upon him. This proprietary playground has saved many a poor little victim.

Those familiar with school work will tell you that no longer do we find the silent, omnivorous reader in our schools. The "logfire" student has become an extinct specie. He went out with the log and in his place has come the indifferent young human who works along the line of the least resistance and who has to be coaxed or spurred on to effort. Educators began to realize that as the difficulties increased the love of reading diminished. Something must be done. If we would have our children desire to read, a way must be found to encourage and inspire them. Evidently, something has been wrong with our methods in the past.

Out of this great record of attempts has come the knowledge that material which is worth while must be offered to the child if we would have him want to read. We must furnish a motive. The love of the story is the lure that must be offered. "Once upon a time" will rouse the dullest child. At an age when the natural is the marvelous and the marvelous the natural, when imagination is helping observation, giants and dragons are quite familiar companions. Everything in the animal and vegetable world can talk and can do things. Why not? Peter Pan knew this. One only ceases to understand and believe such things when he becomes hopelessly grown-up.

There is always a fascinating excitement in danger which requires the brave assertion of fearlessness and the ability to conquer. Size is negligible in the hero. Courage, only, must be reckoned with. With this knowledge that interest must not only be awakened but sustained and with the warning given by past mistakes of things to be avoided, there has been evolved a method that is both rational and pleasing.

The "Progressive" method of reading enjoying general use in New York City offers a plan elaborated to the finest detail which meets each difficulty so simply yet so definitely and satisfactorily that one wonders that this method has been so long in coming. We have presented this system to the child and he is both judge and jury. The matter in the books pleases him. The appearance of the printed page captures him, he is intensely interested. He pronounces it good. He loves to read. With this method, the

teacher tells the first story found in Book One. Again, the story is told with dramatic effect and in short, simple, unvarying statements. Those who live among children know how jealously each statement is watched and how unsafe it is to omit or change one word. Correction speedily follows. When the child knows the story and can tell it all or in part, the teacher prints the first event or sentence on the black board and tells what she has printed. She reads the sentence as a whole, being very careful to give the expressiveness that she wants. The child repeats the sentence as a whole and imitates the expression. This part of the work is particularly helpful to children of foreign birth or parentage.

Location and sequence must be mentally photographed. Then, words from the sentence are printed repeatedly under the same word in the sentence to give, as it were, proper time exposure. Anywhere, everywhere on blackboard, chart or "perception cards" are these words placed and a "Word Hunt" follows. First recognition, then capture and the "find" is triumphantly and carefully compared with its original in the sentence. Thus is the word recognized, in place and out of place and meaningless rote work avoided. Rearrangement and transposition of the same words, telling the same story is next resorted to and then comes the placing of the book in the child's hands. The silence can be felt as the child gazes for the first time with seeing eyes upon a printed page. His amazement and surprise can not be understood by one who has not witnessed this miracle. The door is open. The child has taken his first step towards salvation.

New difficulties present themselves which are simply and logically met. There are phonetic and unphonetic drills. "Families" are discovered and from them comes the "blend." Here the child thoroughly enjoys himself. He is doing something for himself. He is constructively at work.

The discovery of the vowel sounds follows as a natural consequence. Diacritical marks are used to distinguish the long sound from the short sound of the vowel, but their use is very soon discontinued and only resumed when word recognition baffles. The same method is employed for silent letters. Rules for spelling demonstrate and make themselves and become familiar by use.

Visualization and reproduction on paper begin at an early period in school life. The steps from the writing of words and the building of "blends" to the writing of sentences are gradual and easy. Before the child realizes that there is anything more than pleasurable occupation, he finds himself writing the story quite easily. The ability to write these little stories from memory is in the child and needs only the proper encouragement to bring it out.

It is not the intent of this article to exploit this system in detail. That has been done so clearly in the "Plan of Work" that any teacher who can teach, whether she be employed in a city public school or in an outlying district school, can successfully teach children to read and can, through the material found in the books, foster at the same time a love of good reading. Through the "Progressive" method there is a power to attack new material. Big words no longer intimidate. Prefixes and suffixes are stripped from the "Family" word and the child's own effort gets the word. The power has been given to do the work for himself. At the close of the second year in this method, the whole story world has been opened. Interest has been awakened and the desire and the power to go on is his. Dramatization has made real many of the stories told. Self-consciousness has disappeared and in its place has come the natural tone of voice, the pleasing inflection and the power to sustain interest in the listener as well as in the reader.

No bibliography need accompany this system. The bars are down. The field of literature is open to the young explorer, and he may wander at will culling its flowers of beauty and depending for choice upon the training and refining influence exerted upon him by the books provided for him during his "Method Life." He comes in time to realize that a good book is the greatest thing in the world. With Lowell he can say, "Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we now breathe cheaply in the common air."

Our Compulsory Education Laws, and
Retardation and Elimination in Our
Public Schools

CHARLES A. ELLWOOD, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,
UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI.

UR compulsory education laws are failures. They are wrong in principle and have already outlasted any usefulness which they may ever have had. Compulsory education is, of course, not in question. It is rather the form of our compulsory education laws which we should perceive to be no longer adapted to the very purpose for which they were designed. Instead of securing that proper training for citizenship which must be the foundation of successful free institutions, they let every year vast numbers through their net. The reason for this is that they are designed upon a wrong principle; namely, the principle of keeping the child in the school a definite length of time, and then turning him loose whether he has even the rudiments of education or not.

It is surely strange that none of the writers upon retardation and elimination in our public schools have pointed out that the source of these evils is largely in the nature of our educational laws. On every hand it is admitted that our public schools are failing to do the work which they should do for the child before he starts upon his life-work in the world. Nearly all writers, however, seem to think that the only way to remedy this evil is to make the curriculum of our public schools more "attractive", so as to hold the child's interests longer; and thus he may incidentally secure the real training which the work-a-day world and free institutions will require of him. The result is that we have made education such a "soft" affair that it is very far from furnishing the discipline which life requires. Now, I am not opposed to the making of curricula attractive to the child's interests, provided it is wisely done; but it is absurd to think that in this

way alone children can be held long enough in public school to give them the training they need. On the other hand, there is a real danger that by this method habits of perseverance, self control and hard work will fail of proper emphasis.

Let us look at the facts. According to the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education for a series of years, only onethird of the pupils that enter the first grade of our public schools reach the eighth grade. Growing population can, of course, explain only a little of the discrepancy between the numbers in the first and eighth grade. Other investigations have shown that in American cities ten per cent of the pupils leave school before reaching the fourth grade, nineteen per cent before the fifth grade, thirty-two per cent before the sixth grade, forty-six per cent before the seventh grade, sixty per cent before the eighth grade, and seventy-three per cent before graduation. Again, the statistics show that only sixty-eight per cent of those in the second grade remain till the sixth grade. They also show that in almost every case those who drop out of school before they should are the pupils who have been "retarded," who have not kept pace, in other words, with the children of their age-class. The elimination of pupils in the lower grades especially is almost wholly of older pupils, retarded pupils who have failed to keep interest in their school work, but who are old enough to go to work.

All teachers know where these children go, who drop out of our public schools before graduation because they are behind their grades but old enough to work. An investigation of 4386 such children in the city of St. Louis showed that 3764 of them went into the ranks of unskilled labor, while less than ten per cent went into occupations that might be called skilled in any sense. Of the ninety per cent that went into unskilled occupations, fully seventy per cent engaged in work which simply involved fetching and carrying. The pupils, in other words, who leave our public schools before they graduate from the grades, for the most part go to swell the ranks of unskilled labor. They are the ones who later become "the unemployed," and who furnish the bulk of those in our dependent and delinquent classes. To say the least, this is one of the most tragic features of our present social life with its inadequate educational system.