accomplisht during the silent-study period alone. The review and the assignment are equally important in providing opportunities for the employment of the factors of study. Supervised study, therefore, must take into account the three functions of the lesson and utilize each to develop habits of purposive thinking.

SUPERVISED AND DIRECTED STUDY

J. STANLEY BROWN, PRINCIPAL OF JOLIET, ILLINOIS, TOWNSHIP HIGH SCHOOL AND JUNIOR COLLEGE

Educational process is unfixt; it is mutable, unconfined, independent, fluidic; it partakes of these qualities because of the force with which it has to deal. Applied to the schools and colleges, its quantitative element is largest apparently in the realm of intellect. Its qualitative force will be greatest in its effect on the individual as a whole. The process of instruction involves the instructor and the individual to be instructed. There is demanded here a mutuality of effort if the resultant receives either temporary or permanent approval of the participants.

Long before Jesus trod the soil of Galilee, and unceasingly down thru the centuries, men have sought untiringly to improve education, instruction, and teaching. The residuum of theories which for their time met approval and were thought to contribute something permanent has been brought together from age to age and made a part of a fusion of a new process somewhat unlike either of the elements fused, but in a measure has met in a more acceptable way the newer conditions presented.

The adoption of universal education in the United States of America long before many of the much older civilizations, developed under different conditions, conceived or thought of such an idea has hastened the training for teaching and has produced in our public mind the desire for thoroly trained teachers.

Because men and women have appreciated the necessity of trained teachers, even tho the training had to be in the great majority of cases outside of an institution designated for the training of teachers, there has been a constant effort, a constant study, and, may we say, a constant improvement in the relationship between the teacher and the student. We have tried the short school day in secondary education, the period given up to study for all at the beginning of the day, the conference either in the middle of the day or at the close, the assignment of work to be done at home without direction, the keeping of students as a kind of penalty after the great majority had gone to their homes, and many other projects designed to help in the teaching process.

Among the latest of these efforts at securing a closer, a warmer, a more sympathetic, and in many cases a more magnetic relationship between the teacher and the student or pupil is "supervised and directed study." We

are not attempting to define this as by a dictionary definition. It represents a method of instruction, a scheme of teaching, which is based upon a mutual relationship, a mutual obligation existing between the two parties concerned.

We are applying this method of instruction to all kinds of language work, our native tongue, and our foreign tongues. We are, however, persuaded that its application is as defensible in all subjects when sanely and thoughtfully applied. It forever condemns to the scrap heap of discarded pedagogy such expressions as "hearing the recitation," "hearing a class," mere question and answer," when teacher and class have come together. Its application is not the same in any two different subjects; hence every subject to which it is applied must interpret the method in the interest of the subject and not the subject in the interest of the method. It means a longer school day; it means a larger expense; it means a smaller number of unsuccessful pupils; it means a larger percentage of pupils to continue their work for a longer time; it means that the educational expense attacht to this method of teaching is almost offset by the smaller number of repeaters from semester to semester.

The relationship between the teacher and the class takes largely the nature of a conference in which all participate; difficulties presented are discust in the open; the interest created in the first half of the period may be culminated to magnify the interest in the second half of the period. The keyed-up condition, which ought to be general in the conduct of a class after the first twenty or thirty minutes, may be skilfully used without cessation of interest in the continuation of the conference between the teacher and the pupil.

Directed study means the appropriation of the positive and the constructive and the minimizing of the negative and the destructive in the conference group of teacher and class to do, to build, to think, to act, to construct, to produce such a group, and such conditions seem to us far more vital than to memorize and to reproduce or recite what has been prepared to show that it has been prepared. The examination of subject-matter thru common conference and discussion not only is made possible but is made the core and the heart of this kind of educational and instructional effort. The atmosphere of the group created by a common interest in the whole discussion and conference frees the group from the lassitude and indifference many times found when the teacher "hears a recitation," directs a question to an individual, and gets the response from the individual. The individual in turn, when he has performed his part of what is called the recitation, is inclined to be easy for the rest of the hour in the thought that his performance is ended, and that he is but an observer for the remainder of the time.

Initiative may be cultivated in the extreme in well-directed study because of the stimulus which comes from the consideration of the entire matter before the group, and not from the small consideration given to an

individualized question concerned with only a part of the complete topic under discussion. Reproducing has its main value in the earlier years of the educational process, when the power to think is undevelopt, and when the power to reproduce may tend to stimulate and develop the power to think. But certainly at the secondary-school period the power of initiative, the ability to think independently, is either in its inception or at a more advanst stage of development and ought to be carefully directed, encouraged, and developt.

Let no one suppose that supervised and directed study may find its satisfaction at all in the large study-hall over which some teacher is placed for the purpose of keeping the room in order and looking after the details of the discipline of the room. In a broad sense there is a kind of supervision, but it can never have any direct relation or application to supervised and directed study by the teacher especially prepared to do a limited field of work. It is clear that no individual teacher would attempt to direct and supervise the six or eight different fields of work which might be represented in the group in the large assembly hall. The most that can be done under such circumstances is not individualized at all either in subjectmatter or in class direction. Everything which savors of a purely mechanical performance, everything which savors of the deadness of routine, everything which savors of the "letter that killeth," will be eliminated when a real teacher magnetically in sympathy with the group under his care uses the first few minutes of the conference to enthuse the pupils and illuminate the topic for general consideration and then assists, by guidance only, the unfolding of all the difficulties presented and enlists a unity of attention and a warmth of interest literally irresistible.

One subject in the curriculum is as vital and as important as another; one subject ought to be assigned on the daily schedule as much time as another subject. It is clear to me that all linguistic work, whether nativeor foreign-born, whether the mother-tongue or the great-great-grandmothertongue, whether in secondary school or in college, ought to be granted the same consideration in time as any other subject in the curriculum, the same chance for conference and production, the same chance for a kind of laboratory consideration for class and student, the same opportunity to confer, to construct, to criticize, to develop, to produce, to carry out, thru the process of guidance and directed thinking, their examination of subject-matter. In my judgment it is an error to presume that guidance belongs to the vocation only, and not to the whole field of education. Educational guidance thru directed and supervised study may produce as happy and satisfactory results, yea, will produce both happy and satisfactory results, when the individual who guides and directs is saturated with the subject-matter under consideration, is obsest with the best in sociology, psychology, ethics, and pedagogy. In this sort of a conference and consideration of the topics at hand all the best thought of the entire

group may be put into the crucible during the conference, criticism, and debate, and when the whole mass has been fused thru the heat of interest and enthusiasm there will come to all individuals of the group a resultant under the guidance of the director of the group, and this resultant will be far superior to any which might ever come from a perfect recitation heard by a teacher when every question propounded has been answered correctly. The one shows the satisfaction which may come from the expression of mechanical fact; the other the inspiration and enthusiasm which come from the approval of the entire group. Even the individual student placed in the group of the latter kind is led to use his powers to the utmost, while in the other group he has to be driven to secure the use of his powers to the minimum.

Under the stimulus of such a conference, influenst by the keenest concentrated attention, the educational process will develop a brain power keener and keener day by day, and the ability to grapple successfully with a new problem or a new question will be developt.

Directed and well-controlled study produces a kind of independent thinking and induces an unpropt effort. The individual, under the influence of the group, learns to stand alone, to think alone, to act alone, and ultimately to initiate alone.

The contrast between the mere "question and answer" method of conducting a class is as definitely estimated as that between the husk and the kernel. Each may have some function, but the power and the vital force lie in the kernel itself rather than in the husk.

The members of the conference group, teacher and class, are enabled from meeting to meeting to act as appraisers of their own efforts. They are easily able to detect the spurious and cast it out, to determine the genuine and retain it. A combination of judgment, including the entire group, director and directed, means an up-to-date advance of the level of attention and effort day by day.

In the manufacturing world the proudest records have been made thru intensified cooperation. Sometimes we have called it "efficiency." The group concerned with directed study forms the most defensible example of cooperation yet developt in the field of education. The contrast between this and the old type of recitation with question and answer may be seen if we think of the one as a cooperative group synchronized in the solution of a problem, and the other as an isolated individualized group attempting to solve the same problem. Working together we reach the all-inclusive goal; working separately we attain an exclusive individualized goal.

As twentieth-century team work or a great constructive force brought to bear on a single point wins, so directed study controlling the large group and bringing to bear all its power on a single topic under discussion will meet the twentieth-century standard of education.

SUPERVISION OF STUDY IN THE GRADES

GRACE A. DAY, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,

NEW YORK, N.Y.

There is great need to experiment with and work out in detail such factors of study as proposed by Professor McMurry until we know just what are the two or three hundred (or thousand) elementary stimulusresponse bonds or habits which the child must form before he becomes an effective independent student in any field. Also we need to know how the supervision of study may facilitate the consolidation of these numerous elementary habits into a small number of hierarchies.

Then we must continue unlimited scientific experimentation and quantitative measurement in our classrooms before we shall be able to state with trustworthy assurance just how in detail teachers and pupils should work to establish correct study habits. No one as yet has made a thorogoing scientific study of these details.

Professor Thorndike is constantly shocking his advanst students and colleagues in education by such experiences as this. He asks them to estimate how often a child in the first six years of school sees certain of the one hundred spelling demons in his school readers. Thereupon one is chagrined to find himself holding opinions quite contrary to fact. He is askt to estimate the number of times that a child would have to add seven to nine or five to eight, if he performed all of the work in the first two books in a standard three-book series of arithmetic. Again we are humiliated by our ignorance and are ready to agree when Professor Thorndike suggests that the intellectually élite of this country know nothing about the details and minutiae of the instruments of instruction with which they work.

Recent progress in the science of mental measurements, however, gives us hope that in the future it will be possible to give scientifically proved facts concerning supervised study in place of the tentative theses which now are offered.

The supervision of study in the elementary grades, or in any place for that matter, is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The chief end or purpose is the emancipation of our pupils from poor and ineffective ways of studying. The supervision of study which accomplishes its purpose equips pupils with the tools (that is, the knowledge and consequent habits) of independent, self-directed study. Such independence rests upon facility in the mental functions involved in clear thinking.

The test of success for any supervised-study period is, How much better able are these pupils to think and study independently?

Four years of experimentation in elementary classrooms, testing and measuring a considerable variety of methods used to teach children how to study, have brought me to the following tentative conclusions:

1. The supervision of study or teaching children how to study is not one problem but many problems. It involves not the formation of a habit