VOLUME XXI.

No. 8.

It is well for us occasionally to step clear outside our school life and its details and look at our school work in its larger aspects; look at it as one organ of the great social organism. Looking thus at our whole process of education as one factor among the many mutually dependent and interacting factors which go to make mankind what it is, and our institutions and customs what they are, one finds many points at which our school system is failing to perform its function and is thus causing the whole social body to be made sick.

Let us calmly look at a few of our failures. First of all, our schools are failing to reach the masses in any effectual way. We hear so much of the large number of pupils enrolled in the schools and the constant decline in percentage of so-called ignorance, that few of us know the painful fact that more than ninety out of every hundred pupils drop out of the schools before they get to the high school, that nearly ninety-eight out of every hundred, even in Boston, drop out before graduation from the high school. and that, with all our colleges, only one-eighth of 1 per ent. of our people possess the equivalent of a college education.

The ordinary statistics are utterly misleading. The ability to read the Constitution and write one's name will transform educational statistics, but does not necessarily carry with it any true education. It is not essential that a large majority of our citizens be college graduates, but it is essential that they have their bodies, minds and characters developed sufficiently to free them from the baser prejudices and passions, and to en

able them to observe accurately, reason clearly, and execute efficiently. It is essential that they know how to work in harmony with the forces of nature about them; know how to conserve the nature within them; know something of the peoples and institutions among which they move, and know how to perform well some little part of the great work of the world. Less than this makes a man a dangerous citizen; the brighter and stronger the man the more dangerous, no matter whether he be a Jesse James with rifle in hand or the head of a robber corporation pushing some new scheme for getting something for nothing. This modicum of training our citizens will never get so long as nine-tenths of our boys do not get to the high school and 98 per cent fall short of a high school graduation. In spite of all the talk about our great public school system, the remedy of universal public education is still being applied to our sick social body in a truly homeopathic dose of the weakest potency.

Indeed, so very small a fraction of our citizens get the modicum of education mentioned above that the leaders of education might at first thought seem absolved of any blame for any lack of results from our educational system. The unthinking teacher might console himself by saying that the schools should not be blamed for failing to bring our country to higher rational and moral standards, nor charged with promoting the corruption, selfishness and low ideals now dominant, when less than 2 per cent of the childern pass through the high school. But on sober thought not even this balm

can be laid on our conscience, for whose fault is it that 98 per cent of the pupils entering our schools drop out before finishing the course? Why don't we teachers make it worth their while to stay there? Why don't we make our artificial process of education more attractive to the boys than the hard school of experience in the streets and in the shops and factories? Why don't we turn out a product from our schools that is so useful and attractive that sensible parents would sacrifice their all to give their sons this training? We teachers are not altogether responsible, but we are to blame for a large part of this incredible waste of 98 per cent of the raw material of manhood and womanhood brought to our educational factories.

Let me mention now a few of the weak points in our methods and system which I believe constitute the foremost cause of this enormous waste, and, likewise, the cause of the frequent flaws in even the finished product of our schools.

First, in spite of our talk about school hygiene, we are failing still to turn out healthy animals. Children should be sent to school to train and develop their bodies as well as their minds, and yet I do not know a city high school in Texas that has even one director of the science of physical training, one well equipped in-door gymnasium, or even a play ground large enough for half the children to get the needed exercise and diversion through their natural out-door sports. It is cruel to take five hundred young, growing, active, playful children out of the sunlight and fresh air, pen them up forty in a room, make them stop running and jumping, stop playing, stop walking, stop talking, sit still at an ill-fitting desk, strain their eyes and ears and nervous systems and breathe chalk dust for five hours a day; and then to provide absolutely no means for correcting the faulty positions and counteracting the strains produced by this unnatural process is a crime. No wonder there are so many headaches and backaches, so many eye glasses, so much catarrh, so much dyspepsia, neuralgia and hysteria. Statistics show that, as a result of our folly, about a fourth of the pupils have to flee from school before graduating to save their lives, and that

many others who graduate go out into life weakened for all eternity. Furthermore, this has a bad moral effect. Failing to receive the healthful exercise and refreshment which are their just due, it is no wonder that the boys satisfy the cravings of their enervated bodies at the chili stands, the cigarette shops, the barrooms, the pool rooms and the brothels. Nothing will sooner drive one to impurity and intemperance than a run-down, over-strained nervous system, and a body deprived of the needed stimulation and refreshment which comes from joyful exercise, fresh air and sunshine. Again, modern psychology has shown that the highest mental efficiency demands sound, clean body. Our schools are failing here at the very foundation of life.

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In the second place, the curriculum of our schools fails to give to the majority of our pupils a fit preparation for the work they are going to do in life. I recognize that the boy who has his mind well trained and has acquired good habits of study will, though he start later, soon overtake and pass the boy who starts in to do nothing but learn the facts and master the processes of manipulation needed in a trade. I recognize that a well trained mind, well directed sympathies, and strong will are better than any amount of useful information and technical skill without these; but there is no reason why we can not put into our course subjects and methods which would give just as good mental discipline as those now there, and give at the same time a valuable preparation for life work which pupils now have to leave school to obtain.

Every thoughtful student of the history of education must blush with shame when he realizes that our present educational methods and school curriculum are still but the inheritance of mediæval scholasticism, with here and there indiscriminately selected patches of new material pasted on to meet the needs of pioneer days, the clamor of ignorant people who furnish the money, the whim of the educational diletante or the one-idead philosopher. Our curriculum makers seem not yet to have found out that education is intended for other people as well for lawyers, doctors, teachers, and preachers. We are squeezing the new

wine of fresh twentieth century human nature into old bottles of tradition, and wonder why it won't stay there.

It is high time that educational leaders empty their minds of preconceptions and prejudices, look fairly and squarely at these things called men, see from whence they evoluted and what they are, look at the world in which they must now live and consider the destiny they should attain, and, in the light of this knowledge, first hand map out a more sane and useful educational process. Tradition has so long enslaved us that it is only by stepping outside the circle, and in a calm and philosophic spirit going back to a firsthand study of facts and principles of life, that we can determine whether our academic grove is full of dead and wormeaten timber above and a choking undergrowth of valueless new shrubs below.

In addition to the fact that our school system fails to give the knowledge needed in after life, it fails, in the third place, in giving the kind of discipline and training which will develop certain mental powers vitally needed in after life. Our school work still deals too much with books and words, and there is altogether too much memory work, and too little observation, reasoning and doing. Our pupils hear and read about things which they never see or do, and glibly talk about things they don't understand, till they often lose their natural reasoning power and get a false sense of reality. Because of this habit of dealing with terms they do not understand, for which they have no mental image, because of this continual memorizing and accepting authority and because of the absence of a habit of reasoning, our graduates are a prey to all the quacks and charlatans and promoters of the age. Every-day high school graduates are biting at advertised schemes which guarantee 40 to 100 per cent profit, when money can not be lent out for one-tenth that interest. Doctors who never did a piece of investigation in their lives have plenty of high school graduate patients paying large fees to get their new method of curing the most serious diseases "while you wait." Dowieites, Eddyites, the Holy Ghost Jumpers, and other deluded mortals who deny the existence of matter or the laws of nature, have our graduates as their victims. In

the University I find that not one in five. of the high school graduates can observe accurately and make a rational induction from a half dozen facts presented. For example, when given a sheep's brain and asked to look at it and describe what they saw, I have had them to put down as present what was not on the sheep's brain at all but was in a printed description of a brain which they had read in the textbook. It takes longer to do a thing than to read about doing it, and it takes longer to reason out things than it does to commit to memory results from a text-book, hence, in our mad rush to cover so many facts in so short a time, we are still memorizing and cramming to an unwholesome degree. We get more facts, but we injure their minds.

The next shortcoming of which I shall speak is the failure of the school to utilize the natural educational influences in the child's environment. As an example of this, consider the separation of the school and the home. To utterly separate the school education from the education of the home, to have two sets of people attempting to train the same child, neither set knowing what the other is doing, is to use less sense in the education of children than we do in the training of dogs and horses. Worse than this, the school, instead of co-operating with the home, and thus in a measure educating the parents along with their children, has gradually taken on the work of the home. till parents are losing the proper sense of their own responsibility. Parents, by throwing upon the school, which they never enter, the education of their children, even in those matters belonging to the home, are loosening that close bond which the nurture and culture of the child has always thrown around the home. This will inevitably result as disastrously for the home as for the child. That it is already doing so, the growth of divorce laws and the excess of club life would seem to indicate. The anthropologists have shown that it was the long period or helplessness of the offspring and consequent need of care and culture which forced into existence marriage and conjugal fidelity, built the home and furnished the stimulus to all the early arts and sciences. If the infants are now to be turned over to wet nurses, the children

to school marms, the sick to trained nurses, and the aged put into institutions for the aged and infirm, what will be left for the home? The school must begin to co-operate with the home or results more far-reaching than any one can now see may follow on to curse us.

Just as we school men are failing to co-operate with the natural external educational influences, so also are we letting run to waste the great streams of energy within the child placed there by the Creator for the child's development. Did it ever strike you as strange that every other animal on earth but man gets his preparation for life, his education, by the exercise of his God-given instincts? The cat, the rat, the dog, the duck are not driven through unnatural and dreary lessons. If we could get over the old notion of the Dark Ages that human nature is naturally wholly bad; could give up the idea that we are so much wiser than the Creator, and accept what He offers, we should see that every year of a child's life is furnished with instincts, which, if exercised and utilized by our school system, would furnish a preparation for life as natural and as perfect as is given to birds and bees. Man has much more to learn, but he has much more to learn it with. What could not be taught the children if we would only watch the favorable season to utilize the instinct, to imitate the natural suggestibility and curiosity, the play instinct, the tool-using instinct, the constructive instinct, the destructive and predatory instinct, the organizing instinct, the collecting mania, the hunting instinct, the social instinct, etc.? Until recently hardly a one of these great forces of nature was used in school, and as yet our educational processes set squarely counter to them more often than they utilize them.

Last, and worst of all, I would say that our school system is not doing what it should to develop character and inspire ideals. Who are the leaders of our Tammany Halls, who are the grafters, who are the bribe givers, who corrupt legislation, who buy seats in the Senate, who direct the merciless corporations, who organize wild cat companies? They have all, or nearly all, passed through our schools. What were we doing to mould their character and inspire them with

worthy ideals? We can not escape our responsibility for this failure.

The 2

per cent of graduates from the high schools and colleges hold over 75 per cent of the prominent places in every walk of life, they completely direct the activity, guide the thinking, and inspire the ideals of our age, and for these we are largely responsible.

Of all our failures, I would put first this failure to develop character and inspire high ideals. The cause for this is not hard to find. The printing press, railroads, and steam ships have made us neighbors of every civilized people, and we try to know all their languages and literatures. A dozen new fields of science have been developed, and we try to learn them all. In this mad rush for knowledge, we sacrifice or neglect all else. We are eternally cramming for some future examination on what we know. At the close of the school year we do not ask what the pupils are, but what do they know. As people generally get in the long run what they continually strive for, we certainly have an age full of knowledge, but lacking in ideals, lacking in character. It is true that our schools develop punctuality, obedience, and numerous such virtues, but these are generally of too negative a type. Those higher positive qualities of character are often actually repressed in our mechanical school system, and too little effort is directed to the inspiring of those lofty and generous ideals to which one cheerfully sacrifices all wealth, all personal ease, comfort and luxury.

Summing up then this brief criticism of our work, I should say:

1. The schools reach too few people. 2. They fail to properly care for the body.

3. They fail to furnish to a large per cent of the pupils the training they need for the work they must do in after life.

4. They teach books and cultivate memory too much, and thus fail to give to pupils a proper sense of reality, or to train sufficiently the powers of observation and reason.

5. They fail to utilize properly the educational influence of the home.

7. They do not sufficiently develop character and inspire ideals.

This you say is an exaggerated and pessimistic view of our defects. No, the failures are not exaggerated, but the good points are omitted. On many of these points there are signs of improvement, but lest we should forget or lest we should get too well pleased with ourselves, let us once in a while honestly consider how far we are yet from the ideal.

Neither do I see any cause for despair. Every evil mentioned is a curable one. When our superintendents and principals and teachers have better professional training, when the leaders learn enough about their work to really guide, and get the courage to demand their rights, then the school boards and the public will listen to their advice. When we convince the people that ignorance is the most expensive curse a state can have, then we shall have longer school terms, larger play grounds, and all needed equipment

for teaching the more practical branches.

Our better schools of education have let up on so much teaching of devices and methods and are giving teachers that solid grounding in biology, physiology, psychology, philosophy and the history of education which enables them to create methods and frees them from the despotism of tradition. When a few more of these well trained men and women get into our profession, there will be a mighty rattling among the dry bones. While much that is still good will be retained, we shall have a course of study that prepares for doing as well as knowing; a course and a method that utilizes the natural educative tendencies within each child; a school system which co-operates with the home and church and play-ground; a course and a method which will give no less information but will so give it as to develop higher moral character, and inspire with nobler ideals. Each of us has a work to do in hastening this glorious day.

The Summer Normal ought to be a helpful institution, under whose efficient instruction, and in the midst of right conditions, the novice may have his efforts intelligently directed, and teachers, young and old, may meet and study to become more effective in their calling.

In addition to teaching the required courses, it should be the purpose of the Summer Normal to unify the educational work of the State, and to set in motion new plans or purposes that emanate from the head of our educational system.

The last forward steps, in education, should be presented either at the Round Table or by special lectures.

For inspiration, stimulus and culture, the Normal ought to be under a strong faculty, and have accessible to it a good library and laboratories. There should be ample provision for outdoor exercise and healthful recreation. In order that the Summer Normals be able to do most for the teachers, there should be concentration. Fewer and stronger Normals should be the policy.

C. C. CODY, Southwestern University, Georgetown.

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The chief aim of Summer Normal Schools should be the improvement of the professional training, scholarship, and general culture of the teachers. Every possible effort should be made, both by precept and example to give instruction in "The Theory and Practice of Teaching," that will be of real value in the actual school work of the future. Carefully prepared reviews of the various subjects taught should clear up the dark points, settle the doubtful questions and broaden the view of the earnest student-teacher who has studied them well, often without any help save his own efforts. enthusiasm and professional spirit of a Summer Normal School should fill with inspiration, noble ideals, and a love and reverence for the great work of teaching, all who come in contact with it. Last but not least, the Summer Normal should provide adequate means by which every one who is found worthy and well qualified should receive a Summer Normal certificate, which should be evidence of earnest effort made toward self-improvement, and of a desire "To Grow Rather Than To Die." A. W. EDDINS, County Superintendent Falls County.