, has proved an excessive drain on the nerves of both teachers and children; and its continuance anywhere is an educational blunder amounting almost to a crime. The best compromise yet devised is that in practice in New York, where two sets of children are taught daily in the same room, the morning kindergartner assisting for an hour in the afternoon kindergarten, and the afternoon kindergartner assisting for an hour in the morning kindergarten.

The kindergartners, like all active bodies, are dividing into two

camps. One camp would make of the kindergarten a self-sufficient cult, regardless of its connection with the school system as a whole, and cling so closely to the letter of Froebel that they are in danger of missing his spirit altogether. The others are ready and eager to make the transition to the primary grades easy and natural, and have enough of the master's spirit to discard on occasion, and with more advanced children, pretty much all the letter of his law.

Manual training is gaining steadily in public estimation, thanks in part to the phenomenal success of industrial education at Hampton and Tuskegee, and the industrial development of the country. The new manual-training building of the Brookline (Mass.) High School; the new Technical Institute given to Indianapolis; the new science building for practical scientific work at Colorado College; the new foundry at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute; the new research course in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the new departure at the Sheffield Scientific School, by which a part of the work for the degree of mining engineer is done in the field rather than at the university—are all illustrations of the great wealth that is being expended, and the progressive spirit that animates all grades of manual and technical education. The new Simmons College is an attempt to complete the courses in sewing, cookery, and stenography offered in the schools by what shall be an institute of technology for highly educated women.

School architecture is receiving more liberal and intelligent consideration than ever; yet the distinctive progress of the year has been in the provision of adequate playgrounds, with their increased use in vacations, either in connection with vacation schools or independently. Joliet, Ill., takes the lead in this movement with its eighty acres in school yardsone of twenty acres, one of seventeen acres, and several of five acres each. The model school to be established in Knox county, Tenn., is to have its six-room building surrounded by twelve acres of land.

School gardens, by bringing a bit of the country into the heart of the city, afford an admirable and inexpensive form of manual training, provide botanical material, foster a respect for weaker forms of life, and develop perseverance, fidelity, obedience to natural law, mutual helpfulness, and an appreciation of property rights in natural products.

Vacation schools utilize the school plant during the summer, take the children off the street, and give them valuable social experience, as well as manual and physical training. Last summer in New York there were 56,000 children in school playgrounds, and 12,500 children in vacation schools, at a cost per capita for the entire season of 97 cents for playgrounds, and $3.44 for vacation schools. The total cost of these and kindred extensions of the use of school property was $130,000, and this sum made of real value for some 400 hours nearly $35,000,000 of municipal property which otherwise would have been unused. This summer the