the ark of education, and carrying it forward. They stand ready, after the old Anglo-Saxon fashion, by voluntary enthusiasm and enterprise to counteract adverse political influences and the deadening tendencies inherent in the routine activities of the profession of teaching. In their range they cover the entire field of science, pure and applied, of the professions, of the arts, of the humane activities, beginning with eugenics and the protection of the child, and not even ending in art and archaeology, but extending on toward the infinite in associations like that of Religious Education. Few of us are familiar with the activities of these handmaids of education. For example, how many are aware that the most important event in the art life of the United States occurred last May at Washington in the First National Convention of the American Federation of Arts, with the representatives present of one hundred and three chapters and fifty thousand persons? Have we kept up with the development of museums of all kinds, no longer considered as "storage warehouses"? Have we begun to know that this is an age of libraries, not simply housed in the Carnegie palaces, but circulating in the schools and traveling to the farthest rural district with thirty-four state library commissions? We rejoice in the great movement that has given us above four thousand consolidated school districts of all kinds. The traveling libraries, however, are consolidating our entire communities, with a common library, and hastening the day of the social center in schoolhouse as well as country church. Aided by the educational and public press, and the bulletins of agricultural and university extension, our whole people in fact today are becoming a republic of learners. University and school extension supplement the continuation schools, so well begun in the cities. Education is now perpetual and universal.

This diffusion of knowledge in the eyes of some means diffuseness, superficiality, and brings out the objection "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Our epoch meets this with an earnest effort to raise standards. The standardization of education is a present watchword in every kind of school, college, university, and profession, including the veterinarian. Some are frightened, fearing dead uniformity and mechanical results, or that there will be an institutional tyranny that will crush individualism. These are real dangers which, however, will never prevail in a society as keenly alive to education as ours in this epoch and as diverse in character with the different types of education and with the states as the primal educational unit. Where educators do not respond to the standardizing processes, standards are being forced upon them, forged by the evident inconveniences and commercial waste for schools and students, and compelled by the requirements of the professions that deal with life and property. The legislatures are driven to enact standards into laws to protect the people. The prevalent greed and graft have worked as subtly and Appleton's Year Book, 1910, p. 737.

I

widely in education as elsewhere. The idealism of the American and the marvelous prosperity in certain centers have lifted up standards worthy of imitation. We are, therefore, rapidly approximating national standards, and world-standards, befitting the new nationalism of our New America. They are as convenient and educative as a national bank currency in the world of finance. Who does not know the meaning of fifteen secondary school units? Of sixty collegiate year-hours, with the qualitative definitions given to units by associations of college and secondary-school men, and instrumentalities like the College Entrance Examination Board and the National Conference Committee on Standards of Colleges and Secondary Schools? The conferences of the chief state school officers of great sections of the country, of state examining and licensing boards, and of the professions are endorsing these standards, and waiting upon us school men for the perfecting of them.

Last and not least, this has been the epoch of private munificence, in extent rivaling the bounty of the state. The old and new endowed institutions are enabled to be as national in spirit as the state institutions, and the two types safeguard academic freedom, and give a variety and glory to our patriotism. The most original development is the establishment of great foundations like the General Education Board, the Carnegie Institution for Research, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Russell Sage Foundation, the proposed Rockefeller Foundation, worthy in wealth and purpose of our New America, and reassuring in this commercial age that our educational epoch is the beginning of an era of a republic of research, of letters, learning, labor, and humanity, broadening and making perpetual the republic politic of Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Thus may the New America be perpetuated, the "Messiah of the Nations" of Riley's song:

TOPIC: THE COMING OF THE HUMANE ELEMENT IN

EDUCATION

A. THE OPEN-AIR SCHOOL

SHERMAN C. KINGSLEY, GENERAL SUPERINTENDENT, UNITED CHARITIES OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL.

The children of the United States spend 1,476,744 years in the schoolroom each twelve months. To this should be added the time spent by dull and backward pupils kept in at recess and after school, because they did not get their lessons or for bad conduct. No one has attempted to compute the loss in efficiency, school progress, and health of this vast army of children because of overheated, foul air prevalent in the schoolroom, and no one knows to what extent stupidity and bad conduct are attributable to the same cause.

Certain pressures for results prevalent in the business world do not operate in the schools. Unlike the factory or mercantile house, the schools have no anxiety about obtaining raw material. Each year finds a roomful of children waiting at every grade. The school likewise has no problem of advertising or salesmanship in marketing its product, for each year the opposite door opens and an equal number dissolves back into the general public. The community giveth. The community taketh away.

Go back to the school of your childhood. The room is full of children of the same age as you and your fellows when you were there. It is as tho the world stood still and did not grow up. A never-ending stream of children is ready to the teacher's hand. She has her chance as this ceaseless procession makes its pause in her room and goes on during the brief years of school life and out into the world.

The general subject of the morning, "The Coming of the Humane Element in Education," interests me greatly. It is a most significant topic. The word "coming" rather than "arrival" or "arrived" was doubtless used advisedly. All will gladly concede that the "humane element" has a legitimate place in a system which deals with 19,000,000 children in a single year.

For this vast army resolves itself into individual units. Each wears clothes, lives at a certain address, possesses the possibility of getting wet feet and catching cold, knows whether and why he likes or dislikes his teacher. Let me select one from this number and tell you a word about her. In this way, you will understand why I, an outsider, am interested in this subject and why I have been asked to take part in this meeting of superintendents.

On the first Monday of September two years ago, Julia was one of forty-five children to be gotten over certain intellectual ground before the end of the school year by a teacher in the second grade. Most of the children got the pace and made progress, but Julia, for some unaccountable

reason, lagged behind. The teacher, desiring to bring all her group under the wire inside the time limit, like all teachers who are judged by their ability to chase their brood toward that college somewhere, finally became conscious of Julia as an individual problem. She saw a very ordinary little girl, ten years old, pale, listless, but not markedly different from the other children except for this unaccountable "stupidity." She wondered why a child, older than the rest, always quiet and attentive, could not keep up. One afternoon she got her clue when she heard a little boy shrilly whisper: "Hello there, 'Con Kid,"" and saw Julia shrink back into her seat as if someone had struck her.

In May, Julia's father had died of consumption. Until two months before his death, the child slept with him. When she began to cough and run an afternoon temperature, the tuberculosis nurse found a back porch roof on which Julia's cot could be placed, and coaxed her to sleep there. It was not a secluded spot. When one's mother is trying to bring up four children decently on nine dollars a week, one does not live in the suburbs. Many curious windows looked down on the little cot, and the children of the neighborhood, with innocent but exquisite cruelty, twitted and taunted the sensitive "con kid" until she refused to sleep on the roof, and begged her mother to move to some place where no one would know about her. But education is compulsory, so she sat, five hours a day, with the other second-graders in the stuffy schoolroom, running a temperature every afternoon and trying hard to get lessons in which she always failed.

Fortunately for Julia, the teacher read the papers, and she remembered that a school for such children, founded in loving remembrance of a child who died, was soon to be opened on a roof near Julia's home. She took the child there, and Julia discovered that she was not the only "con kid" in Chicago. That helped. The open-air life and the good food helped too; so did the Eskimo suits, and presently Julia began to learn. She gained ten pounds, made her grade, and, most important of all, she forgot all about being different from other children and enjoyed herself. Today, a picture of the "con kid," rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, and fairly radiating vitality, is going all over the country to help other children, well and sick, to win their fresh-air rights.

Three years ago, there was not a single place in this country where such a child could obtain medical care and schooling. The school that received Julia was Elizabeth McCormick Open-Air School No. 1, conducted by the United Charities of Chicago and the Board of Education; in which all expense of food, clothing, and equipment was met by a grant from the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund Trustees.

Julia's story helped to jar us awake not only to her situation and that. of her mother but to thousands of boys and girls in the city in a like condition.

We came upon these children in other ways. The United Charities of

Chicago carries on an extensive outing work. Medical inspection of the children often eliminates from the joys of a vacation in the country children who are predisposed to tuberculosis, who are running temperatures, and whose physical condition is such that they cannot safely romp and play with other children. Furthermore, our work calls us into homes where tuberculosis has laid low the supporter of the family. Chicago is still losing 4,000 people a year from tuberculosis. Our Tuberculosis Institute has found that from 25 per cent to 30 per cent of the children in such families are infected. The heaviest toll laid upon the resources of the United Charities of Chicago by any one cause is that occasioned by tuberculosis.

We know the three-room home, the family trying to live on six dollars a week. We see the children as babes, as little boys and girls; later, we deal with the same boys and girls who come out of school and try to find employment. We witness their disappointment when they fail because of health. We deal with grown people, failures because they have not the physique to stand up and take their place in the world. We see the finished dependent become chargeable for life upon the community because of failure of health or moral delinquency that arises thru inability to earn. We realize that it is hopeless to deal with trouble after it happens; that prevention is necessary; that it must be brought about thru education and the spread of right knowledge of living; that the hope is with the children of the country.

Professor Irving Fisher states that there are 138,000 deaths in a year in this country from tuberculosis, and estimates that unless something is done, of people now living 5,000,000 are destined to die from this preventable disease. It levies its greatest toll between the ages of twenty and thirty years. Saying nothing about affection, human values, and happiness, Professor Fisher states that the money loss alone is $1,100,000,000 a year. Another authority has recently shown that in the state of Illinois alone $1,187,000 a year has been spent in the work of educating children who died before reaching their twentieth year.

The discovery of health needs has come from another angle and almost simultaneously. Medical inspection of schools began in Brussels in 1904, and is now national in scope in England, France, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Japan, the Argentine Republic, and practically so in Germany. In the United States, Boston began in 1894. Now all Massachusetts towns and cities and seventy cities in this country outside of that state have medical inspection. The data are not very accurate, but it is the universal experience that physical defects are found in a large percentage of the children. We are now speaking of all kinds of defects— not tuberculosis only. In Minneapolis, in 1908, 65 per cent of the children examined were found defective; in New York, in 1906, 71 per cent. As a rule this inspection is yet crude, and only the more patent defects are