of expert experience should be emphasized rather than the special results. Undergraduate commercial instruction should include the following topics: 1. A statistical expert on population, including occupational classes. 2. A statistical expert on natural resources. 3. An expert on the products and distribution of the products of agriculture, manufactures, etc. 4. An expert on the different branches of commerce, including raw materials, manufactured commodities, and miscellaneous. 5. An expert on inland transportation. 6. An expert on maritime transportation. 7. Engineering experts in various fields of construction. 8. An expert on financing commerce, both domestic and foreign. Instruction in commerce should always be given from the international viewpoint. There should be close cooperation between teacher and expert. In engaging a specialist for an individual talk or two, it is in general a safe thing to ask him to keep in mind three or four main topics and to have a good illustration or two upon each topic. The use of the expert will be very much enhanced if students be held responsible for having certain information on the subject, either by reading beforehand or within a certain period thereafter. Excellent results may be obtained through the use of a single page outline or syllabus of the main topic which the speaker is to discuss. This may cover probably a third of the page of the syllabus; the second third may be occupied with references to several books on the reserve shelves of the library; the third feature should contain a list of 10 questions to show how much the student carried away with him. JOHN CLAUSEN, manager foreign department, Crocker National Bank, San Francisco. The people of this country are awakening to an appreciation of the importance for more intimate relations—in business, social, and intellectual activities with our sister Republics in Central and South America. In the development of closer relational ties our first thought and attention must, therefore, be given to the necessity of acquainting ourselves with the customs and languages of the peoples of those Republics-as also of other foreign countries. Our attention is daily called to the scarcity of available young men who in a competent and honorable manner are qualified to occupy positions of trust and responsibility. To meet this crying demand of the commercial world too little importance is given to the necessity of finding a common ground on which the business man and the educator can meet and solve the great problem for a better cooperation in the national movement of fostering trade relations. It would seem that the first forward step to devise effective courses of study and developed methods of commercial attainments would be to unite the educational agencies in promoting the move of specialization in instruction for the most direct preparatory training, as covered by the following principal class subjects, viz: 1. History. 2. Modern languages and literature (preference to be given to Spanish and Portuguese). 3. Industrial economics. 4. Commercial economics. 5. Political economy. A young man with a theoretical commercial training and the additional linguistic attainments brought about by such a course would assuredly prove of infinitely more value to his employer in many fields than one who lacks such qualifications. For the benefit of the scholar a merit system should be encouraged for appointments, into the staff of commercial and banking institutions engaged in foreign trade, of worthy graduates who in their sphere of endeavor have demonstrated their fitness to occupy such positions of junior posts. The laudable activities of institutions such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the American Institute of Banking can well be considered criterions in the demonstration of the desire for education along commercial lines, when it is considered that even members of advanced age studiously devote their evenings in acquiring the essential points of business training which were not afforded in their younger years of schooling. It is of interest here to note that the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Banking offers every opportunity to its members for the acquisition of a broader knowledge in banking and finance, commercial laws, accounting, public speaking, as also in the study of the Spanish language, which only recently was inaugurated in the interest of better Pan Americanism, and the institute now boasts a class of 135 pupils who are enthusiastically lending every effort to the successful mastery of this linguistic attainment. The paper of Mr. Wilbur Carr, director of the consular service of the United States, invited for this session, was presented before the above-mentioned educational conference on foreign service training, and will be found in the report on that conference. Keen interest was shown at all times in the papers of this session, several of which were discussed at great length from the floor. Mr. JOHN F. CROWELL remarked: The expert is the hard man to find. This is not because he does not exist, but because he is working in a particular field. One of the main difficulties is that the average school-teacher is not acquainted with a large number of business men. The man who teaches commercial education and does not make at least two new acquaintances in the business world every day is a failure. But when we come to specialists, we have to hunt for him in the business world. We should go to him and tell him to come up before our boys and tell them what he does in the handling of a particular line of goods. He will come before the pupils and tell them where the article originates, how it is distributed, what depots there are for meeting the national and international needs, and why they are located at Shanghai rather than at Hongkong or Harbin; what is the object of maintaining this kind of organization rather than that kind; what kind of implements are sent to this country or to that, and why. The youth will grasp the idea. He will talk to them in such a way that the boys will have a mental picture of the country, of the conditions, and they will, as the bent of the boys naturally is, want to go to that field. When you come to the problem of transportation you can go out and get a man like the traffic manager of one of our trunk lines and bring him before a group of boys, and he will tell them of how tens of thousands of cars are handled, how they are moved from, for instance, Pittsburgh to the seaboard. He will tell the students of a concrete instance where a man arranges for the sale of a large quantity of commodities, say, 10, 20, or 30 carloads, but is unable to get them to destination and close the sale, and may be compelled to dispose of them by auction in order to protect himself. These things mean something to the boys. There is not an expert that can not light up the dull theme of arithmetic, for example, by applying its principles to the huge business of transportation. 59201-16- 3 Take the marine expert. You can get a man who has spent all his life in the shipping business, and he will come to a class and ask what is the average tonnage of ships built in the United States in a year. Teachers, as a rule, do not impart to boys such information as that. Their mind has not been trained in that direction. The mind of the expert has. Therefore, while you, on the one hand, do not put such questions as the one I have suggested, the expert in marine shipping would naturally think of such a question at the very outset of his talk with boys. Prof. JOHN E. TRELEVEN, representing the University of Texas, spoke of the effort made by that institution to use the expert in its business training courses. In part he said: We have first tried to select our men with unusual care before we have extended an invitation to an expert to address our students. We have selected the expert with an eye to the probability, as near as it could be determined, of his delivering to them a logical, practical, and beneficial talk. In the second place, we have been trying to prepare our students to listen to the lecturer. We have been trying to prepare them by some systematic course in the same line as that upon which the expert will address them when he comes into the classroom, and by means of assigned readings. In the third place, we have made it a point to have a conference with each person who is to come in contact with the boys. We have also made it a point to talk to the latter themselves before the lecture is given by the expert. Usually, when our professor visits the expert, he does so in his own office; that is, the office of the expert. He talks with him about his work, finds out the things in which he is particularly interested, and helps the expert to furnish the materials which he will use in the presentation of his lecture to our classes. We have found that if we take the expert out of the formal atmosphere of a classroom, he does better work. Then, in the smaller classes, we ask him in to a round-table discussion, either in the homes of professors or in the lounging rooms of the school. In the larger classes, we ask the expert to meet our classes in the lobby, where there are easy-chairs, and where the expert does not feel that he is delivering a formal lecture. The professor is furnished beforehand with a line of questions to which he wishes answers. This line of questions furnishes the basis for the expert's talk, and this serves to keep the lecture within the bounds intended. Mr. E. L. Wertheim, of the Young Men's Christian Association, West Side Branch, New York City, said: Out of 3,600 students last year who came to us to study something along definite commercial lines there was collected over $90,000. That is one association. The matter of getting men to lecture is of especial interest and importance. The expert has a contribution to make to the cause of education, and if we can guide him we are doing something that is well worth while. You will find that if you ask an expert to come in and speak, he thinks it necessary to go immediately to the library and read up on his question, rather than take something he is dealing with constantly, daily, and that will be of much more interest than anything he could prepare on. The man who tells of the things that are of everyday occurrence with him is the man who will be the most beneficial to the men and boys. I am afraid we have not in the past sufficiently recognized the dignity of commercial education. We have not sufficiently recognized, in practice, the fact that men fail in business because of the lack of proper training. I wonder whether commercial education will receive very much attention in the future. unless we begin now to give more attention to it. We have schools, secondary schools, which prepare boys for college. There we have preparation. Why is it not just as possible to spend a portion of the preparatory period for training the boys to take their places in the commercial world, rather than to step from the secondary schools into the college? Isn't the one as feasible as the other? Mr. S. P. Capen, the acting chairman, specialist in higher education of the Bureau of Education of the United States, remarked: It seems to me that the profession of business, which is becoming recognized as a learned profession, is itself undergoing the experience of older learned professions. Originally all professional training was in the hands of the practitioner, and you must suppose for the professions a condition very similar to that in which commercial training now finds itself, commercial training being largely in the hands of the practitioner or the expert. This is for two reasons chiefly: First, that you have not enough trained teachers, or teachers trained in exactly the right way for your needs in training others in the profession of business; and, secondly-and this seems to me most important-as I judge from what has been said here, that you have as yet no recognized teaching content. Is not that the case? Isn't it necessary, first of all, to know just exactly what knowledge shall make up your higher courses of commercial training, and isn't it necessary to organize that knowledge into a system, to organize, in a word, a teaching content, and turn that over to the teacher? It is only the occasional expert which you now get in schools of medicine and in schools of law. In medical schools the teachers give almost their entire time to the work of teaching. The same is also true of the law schools. I anticipate it will be true of the schools of commerce and business administration in a very short time. THIRD SESSION. The third session was held Wednesday afternoon, December 29, at 2.30 o'clock, in the Pan American Union Building. Mr. Roger W. Babson presided. Papers of a general character on commercial education in Latin America, Germany, and England were presented. COMMERCIAL EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA.1 By EDGAR E. BRANDON. The traditional form of education in Latin America, in both the secondary schools and the universities, was distinctly cultural. This type descended in direct line from the old colonial universities, modeled after the medieval universities of Spain, and continued in the national universities after the independence of Latin America. It was an education that looked forward distinctly to the so-called liberal professions, the priesthood, the law, and somewhat later, medicine. The curriculum of the secondary schools was formed in harmony with this tradition. In former times it included the classics, studies in literature and philosophy, with a relatively small amount of mathematics and 1 Author's abstract. little science. In more modern times the classics have been generally replaced by modern languages, but the study of mathematics and science has always remained overshadowed by the so-called cultural and liberal studies. This being the status of the traditional university education, it became absolutely necessary in the commercial period of the latter half of the nineteenth century to establish schools distinctly devoted to the study of commerce and business administration. The crying need of such institutions was emphasized by the commercial development of Latin America. As long as this section of the globe remained in the semi-isolation that was its lot until the middle of the nineteenth century, the old classical and liberal education satisfied the needs of the country, but with the development of commerce a reform was imperative, and it seemed much easier to educators to institute a distinctive type of commercial schools than to engraft the idea of a more practical education on the older and established forms. The Latin-American mind lends itself readily to commercial education, which in its broadest form must be liberal as well as technical, and include the modern commercial languages, a very considerable amount of history, geography, and political institutions, as well as economics and accounting. When once the need was fully recognized and commercial schools began to be established, they met with unusual favor. Their establishment and development in the different countries of Latin America has been in direct ratio with the commercial advance of the country. In very few cases was their origin similar to that of the so-called business colleges of the United States, and likewise it was not often that their establishment was due to individual initiative. On the contrary, in almost every case it was by act of government that the schools were established, and they have been from the very first an integral part of the national educational system. As at present constituted, they are of different types or grades. At the top of the list are the colleges or higher schools of commerce, such as the one at Buenos Aires which is a part of the University of Buenos Aires, and the one at Santiago, Chile, which, although not connected with the University of Chile, is of a rank that almost, if not quite, equals that of a university faculty. The more common grade, however, is the secondary school of commerce. This grade does not always require a completion of the studies of the elementary schools for admission. There are often two or three classes below the ordinary rank of high school, and two or three classes above the entrance grade of a high school. This is the type of the ordinary schools of commerce in Chile. Nearly every town of importance in this Republic has a commercial school of this grade. In some countries the commercial school is a section of the regular high school. This system of organization is in vogue in Cuba and Peru, for example. The entrance requirements to the section is the same as for the other sections, but the course of study is distinctly of the commercial type. The commercial high school or the commercial school, which is a combination of the upper elementary grades and the lower high-school grades, usually attracts a different class of students than the traditional and literary high school. The latter remains the school of the upper classes, since it leads on to a university career. The former is patronized by the middle and lower middle classes who are engaged in commerce. It is for this reason that the separate installation of the separate school is usually thought preferable in Latin America, and it has only been for reasons of economy that the commercial section has been introduced into the regular high school rather than erecting a separate institution. There is the fear that the older type of secondary education will absorb the newer and |