There are two sides to the money question in teaching.

One side is given us from our great book: "You cannot serve God and Mammon." If the uplifting of the child is the aim of teaching, the money cannot be. Therefore the money must not be, cannot be, the aim of teaching.

The other side is that for the highest service nothing is too high. It is the community's failure to grasp the significance and value of teaching which leaves to teachers' efforts the proper valuation of their work. It is the community that must see that heights are reached in the recompense for this high work. Under the economic conditions of today, a man's or a woman's first duty is to self-support. A still higher duty calls on the earning capacity of the individual. A teacher may not squander the lives of others even if he would his own. And it becomes the duty of the community that accepts the unbounded gift of the teacher to see that no such predicament is presented to one who, fitted to that great task, throws his soul and his life into teaching. The community will come to-not conceed-but demand, money payment for the work of teaching commensurate with the payment of the highest experts in any field. It needs but the conception of the community of what it must have for its children, of what it must give to its children and of how highly it must rate those who are making their lives-in the rating of earning power as well as of esteem and of gratitude. To reach this conception, it is you who must help to show the truth.

That truth can never come out of the spirit of exaction. It will come only out of the spirit of devotion, the spirit that would find a happiness in making ends meet for the sake of a cause, that would find a beauty in economy for the sake of something higher than material goods. The spirit that would cast oneself in to the extent that one could, with joy in the casting, will send beams-has sent beams-shining thru our country; beams of light that are bringing on the dawn of our higher education. To put the teachers of America's sons and daughters on this plane of devotion I should call one of the greatest opportunities on the earth today. Without the spirit of the teacher, no pedagogy, no methods, no plans can be built to succeed. With the great army of America's teachers all moving as on a mission, half the battle of the future is won.

The other half concerns the questions: What shall we teach? How shall we teach? My great quarrel with education today, speaking generally, is that those questions are taken so largely in their narrow sense and answered usually from a narrow view: What shall we afford pupils as accomplishments? and how shall we do it to make the accomplishments

stick?

These lines of thought do not to my mind touch the first principles of education, and when so much as that is discussed and settled, the real question has not yet begun nor been broached. The prime question is:

What are we doing to develop the natures of the children? How may we do to bring them to their highest point of character and usefulness to the community?

Curricula may come and go, may vary in various communities and climes; methods may be tried and discarded and all the while improved as one tries out tools; all without deviating a hair's breadth from the main point aimed at, if the great underlying purpose goes on forever and is ever present. But when discussions and decisions on these lesser issues have no relation to the harbor to reach, the ship seems rudderless and tossing on the

seas.

In this realm, education has been handicapped by having some set harbors which it must reach in its curriculum. The college sets a narrow door thru which all pupils must go, and the business man sets other standards as arbitrary and as necessary. Then both make outcry that the schools do not meet their particular demands with efficiency. Any work attempted without efficiency does harm to the pupil. That goes without saying. It is as necessary to teaching as breath is to life.

But I make outcry that their questions touch but the tenth part of teaching and that they are almost the only questions asked by the community in general, and that in meeting these questions the real fundamental questions of school work are lost.

It is hardly ever asked of the schools whether they are preparing clearer, keener, and more efficient voters and workers for the State. This is the first business of the schools of the country, and it receives but little attention from the public who constitute themselves the schools' critics, but who must be led instead to see the greatest values and real responsibilities of the school.

Citizenship means the rounded development of character supported by powers of the mind. It is for this goal that we must steer all our courses, and our success in reaching it thru our education must be our one final test of its success. Have we reached it? Have we succeeded in our great system of education?

We say we have not yet made good as Americans. Let us take a glance at the pre-eminent shortcomings that hinder us and see if they have for us indications wherein our educational system may be at fault. What are the root qualities to which should be ascribed any failure of our country to make good as yet to its beginnings? Or, to put it differently, and not to view the progress of our country always with a backward glance: What are the qualities in us which seem to be endangering our progress toward our highest goal? The mind's eye runs over the high points of our national shortcomings. We find three great avenues of weakness:

First, the inadequacy of our government. The best people are not always sought to fill our offices; the current methods are bungling in many directions; the right compensation for service to the community is little

thought of; the subjects needing governmental care are many of them neglected; the governmental machinery is left to be used or abused by any who will. And under these conditions our leading citizens are pursuing their own way with few thoughts given to their duties as citizens, and those few weak enough to be stifled in hopelessness! The lack of responsibility of our most responsible people on this subject is an amazing fact today!

Next, we are appalled by the utter thoughtlessness and carelessness for any and all conditions for others of so many of our money-makers in their mad rush for wealth; the general acceptance of the theory, "the Devil take the hindmost"-the naïve question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and the wonder that it should seriously be considered that one man could think of the welfare of another while they work under the divine law of competition. These mean a deep lack of any true sense of the meaning of citizenship. They bode ill for the harmonious and real solution of the questions appearing with such vast moment in our country between so-called capital and so-called labor. They bode ill for that real democracy which in its greater, deeper unity of man working for man, makes null and void any such paltry division of people.

And again, we are confronted by the general lack of discipline and regard for law. Out of this glance there stand out two monsters that glare thru it all so fiercely that we are driven to call them the leading spirits in our weaknesses-materialism and selfish ambition.

The actors on our stage today were once children. The leaders of our civilization were once in the nursery and in the schoolroom. If they are making mistakes in their leading, if they and those they lead are being dominated by materialism and selfish ambition, it is fair to ask of their training. It is true that training and influence cannot anticipate nor prepare for all conditions. It is probable that the unwonted success of American industry, of American enterprise, has gone to the American head, and that in the conditions confronting adults come the causes of the shortcomings. But is not the purpose of training, the meeting of adult conditions? Home and school must join hands in the search for the responsibility of an unsatisfactory national attitude. But I should like to see the school seek the greater part of the responsibility in its eagerness to emanate a clearer light.

Lack of responsibility in the government and for the government. Is our school system likely to fortify its growing citizens against this deadly evil which, just so far as it exists, must be striking at the very root of our national life? Responsibility is of a surety the first quality that the right school life must develop. Yet I cannot see, as I think over schools in general with their red-tape methods of discipline, that responsibility, that finest flower of the right disciplinary relation between pupil and teacher, has very much chance for consideration or for growth.

Thoughtlessness and carelessness for others in all the relations of life. Does the school system plan that this weed shall be early uprooted and be

supplanted by the beauty of always considering others? How can we even talk of supposing that we are arousing in our education a civic sense of caring for the whole, when the fundamental basis of the plan of school achievement is for each pupil to get out all he can for himself regardless of, or even essentially against, all comers; when the basic idea in every recitation and in every course of study and in every department, is to shineif possible, ahead of others; and when all the marks and ratings are on this plan? It is ingrained in the whole system. How can we wonder, then, if later in life these same citizens in pulling out their plums, care nothing for the size of the other fellow's and never even imagine dividing up?

Regardlessness for law! Is our school system building up in our youth a fine, high regard for law? I fear that the view of the school system is limited to its need for having its own laws observed instead of thru them developing a regard for law in its pupils; and I fear that the easy methods to accomplish this are usually resorted to the threat and infliction of petty penalties and the offer of petty bribes-which place the law-keeping on such a shallow basis, that it almost makes the enterprise, so often undertaken by the high-spirited youth, of breaking the law and escaping the penalty, the dignified thing that it seems to him. We cannot suppose that a police system consisting of bribes and penalties is going to affect the character of the pupil except to disregard laws so artificially related to him. Unless we can get the kind of interest in the laws that he will have if he helps to make them, I do not see that we are really making him deeply appreciative of law.

Materialism! The only antidote for materialism is, to be filled with an idealism. Does our school system place before all teachers always that their great work is to develop souls? Is that the keynote of our educational idea? If not, how can we wonder at a materialistic outcome for these individuals who are in our schools in the germ? I fear that the school has been on a more or less factory-like basis-taking in raw material and turning out product, of thinking and counting machines. I fear that the school has shirked its share in the finer side, the spirit part, the character of the children.

Selfish ambition! It would be absurdity even to ask whether our school system is shaped to eradicate selfish ambition. I must think that the selfish ambition of the American is more than a result of the neglect of the schools. I must think that, however unknowingly, we are carefully developing selfish ambition in the school life of our children. We have not deliberately set forth to do this. We have not said we will create the type of citizen who will prey upon his kind ruthlessly for his own advantage. We have not prepared courses of study with this end in view. We have not erected this picture of the ideal American to work toward as an achievement. But the fact remains that we greatly achieve it. The thing has come differently. We are caught by the system. The demands of the

community, of certain specified results of the thinking-machine type, seem necessary to meet. The educational proposition has been too big for us. The very mass of it is overpowering. We have not had time to stop and think just what our main aim should be. To meet the community's demands and carry on the ordinary routine business of running our vast network of schools has been all that we could do. To produce the results we must have a strong leverage of some sort on the pupils a powerful principle that will work.

Self-interest is an easy one-oh, so ready to hand. Mankind is in the delusion that the only way to do anything is by downing someone else. With its fine lack of reason it holds up the other way as the most worthy and to be admired and fiercely practices all the while the cut-throat principle. The general acceptance of the competitive idea as the only workable basis for any achievement presses closely from every side on the schools. We shut our eyes and grasp this tool of selfishness. We take this little inborn seed and assiduously cultivate it from the first year of school to the last and by its aid attain certain results we point to with satisfaction. We smile sadly at moments, and sympathetically, at the unfortunate elements of human nature, and go on sublimely cultivating them just the same. At the end we send forth products to wrestle with these same carefully and successfully cultivated qualities of selfishness and, with or without the aid of churches, to undo the work just as far as possible if they may hope for salvation. And then we wonder that, as we look about us, at the civilization these results are poured out into, we find a self-centered civilizationa civilization on the whole, keyed to the note of selfish ambition, not much minding whether its success spells ruin to others, not questioning whether the good to it is the good to the whole, rather pluming itself than otherwise that its credit marks mean marks over some less favored.

We must face the fact that our schools are the hot-bed of our civilization, with its faults, and when we find a question at the end, we must come back with the question to the beginning. We must free our minds of this clutch of circumstance and stand and look and think and intelligently plan. You must come where, whatever the community may say to you, you will say to it that it must listen while you deliver to it the high policies that must prevail in the elevation of its youth, if you take your part in that epochmaking process which is education.

Here, then, is the culmination of the teacher's opportunity: To create the teaching process that will make the citizen of the future. He must be responsible-not passively but actively; an integer in the formation of the state-seeking and acquiring the training that will make him an intelligent civic force. His citizenship must be based on principle and on an ideal. His principle and ideal must lead him to sacrifice himself for them. His privilege that he seeks must be the privilege of serving. And his powers must be enlarged to make these qualities effective.