working with and through those forces, he must encourage educational meetings and mold public sentiment. The state superintendent must take the sting out of the harmful legislation-killing off bad measures. These, if taken in time, need not cause him trouble. Sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, and always quietly, he may protect the interests of the people. The name of the state superintendent should be a household word. He should be the friend and adviser of every teacher in the state.

STATE AGENT A. W. EDSON of Massachusetts. In response to the assertion that there must necessarily be some politics in the election of a state superintendent of education, I have this to say, that one state, at least,-Massachusetts,boasts of the fact that there is absolutely no politics whatever in the selection of the head of the educational department. The state board of education is composed of eight members, exclusive of the governor and lieutenant governor, members ex-officio; one appointed each year and confirmed by the council, to serve for a period of eight years. This board selects a secretary and six agents. The members of the board receive no compensation, are appointed without any reference to political preferences, and have a long tenure of office. As a result, for fifty-seven years, from 1837 to 1894, there have been but five secretaries-Mann, Sears, Boutwell, White, and Dickenson. The political faith of the secretary is not taken into consideration; in fact, I doubt if the board knows to which political party the present secretary, Hon. Frank A. Hill, belongs.

If the head of the educational department is elected by popular vote or by the legislature, he must, necessarily, be somewhat embarrassed at times in dealing with men and measures. It can't be otherwise. The less politics in connection with the schools the better for them. In the good time coming, teachers rather than politicians will select educational leaders, school boards, and heads of departments.

A. E. WINSHIP, Editor of "New England Journal of Education," Boston.Two thoughts have been well emphasized, the duty and the responsibility of the state superintendent. Two others should certainly receive attention-his opportunity and his personality. There is no position in America aside from that of commissioner of education of the United States that affords such opportunity of educational usefulness as that of the state superintendent of schools. He is enabled to help those rural communities that are in no condition to help themselves in professional advancement.

It is the personality of the state superintendent, more than that of any other educational official, which makes him a power. The personality of Judge Draper, as head of the New York state school system, gave him boundless influence at home and an international reputation.

It is this quality that distinguishes the work in Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, as in many other states. Who can speak the influence for good upon the Keystone State of the personality of Wickersham and Burroughs, Higbee and Waller names that make her educational history radiant? But never in sixty years has there been a more striking and effective personality than that of her state leader, Dr. Schaeffer, from whom we have heard to-day.

Regarding the political affiliations of the state systems, an important distinction has been omitted. No one expects or desires that the head of the educational department should not have positive political preferences; but it is little short of a crime for those preferences to affect him as an educational official. It is as much a man's duty not to be a politician educationally as it is to be a good citizen personally.

This department does well to speak in no uncertain tone regarding the choice and retention of state superintendents of schools on the strength of their personal

ity and their educational and administrative ability. All honor to New Jersey who in Republican hands has re-elected an eminent educator, despite the fact that he was previously elected as a Democrat, and to New York who has just elected one who has served as deputy superintendent under both parties. It ought to be possible for the educators of the country to so far affect public sentiment as to secure the retention regardless of political affiliation of every notably efficient state official.

STATE SUPT. E. B. PRETTYMAN of Maryland.-In Maryland the state board of education consists of two ex-officio members, viz., the governor and the state superintendent, and, in addition, of four persons who are appointed by the governor by and with the advice and consent of the senate. These four are selected from the county superintendents or the presidents of the county school boards. Thus, five out of the six members of the state board are actively engaged in school work, and constitute a professional board. It is the duty of this board to recommend legislation, and the general assembly usually enacts the laws and amendments so recommended. The public schools of the state are all under the jurisdiction of the state board of education, except those of Baltimore city, which are conducted under local laws.

STATE SUPT. R. E. EMERY of Wisconsin.-In most of the states many questions requiring judicial decisions come before the state superintendent. In my own state it has been enacted by the legislature that the decisions of the state superintendent should be subject to review at the hands of the supreme court. Within ten years, however, no appeal has been taken from his decisions.

SUPERINTENDENT SCHAEFFER, in closing the debate, said: "It has been implied in the debate that governors in appointing the state superintendents are influenced by political motives. The fact is that in my state, although the governor was a Democrat, he appointed a Republican, and it is an open secret that our present United States commissioner of education did not vote for Harrison from whom he obtained his appointment, and did not vote for Cleveland to whom he owes his re-appointment. The decisions of the state superintendent in the large states are not the decisions of one man, but of a number of men working together. And then, after the manner of the decisions of the supreme court, one man puts his name to the paper. Instead of the expensive methods and long time required under any other system, we have a way of settling these questions, and many questions there are which it is better to settle any way than to leave unsettled for a very long time. The decisions of the state superintendent should not be subject to a reversal by a fallible supreme court. If anyone can interpret data in the interests of the children, it is certainly the man who has made education a life-long study."

HISTORY TEACHING IN SCHOOLS.

BY DR. B. A. HINSDALE, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.

The report of the conference on history, civil government, and political economy, made to the committee of ten, is a document of forty octavo pages, the foundation of which is composed of some thirty-five resolutions that were carefully elaborated by the distinguished scholars and teachers who composed the conference, while the superstructure is built up by a careful exposition of these relations and their enforcement by appropriate arguments, the whole constituting a solid and valuable body of pedagogical doctrine. Merely to summarize this report and to comment on its salient features would perhaps hardly meet the expectations of the hour. So I shall take up the subject de novo, making such references to the report as shall conduce to the stronger presentation of my own ideas. I shall begin with assigning to history its proper place in a full scheme of educa

tion.

That expansion or growth of the human mind which we call education originates in the contact of the mind itself with facts or objects of knowledge. We are not here concerned with the speculative aspects of the subject; but we must emphasize the fact that all mental activity-the whole train of cognition, feeling, and will-has its rise in the establishment of such points of contact. Potent as the mind is, it cannot act, and so cannot make increase, in vacuum. These facts or objects of knowledge are divisible into three classes:

1. The Facts of Nature.-Every natural object offers to the mind a point of contact, and, when such contact is fixed, sensation, perception, apperception, memory, thought, imagination, pleasure and pain, choice and volition, all follow in due course of time. All schools of philosophy hold that the psychic life originates in the senses.

2. The Facts of Human Society. In their simplest forms, the hu man infant encounters these facts in the family, and thereby gets the discipline that fits him to grapple with the more complex forms that he afterwards encounters in general society and the state. As he learns what hardness and heat are by beating the floor with his heels and thrusting his hand into the flame, so he learns what command, obedience, rule, government, order, right, and duty are through contact with his nurse, parents, brothers and sisters, and playmates.

3. Introspective Facts, or Facts of the Self-Conscious Mind.-Progress ively, the child becomes self-conscious. He learns the use of "I" and "me," learns that he is not what he sees, and that he is other than

the things he touches. He communes with his own heart, and his spirit makes diligent search.

Such are the primordial agents or factors of human civilization, as seen both in individual history and in race history. In both spheres they antedate teachers, and schools, and education, as these terms are commonly understood. In attrition between mind and natural facts originates natural science; in attrition with social facts, social and moral science; and in attrition with mental facts, mental science. To define the relations of these several groups of factors and their comparative values is beside the present purpose; except to say, that, for the most part, they run side by side through the conscious life; that their interaction is constant and powerful, although not uniform in different persons or in different periods of the individual life; and that they are all essential in something like relative measure to a well-developed mind.

These primordial agents of human cultivation are powerfully reenforced by a secondary group. As the first men and women acquired experience through attrition with the worlds of nature, of society, and of the spirit, they imparted to one another what they had learned, and thus became teachers one of another. Ex hypothesi, up to this time all knowledge had come from original sources; henceforth second-hand, or derivative, knowledge, and so tradition and authority, play their part. It may be said with truth that there is no wide interval in point of time between the action of the primary agents and the secondary ones; but it is wide enough, to say nothing of the difference in character, to justify the classification of primary and secondary groups that has been given. So we are led to analyze the group of secondary factors.

1. First in time and in power, comes spoken language or oral tradition, the effect of which upon our minds and lives we are quite incapable of estimating.

2. Then follow material monuments of various kinds, ranging from the articles and utensils of common life to the Pantheon and the Simplon road.

3. Symbols follow, including the rude art of the savage, picturewriting, and the Parthenon freize.

4. Last of all is writing, and its corrolary, printing, which gives us the printed page, books, and libraries. This is, indeed, a kind of symbolism, but a symbolism of so distinct a kind that it well deserves a separate classification.

These last factors of cultivation are plainly derivative; they mean nothing, and serve no useful purpose save as they rest upon a previous culture. Their relations to one another and to the primary group do not here concern us, beyond the observation that there has

been a strong tendency, and particularly since the invention of movable types, to exaggerate the fourth division of the secondary group. But avoiding the questions that are suggested by the words humanism, classicism, realism, and naturalism, let us fix the location of history in the chart of human culture.

The Father of History tells us that he wrote his immortal book that the actions of men might not be affected by time nor the wondrous deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians be forgotten. He has thus defined in a general way the field of history; it is the field of the action or deeds of men. But what action or deeds does it embrace? Shunning the various controversies that a detailed answer would perhaps excite, let us say that history is the story of man's more serious and valuable experience in the most important spheres of his activity-in politics, war, religion, art, industrial achievement, education, scientific discovery, and moral endeavor; and that its sources go back to every one of the secondary agents of education-tradition, monuments, symbolism, and the written page. Seizing first the actions of men that constitute the body of history, the student rests not until he has discovered the spiritual elements out of which these actions have sprung. History is, therefore, philosophy teaching by examples. Even Froude, who scorned both the science and the philosophy of history, and said history was but a drama, admitted that it does teach the difference between right and wrong. And when this much is said, what need be added to show its high educational value? History is one of the main channels through which the experience of the race is communicated to us; and to ask whether it is worth while to pay attention to what it conveys, is to ask whether it is worth while to defer to experience at all. If it is profitable to study the formation of crystals, the hatching of eggs, the germination and growth of seeds, and the surrounding social environment, a fortiore is it profitable to study the evolution of humanity from its lowest to its highest forms? As in the lower sphere of life man cannot reach his ends when cut off from association with men, so he cannot meet the ends of the higher sphere when cut off from the past.

Having thus assigned to history its place in the circle of educational agents, I do not think that it is necessary to insist, point by point, that it trains the memory, stimulates the imagination, furnishes guiding knowledge, and cultivates the faculties of reason. But I would observe, with Bishop Stubbs, that history is a great school of the judgment; and all the more valuable because it deals with moral or probable elements, or just such elements as the pupil now encounters in the home, the school, and the church, and just such elements as he will encounter in the town meeting, on 'change, in legislative halls, and administrative offices. How desirable it is, especially,