verdict in order that the public may know that it defies the wisdom of the court. Prejudice says "I, in my majestic conceit, will not wait for the judge; will not listen to the evidence." The man of prejudice is nowhere so vicious as in matters of education, for here judgment claims to be enthroned. The religionist and the politician are expected to be biased, as is the attorney in court; but the educator professes to be as unprejudiced as the judge upon the the bench. The solicitor is excused for being one-sided, but the prejudiced judge is impeachable.

No prejudiced schoolman can be an educator. He who is prej udiced in matters educational will be impeached by that sentiment whose verdict is eternal.

Heroism is to prejudice what conviction is to pride. It prejudges nothing but dares everything for the benefit of mankind when conviction is based on evidence. Prejudice magnifies selfishness; heroism magnifies sacrifice. Fame is the handmaid of heroism, but infamy of prejudice.

Conviction begets a great purpose and heroism enthrones it. Education presents the arena in which conviction and heroism must win their victories over pride and prejudice. Because of this, educators need deeper convictions and more intense heroism.

It should be ever borne in mind that pride may be as vicious in regard to the new as to the old, and prejudice may be as malicious with the old as the new.

Away forever with our pride in past glory and present achieve. ment; away forever with the prejudices that will not patiently heed all testimony regarding the virtues of the old and the hopes of the new in psychology or philosophy, in methods or devices.

May we not hope to witness a scene of educational transfiguration in which pride and prejudice shall come forth in all the glory of educational conviction and heroism.

We have the good fortune to have at the head of the educational department of the national government a man who stands forth among the nations with breadth of scholarship, with height of culture, the leader of leaders in education, because he is the man of all men in educational conviction and educational heroism.

PROGRESS IN PRIMARY EDUCATION.

BY MRS. EVA D. KELLOGG, EDITOR OF "PRIMARY EDUCATION," BOSTON, MASS,

If zigzag be the law of progress, the cause of primary education in America is certainly moving forward. The term "primary education" as used here means the education of the youngest children in our public schools.

In the rhythmic swing of events that have marked the distinctive efforts for the training of little children for the last fifty years, the tick-tack of the vibrating pendulum has touched the supremest limits of complete neglect on the one side and over-attention on the other.

Half a century ago the children in our primary rooms were only so many little people on their own unattended way from childhood to manhood. To-day they are the center of the universe. Then they were to "be seen and not heard." To-day every word from their childish lips is listened for lest some significant utterance be lost to the world. Then, if they were fed at all, it was on the driest. solidest meat. Now they are over-nursed on the bottled-up wisdom of the ages-with the usual result in such cases.

Then the child was not fashionable. does not talk the child to-day is a fossil.

The man or woman who

Is this marvelous change in half a century all pure progress? There is not time in this brief paper to look over the whole field for an answer. Let us confine ourselves to the consideration of two or three prominent subjects that are to-day receiving attention. from every section of the country. Thoughtful teachers of the Maine coast, by the Pacific shores, in the breezy Northwest, and in the progressive schools of the Southern States that have "caught step” in the forward march of progress in the last twenty years with so much of skill and energy as to arouse the pride and admiration of the whole educational line-all are pursuing these subjects with such unity of purpose that it seems not unfitting to question a little concerning them at an educational congress at Atlanta.

These questions are not meant for assertions, but simply as one would examine milestones to see if they really mark off progress along the highway.

First, that of child study. He who "put a little child in the midst" nineteen hundred years ago, saying, "Except ye become as little children," pointed the whole world to child study-the study of the spirit and soul of the child. Have we entered upon this study

with that same reverent spirit? When the doctors in psychology discuss the best ways of entering into the sacred temple of child nature, do they approach it as the three wise men of the East “followed the star to where the young child was?"

All honor, and sympathy, and co-operation with the avowed purposes of the societies formed for the pursuance of child study. The note of future reform is distinctly heard in their outlined plan for child investigation, and hope and faith revive and flutter again in the human heart when the experts in advanced psychology are willing to enter the child world as humble learners, convinced that all true education must be founded upon the discoveries made therein. How the hearts that have been heavy over existing wrongs in the schoolroom grow lighter, and the anxious eyes that are weary with watching for relief grow brighter, when the wisest, strongest, most influential men in the educational world, whose very names forecast victory, have joined together under the simple name of "Society for Child Study," and are willing to watch, and to work, and to wait for the light that dawns only upon conscientious, unselfish, intelligent, and persistent investigation!

Here, indeed, is progress, and herein lies the hope of the future for the education of little children.

But are there no dangers to be avoided; no pitfalls to escape even in such a glorious work as this? Every worthy cause, and especially every new cause, is threatened with the disintegrating elements of unwise discipleship, till the cry, "Save it from its friends!" is forced from loyal lips. Does not such a danger lie concealed in one phrase in the "purpose of child study," viz., "the collection and collation of the scientific data resulting from experiments and investigation?" Is there not danger that impetuous laborers in this unfamiliar field shall snatch this phrase as their especial ways and means for mental investigation, and with temperamental zeal push it forward out of all relation to the main purpose of the work? Is it not already being done? And is not this "collection and collation" being held aloft as education itself, instead of one single line of experiment toward the great end to be sought, viz., a bed-rock, basal foundation for an ideal course of study in our public schools?

To push forward the experimental tests upon the immature mental capacity of the child; to propound questions for the reasoning powers when such powers do not exist; to appeal to the judgment as yet undeveloped; to probe for individual decision in cases where such decision is the merest farce; to record such decisions in ponderous volumes, and to such a numerical extent that mathematics is brought in to assist, and upon her beloved handmaid, Percentage is laid the burden of a dry statistical classification that does not

classify but only confuse-is all this that has been done, and is being done, a contribution of real value to the true purpose of child investigation? For example, is it a step forward when a thousand immature children have been asked to decide whether they have ever been unjustly punished? One natural outcome of this has already appeared in an educational journal, when the editor suggests that this question be given to children, miscellaneously, as "composition work." It is not difficult to fancy the atmosphere of the schoolroom when the martyred boy has his teacher's license for the first time to describe his method of unjust punishment and his opinion, of it, to his admiring boy companions and sympathizers. Oh, the farce of it!

Is it not even at its best a pitiful attempt to arraign children in the name of child study, and propound to them the problem of ages, "Know thyself?" Burns voiced the need of humanity when he prayed for the "power to see ourselves as ithers see us."

The weak, irrelevant answers of these children to all such questions should be confirmation sufficient that this flippant, superficial method of child study is casting reproach upon a most worthy cause. Men in high places, engaged in this special form of investigation, working through immature student-teachers-the blind leading the blind-assert that they are prepared to accept the united decision of any thousand ordinary children as a guide to their own course of procedure in child education. If a thousand children call for harmful tragic stories; if they demand the murder of three bears to-day, and three bears plus a man or a woman to-morrow, shall not this thousandfold verdict be enough? A thousand children under a thousand varying influences of heredity and fashioned by the thousand influences of differing environment placed upon the throne of judgment to decide upon this or that method for their own personal training! Have we lost our anchorage that we can drift like this, at the mercy of the wind-tossed waves? Has the current phrase, “The children like it," become a siren to lure us on to rocks of destruction? And has it occurred to us that there is great danger that this generation of children may grow up conceited and priggish under a method of child study that invites them to sit as judge and jury over their own acts?

Let the children be studied, but let it be done mainly while in the enjoyment of their own unconscious and illimitable freedom, and let the recording angel keep out of sight and not load down these young people with the unsightly burden of self-consciousness. American children have too much of it already; have they not?

We pause at another milestone-nature study. Is not the first record of nature teaching when the Great Teacher taught the people

to "consider the lilies of the field," and presented truth by means of "a grain of mustard seed?" Again we see we have waited all these hundreds of years before catching the full significance of this model teaching. But we have reached it at last so far as the subject-matter is concerned, but let us question here and see if we are not wandering away from the simplicity of Nature herself, and building up machinery for investigation instead of seeking to become the little children we must be if we enter into the kingdom of nature revelation.

It is wonderful how soon we lose simplicity in the consideration of any subject which we bring into the schoolroom. We stoop to gather a flower, and a simple, genuine worship goes out to the holy, unsolved mystery of the "flower in the crannied wall." Still holding the flower we pass into the schoolroom, and how long before the method passion dominates every other thought? As soon as that flower becomes the subject of a lesson, the rattle of the machinery begins to be heard, and with the inevitable, "Now, children," the God in the flower is forgotten and the science of the flower has taken its place. Stamens, petals, pistils must be counted, the velvety leaf torn from its center, and the heavenly fragrance spilled on the altar of technicalities. Do we not often analyze where we should worship, and rob the lesson of all soul cultivation because, by-and-by, this may perchance be gathered again into a language lesson? What a reason! Cannot some things in nature study be allowed to sink into the soul uncounted and unmeasured? Cannot beauty be enjoyed and assimilated into soul tissue without the constant feeling that some day it must be reproduced again and crystallized into mere words?

We who have lived long enough have found that it is great compensation that there are some things in this world that cannot be put into words.

Mathematics, too, has been known to stalk into this realm of nature study, and propound chilling questions in percentage-as to the roses one sees in a day, what proportion were pink or crimson, etc. If the dust on the butterfly's wing, glistening in heaven's own rainbow glory, is not safe from the Percentage demon, and it has been proven that it is not, under the specious plea that our children must learn to see accurately, then the intellectual Mephistopheles of modern education has full power to work his evil way, crushing out all highest aspirations for the soul of things. It is asked, perhaps, Does not nature study belong in primary schools? Certainly. Does not science belong in the primary schools? Certainly, again. But can we afford either in this nineteenth century, which, already, "with its knife and glass, makes thought physical," if at the cost