pose of cooporation and mutual advancement. Alone she can furnish but a small part of the tropical supplies for which we have been accustomed to send 250 million dollars abroad each year, but with the cooperation of undeveloped Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, should they fall within our borders, would enable us to expend among our own people practically all of that vast sum which we have heretofore been compelled to send to foreign lands and foreign people. FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL PENMANSHIP. IN IN By W. S. HISER. Paper prepared for the National Educational Association Meeting held at Washington, D. C., July, 1898. the discussion of this subject, two important characteristics that exist will be presented and changes that should be made therein, will be suggested. Since the change from the old legible round-hand style of writing to what we may term the Spencerian style the ideal standard of the school has been fine line penmanship with frequent shading. Of late years there has been a healthful tendency to omit all shading, but in large measure the same narrow line is continued. This fine line writing is produced with fine or medium fine pens which require much skill in handling, on the part of the pupil. The inability of adults, except professional penmen, to use a fine pen successfully in the hurry incident to writing in business is some proof that children who have less skill in motor control and less practice in writing should not use medium fine pens. It is admitted that fine line shaded work looks pretty, but it is difficult to execute and hard on the eyes both at the time of writing and of reading. The fine pen is continually catching in the paper, particularly in school work, where in the intermediate and higher grades the pupil must write rapidly. The frequent catching, scratching, spattering worries the pupil but the teacher says he must use the pen. A business man does not allow his feelings to be worried that way. He simply uses a coarse pen. After a pupil has given a coarse pen a trial, his love for the fine pen is transferred, in nearly every case among the boys, and in a majority of cases among the girls. Fine line writing, done a little carelessly, is exceedingly difficult to read. As was said above, it is pretty if well done; but so much of our written work is not well written and poor writing done with a fine pen is less legible than the same writing would be if written with a coarse pen. For the sake of both teacher and pupil, legibility should not be ignored. In the different grades in the Richmond Indiana public schools, we have recently given stub pens of different degrees of coarseness a careful trial, and it is thought that a medium stub is best suited to our work. Eighty per cent. of our teachers express a preference for coarse pens and those trying the stub pens in their schools express themselves in favor of the medium stub. This leads us to consider that coarse writing rather than fine line writing should be the standard of the public school. The substitution of coarse pens for fine ones during the last three years has been making rapid progress. No writing instrument is quite so easily and rapidly handled as the lead pencil. It is gladly substituted for the pen, fine or coarse, in all written work, if it is permitted. Possibly the nearest approach to the pencil is the stub pen. The stub pen runs easily, smoothly, making a plain, definite stroke, and making a page almost as easily read as print. Width of line prevents, in a large measure, writing that is too fine, but still does not require a letter that is too large. More paper is used in written work in the public schools than ever before, and the soft quality of it requires a pen with a rather broad point. That the work may be dispatched with comfort and ease and neatness this grade of pen is desirable. Rapid writing in the public schools, particularly from the intermediate grades upward, is absolutely demanded, in spelling and note-taking. When a pupil acquires the habit of fast thinking, speed in writing should be a companion habit. In rapid written work, more pressure is placed on the pen, and in order that it may run with ease and, not catch in the paper, width of point and stiffness are important requisites. The most legible styles of writing used are the round-hand and the semi-roundhand; and it should be observed that the stub pen is especially constructed to produce the latter, but without the extra pressure that is necessary in using a fine pen for this style of writing. In writing with a broad stub pen you will discover that the up strokes are narrow compared with broader down strokes. This is not so perceptible with the medium stub, yet the width of the up and down strokes with this pen varies. Doubtless there is more pressure on the pen on the down strokes in rapid writing which would tend to spread the pen points, and increase the width of the line. The script copy of the Declaration of Independence which may be seen in this city is a fair illustration and proof of what is claimed for a medium stub pen. While in school the pupil is learning to write, it is true, yet at the same time his writing should be of the largest possible utility, both to him then and after he is graduated or has left school, possibly to engage in business. It is a well known fact that business men use coarse and stub pens to the exclusion of the fine and medium fine pointed pen commonly in use in our public schools. This practice of the business men which we seem to ignore, surely ought to be very suggestive to us, and it is this that has aided in changing the opinions of supervisors and schoolmen during the last few years in the matter of using fine pens. The fruitful and helpful developments of scientific research in the field of child-study have had a vital bearing in favor of using coarse pens. We shall finally give fuller recognition to the teachings of this field of study. The tardiness with which coarse pens have been introduced has led many teachers and superintendents into the erroneous idea that no slant is the reform needed to produce more legible writing with the most ease and comfort and speed to the writer. To the coarse pens that are used in the so-called vertical writing, is due its popularity, rather than to the fact that it has no slant. The claim that this style of writing has no slant its adherents and followers have as yet failed to establish. In the last three years we have seen some breaking away from the standard of slant that has been our ideal for so long. It is safe to assert that while fifty-two degrees have been the standard of the copybook makers for years, yet the average standard of public-school pupils, in written work, has not been this slant. The average slant has been less than this standard. The average slant of business men is now, and for years been less than the copy-book standard of fifty-two degrees. The breaking away from the old standard now appears radical. The practice of both the public school and the counting-room has forced copy-book publishers to make a change in the slant standard. Many have gone to an extreme in this. The attempt to harmonize the standard of the copy-book with the average standard of business and school has provoked much agitation in the penmanship world, and it is appearing rather clearly that the old standard needs modfication. Letters made on a fifty-two degree slant are more angular and have less width than those made on a slant that is intermedial between no slant and a slant of fifty-two degrees. So the degree of legibility is increased by decreasing the slant, and were legibility the only factor to be considered we might abandon slant. The execution of writing can not be ignored, and right here the law of motion comes in. Judging from the results, whatever the ideal or standard of slant may be, they seem to indicate that letters must and will slant; and further, that the natural slant is to the right, and further still, that the average standard varies little from fifteen degrees to the right of a perpendicular line. Measured by the rule of the old standard it would be a slant of seventy-five degrees. There is an extreme standard of no slant being put forth. It is but fair to say, as shown by the writing of pupils and teachers attempting to follow the standard, that very few write without slant. Those who persistently follow the "no slant standard” write with a left slant which increases as the speed in execution is increased until a slant to some fifteen degrees to the left is reached. Others not so persistent slant both right and left. A few, writing at a very ordinary rate of speed and carefully watching that every down stroke is perpendicular, succeed in writing vertically. The law of motion, it appears, compels slant, the same as it compels one to lean in the direction toward which he is going when walking rapidly. It would be very nice to walk exactly erect when in a hurry, but it is contrary to the law of motion. Stepping outside of the school-room, we find that business men who put writing to a practical test write with a slant of from ten to twenty degrees to the right of a perpendicular line. This gives a style of letter that is full, round and open, thus producing a maximum of legibility, ease and naturalness in execution, combined with the highest degree of speed. In conclusion, it appears that there is a reformation going on in the field of Public School Penmanship. The ideal standard of a quarter of a century ago (the hair-line, fifty-two degrees slant, shaded style of writing) is passing away. In its stead a new standard, more practical, more easily and rapidly written, and more legible has come. This standard advocates medium coarse writing, done with a medium coarse or medium stub pen, on an intermedial slant to the right, varying little from fifteen degrees, and done under the instruction and supervision of a Director of Penmanship. RICHMOND, INDIANA. WHAT CAN BE DONE IN GEOGRAPHY. HE teacher who undertakes a year's work in the grades has a great many things to think of. Innumerable problems, large and small, will arise which he will be obliged to solve in some way, and often upon the spur of the moment. Every day he will be confronted with questions which demand an immediate answer, and occasions will arise when he would give a month's salary for an hour or two to think. The details cannot be foreseen, but many of them may be forestalled by laying out some general plans at the start. It is the purpose of this article to make a few suggestions which it is hoped may prove helpful in geography. The work is outlined in considerable detail in the State Manual and Course of Study issued by the state, city and town superintendents, and it is assumed that the majority of teachers will try to follow their guidance. All such courses of study are subject to defects and misfits, because no uniform course can be made to fit all the varying conditions of a whole state. But in the main these publications will be found to be valuable aids to good teaching. Whatever may be the conditions imposed upon the teacher from without, he can meet them successfully by establishing certain conditions within himself. (1) Every teacher of geography can make his teaching more realistic; that is, he can teach more by things instead of words. The child cannot possibly understand words unless they represent things which he has perceived by his senses or things similar to things so perceived. The teacher who attempts to teach by words launches upon an unknown sea, because he does not know whether those words stand for ideas in the child's mind or remain simply meaningless words. That some teaching will result in parrot-learning is probably inevitable. It should be made as little as possible. The teacher of geography, above all others, is provided with material for realistic teaching upon a grand scale. He need not ask the trustee for ten dollars or one dollar with which to buy apparatus. The teacher in the most remote country district is provided with a geographical laboratory which a million dollars could not buy; it has no walls or roof, and needs none. It is only custom and tradition which confines school teaching to the school-room. There is more to be learned out of doors than all the text-books contain. Better still, the experiments and demonstrations in this open air laboratory are always going on night and day, summer and winter, rain or shine. The teacher is not called upon to spend a minute of his already over-full day in preparing them or any of his exhausted nerve in making them go off well. They never fail, and all we have to do is to open our eyes and look at them. The teacher who studies his own neighborhood will be astonished at the wealth and range of illustration at his command. Is the subject "the earth as a whole," its motions and relations to the sun and stars? They are as clearly visible from your schoolhouse as from the Harvard Observatory. The sun rises every morning this month nearly in the east, follows a certain path in the heavens and sets nearly west. Next month he will rise and travel and set differently. The north star may always be found in the same place, while a large number of stars are always wheeling around it without rising or setting. The child who becomes familiar with these things sees the world go round and the seasons change. Every day every spot in Indiana passes through changes of temperature similar to those the child would pass through if he could travel from here to the north pole, and from the same cause. Early in the morning and towards sunset we are in the frigid zone because the sun's rays are as slanting as they ever are anywhere; in the middle of the day we are in the temperate zone because the sun's rays are more direct, and at the summer noons we are well into the torrid zone. How can teaching these things even to the "1's" and "2's" be difficult if we avail ourselves of the means at hand? If the subject next month is weather and climate, is there not as much weather to the square mile in your township as at the place where the weather is made? Can you keep it out of your yard and house if you try? The temperature goes up and down day by day and week by week. It is easier to follow and measure it with a fifteen-cent thermometer than it is to tell the time of day by the clock. The wind blows gently or strongly and shifts about through all the points of the compass; a child can feel it, and see the smoke or the windmill which tells its direction. Every day is clear or cloudy, or it rains or it snows. All these conditions change from hour to hour, not in a haphazard, capricious way, but according to certain simple relations which your geography class can discover and see through in one term. Which will be more valuable and satisfactory to them, to know the laws which govern the weather they have to meet every day at home or to learn about the snow in Thibet and the rain in South America? Is the subject the dry land and its features? We Hoosiers are great land lubbers, and seldom get caught off terra firma. Our home is upon a plain or a plateau, a hill or a valley, and there are other features in sight or in reach. The rain falls upon our particular portion of the crust of the earth, and a part of it runs off in the streams. Our streams are acting just as streams generally act. The water in the roadside ditch is governed by the same forces as the average river, and is producing, on a small scale, the same results. Is the subject the distribution of plants and animals? It does not require a botanist to see that some plants grow in the marsh, others on the river bottoms; some on a rocky hillside, others in dry sand or hard clay. The children have found out without the teacher's help that there are fish in the river, frogs and turtles in the swamp, birds in the woods and crickets under a stone. These furnish sufficient illustration of the great fact that different plants and animals are adapted to live under different conditions. Is the subject "political geography," the material, industrial, commercial and social conditions of men? No one is teaching in an uninhabited desert. The existence of a school assumes the existence of a community whose relations are wide and complex. The people who maintain it live in some kind of houses, on lonely farms, in the crossroads huddle, at the smart railroad station, the village, the county town or the city. They are all engaged in some kind of industry and commerce; they are raising something or manufacturing something or buying or selling or doing all of these things. Along the wagon roads and railroads and rivers goods are being transported, and to every household some commodity from far countries is sure to come. No better facilities need be asked for introducing children to the subject of industrial, commercial and social geography. When the teacher has exhausted the home resources it will be time to look after the rest of the world, and the pupils will then be ready for it. If the teacher has never attempted to lead his class outside the text-book or the schoolroom, and feels nervous and timid about plunging into new and strange regions, he need not try to follow all or half the suggestions of this article. One little excursion into "home geography" along the path which seems nearest and easiest will be sufficient to gain confidence in oneself and a conviction as to the value of the work. (2) Every teacher of geography can use more than one text-book. This is an advantage, however excellent the class-books may be. It is useless to ignore or disguise the fact that the text-books in geography prescribed by law in Indiana are out of date, untrustworthy, and on many subjects wholly false and misleading. Every advanced teacher and schoolman in the state knows it. Happily the day for a change is near at hand. Meanwhile it is questionable whether a teacher has a moral right to depend upon them alone, without trying to correct their gross errors. There are a few text-books which are abreast with the advancement of geographic science. Is the teacher who fails. to avail himself of these true to his own best interests or highest duty? A set of Frye's or the Natural series placed upon the teacher's desk and used daily for reference by teacher and pupils will add wonderfully to the interest and efficiency of the work. WE FACTS ABOUT THE SCHOOLS OF MASSACHUSETTS. By FRANK H. KASSON. WE ARE indebted to Secretary Frank A. Hill of the Massachusetts State Board of Education for the following interesting facts: There are in the State of Massachusetts 4,501 public schools, a decrease of thirty-eight from last year, but on the single class-room basis there are 9,557 schools, an increase of 404 over last year. On May 1, 1896, there were 431,387 pupils in the State between five and fifteen years of age; 439,367 different persons attended the schools, an increase of 15,014. The average membership was 363,866, and the average attendance 334,945. The percentage of attendance (92) was very good, indeed. The number of teachers employed was 12,843, which was an increase of 568. There were but 1,120 men to 11,723 women; and the ratio is not improving, as the increase in the number of men was only 42 to 526 women. There were 4,103 teachers who had graduated from normal schools. In 135 towns and cities (a little over one-third) teachers are appointed under the tenure-ofoffice act. We hope this will continue until all our cities and towns shall do away with annual elections. The average pay per month was $144.80 for men and $52.20 for women. This was an average gain for the men of $8.77, but only $1.90 for the women. We are sorry to see so large a disparity in the wages of women teachers. The school year runs from six to ten months. The average for the whole State is nine months and six days. Massachusetts expended $7,736,815.48 on teacher's wages, fuel, care of rooms, transportation of children. This was a gain of $376,402.10 over the preceding year, being $2.95 in each $1,000 of the $2,622,520,278 of the State's valuation. Add to this what is spent for supervision, for text-books, supplies ($578,146.59), for new school-houses ($2,207,981.78), for permanent improvements, for repairs and for sundries, and we reach a grand total of $12,390,637.92. There are now ten normal schools in the State, including the Boston Normal Art School. Four of these-at Fitchburg, North Adams, Hyannis, and Lowell-have been opened recently, the last three during 1897. During that year 720 were admitted to entering classes, which was an increase of 5 per cent. over 1896. The whole number in attendance on December 1, 1897, was 1,388— the largest in the history of our normal schools. The proportion of pupils graduating is now about 75 per cent. In 1896-'97 there were 262 high schools (a gain of four), with 1,283 teachers (increase ninety-two), and 36,288 pupils (increase 1,905). The enrollment in these schools was 8.3 per cent. of the total enrollment. The average salary paid to principals was $1,383.63. Fifty-five towns and cities maintained evening schools with 1,352 teachers and 29,800 pupils, at an expense of $185,862.42. This is money wisely spent. In 262 towns and cities there are 155 superintendents, six supervisors (in Boston), and three assistant superintendents of schools. Forty-nine of these have charge in 149 towns, half of their salaries, which are not less than $1,500, being paid by the State. Of the children of the State 93.8 per cent. are under *Frye's Primary and Complete Geographies, Ginn & Co. The Natural Elementary and Advanced Geographies, American Book Co. |