in subsequent study and reading of divers kinds. The old idea was that the matter learned in grammar and spelling and geography and history should be as well fixed in mind as the multiplication table. It is not very clear what the new idea is.

When the three R's were the order in education, Arithmetic received perhaps a third of the pupils' time and effort; today it gets a bare seventh or eighth. How could it be otherwise when so many new subjects are found in the day's program. Arithmetic was probably hit the hardest by the influx of new branches, since the others benefited from them indirectly, while arithmetic did not. Granted that methods of teaching arithmetic are better in some ways now than formerly, it remains that the cut in time is far too great to be offset by this gain.

That the standard in mathematical preparation has been greatly lowered is capable of proof. Thus, the harder topics, the harder cases, and the more difficult problems have been gradually excluded from arithmetic and algebra, though the time given to algebra continues the same. Then much of quantitative matter in physics textbooks has disappeared, leaving the treatment largely qualitative, regrettable as this is. As another evidence we see colleges and universities forced to organize sub-Freshman algebra classes, and, at the end of the first Semester, send home in disgrace a frightfully large percentage of students found incapable of doing the work required. Still other evidence is available in the action of half-baked educators here and there over the country, who throw out secondary mathematics entirely, except for pupils who must have it for their courses in college. Now, if any one doubts these facts, he is challenged to make an investigation, which is easily feasible for any one.

When we consider that there are only two ways of approach to most matters of interest, the qualitative and the quantitative, the foregoing has an ominous look as showing a bad tendency in the new education. Now the quantitative side of farm management, manufacturing management, business management, home management, and management of the manifold ordinary affairs of life is an essentially important one. Any crippling of educa

tion at so vital a point is sure to cripple society itself. "For which of you intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it." But how can people count the cost, if their education was defective along this line? Of the seventeen out of twenty that fail in business, a large part neglected to include all of the numerical elements in their problem. The efficiency experts report that ninety per cent of present grown-ups are square pegs in round holes. With the right sort of education many of the ninety per cent ought to be able to whittle themselves round.

Arithmetic is the one branch that constitutes a specific preparation for the ordinary business affairs of life. It has to do with buying and selling, with keeping of accounts, with taxes and insurance, with business operations of all sorts and the papers that go with them, as checks, notes, bills, drafts, money orders, deeds, mortgages, stocks, and bonds, bills of lading and contracts generally with building and repairing, and with all sorts of transactions involving calculations of lengths, areas, volumes, capacity, and time. No wonder our fathers thought arithmetic important. Have we learned that they were wrong

One part of artihmetic has not been and is not now being taught in the best way. It is the applications of percentage. The textbooks contain only the bare bones of transactions, with all the flesh and blood removed. Take for example the problem: Find the interest on $250 at 6% for 2 yr. 5 mo. 18 da. The actual problem in life would be something like this: A wanted $250, to buy a horse. He went to B, and asked to borrow the money. B agreed to lend it to him. The note was written for two years. A obtained his money, and B held the note. A could not pay the money at the date of maturity, and B gave him more time. At the end of the time specified in the problem, A came to B and paid what was due, interest and principal together, and received back his note. This transaction can be varied in a dozen different ways: By security being asked; by sale of the note to a private party or to a bank; by joint form; by need of protest; etc. All this should be dramatized, if the pupils are to fully understand

the transaction and profit by their knowledge in later life. All the equipment needed for this instruction is a blackboard, and scraps of paper to represent the various papers and monies handled in the action. Time should be found for dramatizing in the above way all of the important operations and procedures that are likely to occur in the after life of the pupils. Normal Schools should give a course to prospective teachers that would explain with tolerable fulness how business is actually done, how its operations can be successfully dramatized; and how legal and other forms can be secured for use in schools.

The reader is probably asking how time can be found for this training. The answer is, easily, and plenty of it, and for other studies as well that are now unfairly treated. There are other available losses in education besides those in the curriculum. A recent writer declared that the republics of the United States and France are the most conservative of all the more prominent nations in the world. It certainly is true that while our people are progressive as regards securing personal comforts and the securing of wealth, in other ways they are highly conservative. We have been asked for years to give attention to two great reforms, both intimately connected with education, and yet not one in a hundred of our most prominent and most progressive educators knows them as educational reforms, or has a ghost of an idea of their importance! They are language and metric reform. Our annual loss through failure to adopt the Metric Weights and Measures runs into the hundreds of millions, (not counting loss in foreign trade), and a large part of this loss is in the form of extra time and effort required to teach twenty-two million children arithmetic involving an abominable set of weights and measures, and, in the main, making a fizzle of it. The time needed for teaching arithmetic in metric countries is much less, and the results are far more satisfactory. But if metric reform be important as an educational question, then language reform is much more important. Dr. Melvil Dewey, the famous librarian, author of the Decimal System of Classification, in almost exclusive use in all American libraries, in a letter to the writer declared

our annual loss because of our language is more than a billion dollars, and that more than 15% of all written and printed matter could be cut out. A large per cent of the billion dollar loss is in education. The figure named may seem fantastic when it is recalled that the total cost for education is only about three-quarters of a million dollars. But if we assume the loss of earning power through an inferior education is only $20 a year, and this loss is suffered by each of the 50 million persons, we have the whole billion in this one item.

What is needed is a complete revision of the language, regarding it merely as a means to an end, and not as something holy, that can not be changed. The Simplified Spelling Society (S. S. S.), with the collaboration of the most eminent linguists, prepared a one sound-one symbol form of the language and is offering it for general adoption by all English speaking people. In it the same sound is always spelled with the same letters. Experiment shows that children can learn such a language in a fraction of the time it takes them to learn present English, progress in learning to read being amazingly rapid. The proximately fortytwo sounds we use are now spelled in three or four hundred different ways.

You don't believe it? Well here they are:

Thus, a in ate is spelled in more than twenty-five ways. Ate, braid, great, they, say, eight, deign, arraign, straight, gaol, bouquet, reindeer, aye, fete, demesne, champagne, weighed, conveyed, eh, halfpenny; followed by r, aeroplane, there, heir, n'er, etc. In the English language every time a word is looked up in the dictionary, whether by a child in school or an adult of any age, attention must be paid to: (1)Spelling, (2) pronunciation, (3) accent, and (4) meaning, or meanings! The path to knowledge for other races, as Germans, Italians, Spanish, is beset with no such obstructions. It need not be for English peoples, if the educational world takes hold of the problem in earnest.

Two objections are raised to a new form of the language being introduced. First, that older people could not learn it; and, second, that our libraries would become useless. The answer to the

first is, that the new form of language would not be so difficult to read as much dialect that is read by millions daily; the answer to the second is that libraries would remain and be used just as they are now. In years to come only scholars would be obliged to learn the old as well as the new form of the language.

A third great loss in education is due to the retention of monarchical and oligarchical forms of government in business and education. The President, Superintendent, or Chairman of the Board of Directors (business) is usually a monarch over his domain. We congratulated ourselves on taking the power away from one Kaiser, but we have ten thousands Kaisers left here at home. No one doubts that a benevolent despotism is the best form of government, so long as it remains benevolent. In America, School Boards actually or virtually turn the whole administration over to the President or Superintendent, retaining only the financial end. The Superintendent has the whole control of the disposition of salaries, division of the work, and arrangement of the curriculum, unless, in the last respect, he is hampered by a State Department, where, in turn, we meet another autocrat. By this plan of government faculties are puppets, and (in business) laborers are slaves. There should be collaboration and division of authority on some working basis. If a state's or city's curriculum represented the combined wisdom of all its superintendents, principals, and teachers, it would not be so lopsided, superficial, unscientific, and imperfect.

The Superintendent and Principal instead of faculty form of government make for inefficiency in a democracy. John's father and Mary's mother appeal to the Superintendent or Principal or Teacher to let them pass, whether they deserve to or not, and each standing alone must resist the demand. This is a very real problem all over the country, and represents a serious weakness in a democratic form of government. Little or nothing is being done to solve this problem. It has not been low salaries alone that has driven vast numbers of High School teachers out of the profession. So long as these conditions remain, education will retain its present-day defects.