tion was the chief problem for statesmanship. This policy must be our destiny; our leaders must be priests of truth and in her pay; they must think fearlessly and ceaselessly in all directions; must investigate and discuss, do and suffer all in the world's great holy cause of science and learning"-sentiment that will need to be uttered confidently and strongly many times in the South, before the battle for popular education is finally and magnificently

won.

SCHOOLS OF THE NORTHWEST.

BY SUPT. J. M. McCALLIE, SUPERINTENDENT CITY SCHOOLS, HENDERSON, KY.

Having spent five years of study and supervision in the schools of the Northwest, and having spent previously eight years of supervision and teaching in the South, I, perhaps, might be considered competent to make some comparisons which will be of interest and may be of value to some Southern teachers.

I will tell you of things just as I saw them, and will draw such conclusions as the facts will merit.

The average Southerner is so polite and generous that, through force of habit, he will often speak of faults in such a manner as to make them seem virtues.

Many annual school reports remind me forcibly of inscriptions on some tombstones; they are misleading only to those who are not acquainted with the schools.

The time has come when we should look these school questions squarely in the face and deal with them and ourselves honestly.

There is no denying the fact that the schools of the Northwest are much more progressive than the vast majority of schools in the South.

There are several reasons why this is so, one of which can be traced to the institution of slavery. Slavery made large plantations possible, and the homes of the white population so far apart as to make public schools impossible, and besides it was not considered very necessary or desirable for any except the upper class to be educated, and these were generally educated in private schools or by tutors or sent abroad.

Our fathers seemed to overlook the fact that, to make a strong State, the voters must be educated; consequently acts of legislation looking toward the education of the masses were not so frequent or so liberal as they might have been. I know there are some notable exceptions to this assertion, but upon the whole I think it is true.

The Civil War came, and the South, rich, proud and beautiful, called her sons to her, bestowed upon them all her wealth, and bade them defend her rights. Like loyal sons of a loyal mother they went; and, after four years of struggle, disaster and ruin, she again called them-the tattered remnant of a once proud army-and said, "You have done what you could. Go sheath. your swords, rebuild your homes and churches and place in every community a schoolhouse and bid every one, friend and foe and slave, be educated, for, by this will ye conquer and become, as God intended, a mighty people." For thirty-five years, as far as means would permit, this command has been faithfully kept, and the prophecy is being fulfilled.

I do not believe that any other people could have done as well as we have done under the circumstances, yet there is no denying the fact, that, aside from the loss of property, the defeat was so humiliating as to leave its effect even upon the present genera

tion.

A people humiliated are like a robust boy humiliated. They look upon failure as a matter of course, and difficulties are not only not attacked with that earnestness which is born of success, but there is a tendency not to undertake these difficulties at all, but to pass them by lightly, because it seems utterly beyond their power to master them.

Whereas, in the South, their institutions were such as to make public schools unnecessary, and, consequently, but little public attention or money was given to them, in the Northwest, State aid, the absence of slavery and aristocratic families,-every one being about on the same footing-public schools received the earliest and most hearty support from the very beginning of the States.

The South since the war has had to struggle in poverty and at the same time divide her meagre school taxes to educate the non-tax-paying negroes.

The South has had to overcome difficulties, burdened with the consciousness of having made a great failure, and the North

west has met her difficulties buoyed up by the consciousness of

success.

In the South, after the war, we had exhibited among a whole people that which we call in children self-consciousness. As children's efforts, under this condition, are in a measure paralyzed, so were the efforts of the South paralyzed in being conscious that failure had been met with, and a realization of the fact that there was but little left with which to do those things which her aspirations prompted her to do.

Not so with the Northwest. Flushed with victory and having everything at her command with which to insure future success, she has gone ahead, with no one to criticise her failures, at the time they were made, or call attention to her successes; and, as a result, what has been accomplished stands today as a monument to the energy and common sense of the common people of the Northwest.

Without any further words as to the general causes of the differences and superiority of the schools of the Northwest over the schools of the South, let us notice some special causes.

The course of study of the average town of the Northwest compared with the course of study of the average Southern town, shows a much deeper study of the nature of the child to be educated and the materials and methods best suited to bring about this education in the most economical way. There is much more in their course of study, and it is much richer than ours; yet they master it in the same time, and often in less time than we can master our meagre courses of study.

The courses of study of the Northwest recognize the fact that the child-mind reaches its development through internal growth rather than by accretion. They also recognize the fact that the child has an imagination, and that it should be made a most potent factor in his education, while we, in the South, scarcely seem to recognize the existence of such a faculty, or, if it does exist, it is but to be suppressed.

What business has a child with an imagination, anyway, when he spends the half of his school life learning to place symbols to make words to put into sentences which have no earthly interest to him, and the other half is spent in the manipulation of figures to get answers? Surely the Designer of the mind could have saved himself the trouble of constructing this faculty, had he anticipated many of our public schools, and many a child would

have been spared a "thrashing," because he dared to draw a picture, or tell a story, the promptings of his imprisoned imagination.

How cruel it would be to clip the wings of a little bird, and thus deprive it of the joys of its home in the trees. Yet, in the guise of education, we are no less cruel in clipping the wings of the child's imagination when he enters school, and thus compelling him to leave nature, his old nurse, and to lay aside all the beautiful story-books she has written for him, and force him to learn to read by the sweat of his brow.

I would not have you believe that I think that the imagination is the only thing in the child worth looking after, but, I do think that if the imagination were reckoned with in all of our teaching, the children would learn many more facts of value to them in less time, and with thrice the pleasure, than if we should try to teach these facts by suppressing the imagination.

A child cannot read with proper expression without picturing vividly the scene described; he may juggle with figures but he can know no mathematics without imagination; he may memorize questions in geography, but he can know geography only through the imagination; he may be able to repeat pages of history, but without an imagination it profiteth him nothing; he may be able to conjugate the verb in all its modes and tenses and parse ad in finitum, but if he have not withall an imagination, it is worse than tinkling cymbals or sounding brass.

Imagination enables the poet to people the world with characters more real than the real, and the artist to paint these more than real unreal things.

It was on the wings of the imagination that the astronomers were lifted from earth and carried through space to the most distant star and showed how these twinkling orbs might be weighed in her fairy balances. It was imagination that pointed Columbus the way to the New World, taught Fulton to invent the steamboat, and gave to the scientist the keys with which he has unlocked the store houses of creation and compelled even proud electricity to come from her home in the skies to do, like an obedient servant, the menial work of man. It matters not the vocation, whether they be the ditch diggers in the ditch, farmers at the plow, cooks in the kitchen, merchants at the counter, lawyers at the bar, doctors at the sick-bed, preachers in the pulpit or teachers in the

school, people will be successful in proportion to the strength of their respective imaginations.

Therefore, since the imagination is such an important factor in everything that is done on this earth and even enables the lost sinner to see the way to the better world to come, you can well understand why I think that the imagination should not be overlooked in any system of education. It must be that the makers of the courses of study of the Northwest had some such view as the above of the function of the imagination. May I quote from one of these noted leaders in educational thought.

"Life is the great thing after all; the life of the child at its time and in its measure, no less than the life of the adult. Strange would it be, indeed, if intelligent and serious attention to what the child now needs and is capable of in the way of a rich, valuable, and expanded life should somehow conflict with the needs and possibilities of later, adult life. 'Let us live with our children,' certainly means, first of all, that our children shall live-not that they shall be hampered and stunted by being forced into all kinds of conditions, the most remote consideration of which is relevancy to the present life of the child. If we seek the kingdom, educationally, all other things shall be added unto us— which, being interpreted, is that if we identify ourselves with the real instincts and needs of childhood, and ask only after its fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and information and culture of adult life shall all come in their due season."

The real child, it hardly need be said, lives in the world of values, of imagination and ideas which find only imperfect outward embodiment. We hear much nowadays about the cultivation of the child's "imagination.' Then we undo much of our own talk and work, by a belief that the imagination is some special part of the child that finds its satisfaction in some one particular direction,-generally speaking, that of the unreal and make-believe, of the myth and made-up story. Why are we so hard of heart and so slow to believe? The imagination is the medium in which the child lives. To him there is everywhere and in everything that occupies his mind and activity at all, a surplusage of value and significance. The question of the relation of the school to the child's life is at bottom simply this: shall we ignore this native setting and tendency, dealing not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have erected, or shall we give