that with reference to training in democracy the subcommittee on Superintendents' Problems has sent out a questionnaire "for the purpose of discovering factors already existing in some American schools that tend to a truer and completer democracy in the hope that school superintendents and committees of teachers may be inspired to adopt to their own local systems the best means used by others and to pass on to others what is best in their own." Finally we cannot expect our teachers to train children in democracy and to stamp the nervous machinery of children with responsiveness to cooperative control unless the teachers find themselves in a cooperatively administered system of schools. Does the teacher have a voice in the making of professional rating systems and educational requirements for salary promotions and the opportunity to express herself on various educational and administrative policies? If we really believe in democracy and expect to train children in it, then it must be practist in the administrative offices and organizations of the school system as well as in the classroom. There is no place for a vicarious democracy in a system of public schools. In Germany is illustrated a nation seeking to establish autocracy thru a system of education. She succeeded. Is it possible for us thru training in the schools to establish a cooperating democracy? Yes, but the task is more difficult than the education for autocracy. Training children to feel, think, and act cooperatively is more difficult than training children to feel, think, and act dependently. We shall not, however, despair because of the enormity of our task. Primarily we must believe that the teacher is a self-directing, cooperating control machine placed in the school for the purpose of training similar machines to function. There will be many breakdowns in the school, and there will be times when the chief engineer will desire to switch back on to the old autocratic controls, but if he really understands himself, the machines intrusted to his care, and the purpose of the school he will be willing to blunder in the manipulation, to be disappointed in the day's quantitative output, because he is concerned, not in a product made in Germany, but in a product in the making in America. This chief engineer is the American school teacher, and the wonderful, coordinating, cooperative, self-directing, and self-improving machines are American boys and girls in our public schools. The force that operates within such a school is the socializing force of democracy. If we really believe in it we shall operate our schools according to its laws. Our chief concern in the twilight of democracy is to discover its laws and then to apply them. DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION SECRETARY'S MINUTES OFFICERS President-FRANK L. McVey, president, University of Kentucky....... ..Lexington, Ky. .Evanston, Ill. TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 1 The Department of Higher Education of the National Education Association convened in regular session on Tuesday afternoon, July 1, at 2:00 o'clock, in Juneau Hall, Auditorium, Milwaukee, Wis. The meeting was called to order by Frank L. McVey, president. The following program was presented: "The Influence of the War on Higher Education"-James Sullivan, chief, Division of Archives and History, State Department of Education, Albany, N.Y. "The Effect of the War on Methods of Teaching"-A. A. Potter, State Agricultural College, Manhattan, Kans. "Modification of Business Methods in Educational Institutions"-Henry H. Hilton, chief of Settlement Division, Committee on Education and Special Training, War Department, Washington, D.C. "Effect of War on the Education of Women"-Kathryn S. McLean, dean, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio. Discussion-E. A. Birge, president, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.; James L. McConaughy, president, Knox College, Galesburg, Ill. The following officers were elected for the ensuing year: President-Guy Stanton Ford, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Secretary J. J. Pettijohn, director, Educational Extension, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. EDWARD L. SCHAUB, Secretary PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR ON HIGHER EDUCATION JAMES SULLIVAN, CHIEF, DIVISION OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY, STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, ALBANY, N.Y. Let us waive for the moment all questions which because of the absence of sufficient data must remain problematical for some years to come. College executives will undoubtedly occupy themselves with what they conceive to be the lessons to be drawn from the war. That these lessons are going to bring about any such great cataclysmic changes as their opponents advocate is doubtful. By that time the veil that covers much that has gone on in the army this side and on the other will have been withdrawn, and perhaps we shall be in a better position to take the impartial measure of the work accomplisht by executives and technical men trained, so to speak, overnight. In all this tempest of criticism the college executives will do well to remember that our country has never fought a war in which the college man played so large a part as in this one. The very men who were attacking the colleges were at the same time asking for the assistance of college-trained men. There is, however, another side to this question than that contained on the courses and methods of instruction in the colleges. This is contained in an attack, virtually unconscious, on practically all higher education. Those of us who have been away from the cloistered shadows of your institutions and have been mixing with the sordid world are inclined, when we hear you talking about what you are going to do with your student body in the future, to ask: "How do you know you are going to have a student body?" We think that there is grave danger of your not having any, or at least one very much reduced in size. Let us have some of the reasons for this pessimism. While this war was on, and even after the fighting was actually over, we heard much, overmuch perhaps, of how much labor had done to win the war. This was the one great thing that was exploited in the newspapers. Figuratively speaking we patted labor on the back—“You're hot stuff. You're it. Without you we would have lost the war." In very truth it was the apotheosis of labor, and labor was not slow to take advantage of it. If its head became a little swelled it was really the fault of the public. If labor was inclined to take the public by the throat and say, "Give us what we ask or we will stop the very breath of industry," it was largely the public's fault. "If we stop work, you'll starve," said labor, and we were not able to say "nay." Tho a little less vociferous about its accomplishments, capital did not hide its light under a bushel, and we reacht the almost unbelievable state of having the lion and the lamb lie side by side in peace. In order to stand in with labor one millionaire capitalist made the remark that "the time has come when the remuneration given to hand labor must equal that given to brains." He might have gone farther and not even have said "must" but "actually is being given as much and more than brain labor." We have lookt in vain for anyone to sing the paean of brains and the part they played in winning the war. We are not far wrong in saying that the first expression is in the subliminal consciousness of labor and of capital today. The latter has actually found itself able to employ well-trained brain labor at less than hand labor. It has been able to employ a man to design the bridge at less than the riveter who puts in the rivet. In the language of the street: "If such conditions are to prevail where does education come in ?" If hand labor, by a display of union force, can get all that goes to make up for the pursuit of happiness, why should a young man go thru a long and arduous training merely to find himself compelled to live huddled up in apartments in our great cities, returning from his business day by day to help his wife with washing the dishes and even at times with the family washing? I can cite cases where this is done even in your colleges. Is the head of a grammar school or of a high school justified in encouraging a boy or girl to continue for four or eight or even more years for an education which, after it is attained, will bring him or her less than a plumber's assistant or a shirt-waist maker? The biggest job of the college and technical school head at the present time is to convince an unbelieving, skeptical world not only that `an education pays, but that it ought to pay. At present it does not. At a meeting of a society of engineers in Syracuse a short time ago a comparison was made of the remuneration received by the engineers, most of whom, as you know, are nowadays merely employes of great corporations, with the wages received by railway employes and in the trades. The discrepancy was markt. As one engineer remarkt, "Do you think I am going to send my boy to a college or a technical school as long as such conditions prevail ?" How long are you in the colleges going to acquiesce in such conditions? Are you raising an organized protest against the minimizing of the importance of education by allowing those who get it to obtain less than those who do not have it? Labor cries out, "If we stop work, you starve." Have you met it with a similar statement, "If brains stop work, the world does not stand still; it goes backward to stagnation and death"? The world has not yet been made to realize by a strike what would happen if the engineers of this country of ours quit work. The man who puts the bolt in the girder has not been made to realize how helpless he would be were the blueprint plans not forthcoming. The riveter can with a few hours of apprenticeship learn to put in the bolt, but he and the world at large must be made to realize in some forceful way that it takes years to prepare a man to be able to design a bridge. Until such a realization is brought about, and the fact that brain labor must receive more than hand labor, then our higher educational institutions are going to have, and should deservedly have, lean years. The war has, to some extent, shockt many people because of the discovery of the amount of so-called radicalism found among our ministers and college professors. To those who know what some of these men receive it is no surprise to hear the cry for social justice coming from them. It is no surprise to be told by the president of one of our largest women's colleges that the words "teaching profession" are taboo with the graduates. The late Francis Joseph is said to have remarkt that the comforts of life made a good citizen. We must be glad that he did not use that muchabused word "spiritual." In these days of normal-school commencements Scrooges with long whiskers get up and tell the teachers, "Yours is not a profession in which you get a large material reward. It is in the spiritual satisfaction that you get in molding the minds of the makers of the nation." The spiritual, however, does not feed an empty stomach and clothe a naked back. After some of our ministers and college professors have been rudely awakened to that fact, is it surprising that they are joining the ranks of the radicals? THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON METHODS OF TEACHING A. A. POTTER, DEAN, ENGINEERING DIVISION, KANSAS STATE The war has opened up a larger vision of education. Many of our educators took an active part in the war, and this has resulted in stimulating and broadening their life and outlook. Teachers who were engaged in war work in the military and in the non-military branches of our government were forst into doing things entirely unorthodox and unacademic, and this will certainly have a most beneficial effect upon the curricula and methods of teaching in our schools, colleges, and universities. Results accomplisht in the military-training camps for the technical branches of the army indicate that the following factors in our educational system will stand more careful analysis: Organization. More effective results can be accomplisht if the duties of every person connected with the administration, instruction, and research activities of an educational institution are carefully workt out, showing lines of authority and responsibility. A diagram should then be drawn up which shows at a glance to whom each individual in the organization is responsible and the main duties, whether executive, teaching, or investigational, every person is performing. This chart should be supplemented by departmental charts and by written instructions which should set forth details of organization. It should be the duty of the head of the institution to familiarize the heads of the various departments with the organization. The heads of the departments should be held responsible for the quality of the instruction in their departments. To correlate the work of the various instructors in any given department frequent conferences should be held of all instructors teaching the same or related subjects. The head of the institution should also hold frequent conferences of all department heads in order to correlate the work of the various departments and to discuss administrative details. Matters affecting the entire teaching force should be discust at general meetings, which should be attended by every person connected with the institution. When several instructors are teaching the same subject, but to different sections, the schedule of instruction should be planned by a committee including all such instructors, and in cooperation with the head of the department. If at all possible, where several instructors are handling |