In the old days of apprenticeship, the school was established for purely academic instruction, so that the brain as well as the body might have exercise. But about a quarter of a century ago we awoke to the realization that industrial and social conditions had "flowed"; and that education, as then administered, instead of being a preparation for usefulness, bade fair to become a preparation for idleness; that book lore was useless without food; that the old apprenticeship was education for business; the old schooling was education for brain work; that neither alone was sufficient; and that since in the altered conditions there was no longer facility for business training, the public schools must enlarge their scope to include that.

The idea that training to work is a very essential part of public school education has had a hard struggle to get itself a hearing. "We must not commercialize the schools," say some. some. "My children will never have to work," say others whose offspring will probably squander their patrimony and have to work or steal. And schoolmen have discovered that brain work and vocational work travel faster when they go hand in hand. Moreover, the young people who must earn their living can be kept at their books longer when at the same time they are preparing for their future occupations; and the sons of the wealthy will have a saner conception of what it means to be a gentleman and will often be preserved in the ranks of honest men if they know how to earn an honest dollar.

The first duty of every one is to earn his own living; and he who can not or will not do this is a parasite upon society. We shall some day agree that no pupil, male or female, rich or poor, shall be graduated until he has earned a little money. And this, in the interest of democracy, self-respect, and economic independence. Those who did not already know it have learned through this war that Germany is the best organized and most efficient of European nations; which is because each separate individual in it is thoroughly trained for usefulness.

When the Kosminski school in Chicago was opened, people told each other with some surprise, that cooking and sewing were to be taught in that building. Now the school in which these subjects are not taught is the exception. Domestic arts, manual training,

evening schools, technical schools, part-time schools, and trade schools, have come into our educational system and have come to stay. Our universities now include in their curriculi such subjects as ceramics, agriculture, library science, civil and electrical engineering, and domestic science; and to men and women engaged in business they give short courses in banking, marketing and credits, business law, investments, accounting, and salesmanship. It was not until 1867 that a professor of Cambridge gave lectures in the north of England. Now every university and every normal school of note gives lectures and has study classes in a wide radius, thus going out to reach those who cannot come to them.

The Gary schools are open every day in the week to old and young, from 7 A. M. till 9 or 10 P. M. and instruction is given in almost every conceivable line, from children's play to the serious activities of adults. At the Tuskegee Institute the students study and work on alternate days. At the Cincinnati Technical College they get theory and practice on alternate weeks, one half of them going each week into the shops, factories, and business houses of the city for practical experience.

So general is the educational awakening that business firms are voluntarily establishing schools for their employees; like the white goods factory in New York which has a school and conducts graduations within its walls to improve the efficiency of its workers; or like the telephone company of Chicago which, in a still more philanthropic spirit, has established a school for its employees so that when they become too old for their present work and its compensation, they may not be too ignorant for other employment.

Perhaps nowwhere else in the United States is the remarkable change in educational ideals so fully revealed as in the Gary schools and in the varied enterprises of the Los Angeles schools. In the latter the vocational inclinations of the children are observed from the lowest grade by means of what is termed "play vocations". Each little one is allowed to choose a calling and cut out pictures from catalogs and advertising matter to make an automobile scrap book, a rancher one, a dressmaker, an engineer, or a geographical one. All through the grades the tendency of each one is noted so that he may be given advice as to the calling for which to fit himself. In the grades they make baskets, trays, stools, cane chairs, and

other reed furniture; repair books, make iceboxes, tables, toolchests, work benches, fireless cookers, ironing boards; make and set cement posts; lay sidewalk; and cobble shoes. More than fivehundred pupils remain after school in the sloyd rooms, and hundreds of outsiders come in the evening for this work. One of the sloyd teachers visits the homes of the pupils and directs their attention to repairs they should make in the houses in which they live.

They have a school orchestra of one thousand members, and three teachers who give full time to it. They have doctors, clinics, a day nursery, school for mutes, school for defectives, vacation schools, evening schools, kindergarten schools, special drawing school, art school; schools for agriculture, commerce, domestic science, marine vocations, technical vocations. They teach management of "wireless" apparatus, mail service, departmental work at Washington, illustrating and advertising, dramatic art; home, maternity, and emergency nursing.

In large cities schools are seeing the need of helping pupils to get started in business. New York and Chicago teachers are suggesting that school boards have a vocational bureau to aid graduates and pupils who must help out the family earnings, in finding employment. The Los Angeles schools have a chart showing the pupils the chances for positions and the wages paid for different degrees of preparedness in each of the following occupations: Commercial art, hand wrought metal work, interior decorating, leather work, pottery work; general farmer, specialty farmer, truck gardener, landscape gardener, nurseryman, dairy farmer, poultryman, farm mechanic; multigraph operator, adding machine operator, filing clerk, billing clerk, office assistant, office manager, accountant, auditor, bank clerk, bookkeeper, cashier, stenographer, reporter, private secretary, shipping clerk, receiving clerk, business manager, postoffice employee, civil service employee, commercial teacher; caterer's assistant, teacher, housekeeper, waitress, dressmaker, milliner, seamstress; boat builder, engineer, merchant marine, naval architect; aquarium attendant, cataloguer, chart designer, curator of museums; fish commissioner, fish expert, fish propagator; assayer, blacksmith, cabinet maker, chemist, draftsman, foundryman; electrical station, sub-station, telephone work,

electric light work, electrician, machine shop work, pattern making, and surveying.

Beside all this, the children go to museums to study the different parts of animals; to the mountains to spend a day with the oaks and pines; to fossil beds to watch the excavation of extinct animals; and to the seashore to study marine animals and algae.

We have "flowed" a long way since the time when elementary education meant the three Rs, and higher education meant the classics. Book-repairing, cobbling, and boat building taught in the public schools! Pupils going off-3,000 in a company-to spend a day at the seashore! Ye gods! How the old time sticklers for strictly a literary education must be sitting up in their graves and rubbing their startled eyes at these innovations!

The Verb.

I am the Verb-0 ye Sucklings of Wisdom, I am the Most Mighty Verb. And my ways are like unto no other forms of speechyea terrible and intricate are my ways, for it is I that assert. Many things have I told that could not have been told without Me. I stand alone the Verb. Take heed, O ye Sucklings, learn well my ways for I am not always bound by intransition, and I have aids that were and are and will be, that may and can and must do what I will— auxiliaries to Me, the Verb. I govern time as time has governed men; and like man I have personality, commanding and declaring, very acitve; or, like woman, I am moody, feminine by nature, speaking in conditions, passive, indirect. I can be single or be many things, be incomplete, complete, aye what I will-finite, infinite, for I am mighty and I am the Verb.

MADELIENE N. PRENTICE.

HOWARD MITCHELL, HIGH SCHOOL, HOLYOKE, Mass.

P

ERHAPS no innovation in school life in recent years offers more promise for the advancement of good teaching than supervised study. The conscientious teacher of modern foreign languages finds in it at least a partial solution for the vexing probblem of how to meet the individual needs of his pupils. It offers a great opportunity to guide the beginner, bewildered by a mass of foreign material and strange sounds, through the fog until he is able at last to find his own way; to lift the slow pupil to a plane where he is actually cheered by successful achievement; to provide new material for the brilliant pupil commensurate with his ability; and to spur the plodder to greater effort and to give him an extra incentive so that he will not be content with mediocre work.

The abolition of practically all recitation upon work prepared outside of the class room and concentration upon oral and written drill exercises during an hour period are necessary in the initial stages of language work. Extraneous materials which confuse should be eliminated and a great number of exercises given, bearing upon a single essential principle, until after much repetition that principle has become automatic, habitual, a part of the pupil's linguistic knowledge. The recitation of paradigms and meaningless rules of grammar no longer find a place in good modern lan- v guage teaching. Supervised oral and written class drill in the foreign idiom must take its place so that we may teach the pupils how to use the foreign language instead of teaching them about it.

During the portion of the recitation period allotted to supervised study, those elements which confuse and befog a task set for the pupil can be discovered and means taken to dispel them. A single glance over a pupil's shoulder at the written work being done will reveal to an experienced teacher the course necessary to check a wrong conception and start the pupil right. Two or three minutes individual attention, giving a couple of examples illustrating the exercise will nearly always bring: "Oh. I see how it is done now!" The work is attacked with new vigor and interest and without further aid the pupil will generally finish the exer