XIV.-SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND DISCIPLINE.

Uniformity and freedom.-F. W. Parker, Cook County Normal School: Uniformity may be a necessity in the evolution of a school system, or any other system; but there comes a time when this rough staging should be torn away. The next period of evolution must be a period of liberty, that liberty so restricted that it will lead to freedom. Merit in fixing uniformity is complete skill in routine duties, a strict compliance with conventional demands, the order that keeps pupils still; the teaching that complies with the letter of a course of study; the drill that passes classes on bloc from grade to grade; the spirit that humbly bows to dogmatic rules. Under uniformity, teaching is a business and not an art. A business is governed by fixed rules; an art by eternal principles.

Think for a moment of a great corps of teachers, each imbued with a divine enthusiasm of study and a firm devotion to the highest interests of humanity; each striving to find more and more of truth, and to apply it for the weal of the child. Think of each giving freely to all the treasures and truths that he finds, and receiving as freely from all, their discoveries. Under such circumstances we would not have to search with a Diogenes lantern for a first-class teacher.

XV.-SECONDARY EDUCATION.

Free high schools unwise.-James P. Munroe, in the Educational Review: The maintenance of free high schools is unwise; first, because it obliges a whole community to pay for what only a limited number can enjoy; second, because, necessarily expensive, it robs the lower schools of funds essential to them; and, third, because it offers to boys and girls wholly unfit for secondary education a temptation to exchange the actual benefits of remunerative work at 15 years of age for the doubtful advantage of a training that can have no direct bearing upon their life work, and which, at the time of life it occurs, may do decided harm. The State must, of course, take the initiative in providing secondary schools separate from or in connection with those already established by private enterprise, and it must maintain such course of study as the needs of the community demand; but for these courses there should be a graded system of fees, regulated by the nature and extent of the studies pursued, and, while a certain proportion of the cost of their support might be assessed upon the taxpayers, the larger share should be borne by those in attendance. When such a school ceases to be mainly self-supporting, the town or school district should have power to suspend it until the demand for reopening justifies its revival. In this way only can the high school do the work that should be required of it; only by such a pruning can the primary and grammar schools receive the money and attention they deserve; and after such a bold first step can a real reform of the public-school system be begun.

Public high schools vs. academies.-Intelligence: The public high schools, especially those of New England, are steadily coming to the front as the schools which give the most thorough and useful preparation for college. Three times within a few years the valedictory at Yale has been awarded to a student whose preparatory studies were in the New Haven High School.

The rise of the public high school as the crowning feature of the system of common school education is a most interesting fact. In several of the New England States these schools have caused the delay of most of the old-time academies which were once flourishing institutions, or at all events their relative decay. Except a few which, by reason of their large endowment or some especially favorable condition, have grown with the growth of population, they have fallen into comparative obscurity.

Suggestions as to the curriculum of the preparatory school.-President D. C. Gilman (in the Cosmopolitan): Whenever the time comes for a revision of the curriculum of the preparatory school, three subjects should receive much more at tention than is now given to them. The study of science should be so pursued that the habit of close observation and of reasoning upon ascertained facts should at least be initiated. Nature should be approached by the schoolboy as a willing and ever-present teacher. Her lessons should be the delight of every adolescent. When we remember that in contemplating the heavens, in watching the life of plants and animals, in the observation of the modes of motion and in studying the inorganic world there are innumerable and infinitely varied opportunities to awaken curiosity, to train the eye and the hand, to exercise the judgment, to reward investigation-how strange that so little progress is made in the introduction of scientific studies in elementary education! Modern lan

guages also, especially French and German, are nowadays indispensable in a liberal education; and they are much more readily acquired in childhood than maturity. How are they to get just recognition in the preparatory schools? An acquaintance with the Bible should also be required of every schoolboy. College professors have lately been showing how ignorant the youth of America are of the history, the geography, the biography, and the literature of the sacred books. I do not now refer to its religious lessons, but I speak of the Bible as the basis of our social fabric, as the embodiment of the most instructive human experiences, as a collection of poems, histories, precepts, laws, and examples, priceless in importance to the human race. These Scriptures have pervaded our literature. All this inheritance we possess in a version which is unique. Its marvelous diction, secured by the revisions of many centuries, and its substantial accuracy, the care of many generations of scholars, are beyond our praise. But how little study does the schoolboy give to this book in secular or sacred hours; how ignorant may he really be of that which is supposed to be his daily counselor! Science, modern languages and the Bible have been so long neglected in preparatory schools that it is extremely hard nowadays to find effective teachers for these subjects. There is no consensus as to books, no tradition respecting methods. Perhaps we are waiting for the waters to be disturbed by the angel of deliverance, but we shall wait in vain unless we put forth efforts of our own to reach the true remedies. The day will come for Eetter things; we can see its approaches. .

XVI. TEACHERS.

Is special preparation for teaching indispensable?-Superintendent Henry Sabin (Iowa): Shall we say that special preparation for the teacher's work is not desirable? Certainly it is very desirable, but it is not indispensable. There are only four indispensable requisites-knowledge of subject-matter, uprightness of character, a desire to improve, and common sense. With these as a foundation we may build an Arnold, an Agassiz, or a Philbrick. If any one of these requisites is wanting, no amount of professional study or reading of educational books can supply the deficiency. There has broken out lately a mania for high intellectual development, which the teacher expects to attain by reading a book a month. Teachers sometimes become gormandizers of books. Dickens says of one of his schoolmaster characters, after enumerating a long list of his requirements: "Ah, rather overdone, Mr. Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!"

Superintendent J. M. Greenwood (Kansas City, Mo.): It might be as well to state clearly that all this talk about making good teachers without professional training is of little value to the schools. There is no equivalent for professional training. * * * Let us understand it, and not beguile ourselves into longwinded discussions in the vain search for temporary substitutes.

Superintendent Draper, of New York, remarked on this subject that he was sorry to note a disposition on the part of one or two speakers to disparage professional training altogether. It wastoo late in the history of educational progress to do this. Such sentiments are outlawed-are back numbers. It was not worth while to argue with men who had been enjoying a Rip Van Winkle slumber and were out of touch with the general educational sentiment of the country. Four propositions worthy of consideration.-Superintendent Henry Sabin (Iowa): 1. Pedagogical research, educational inquiry, the study of methodology alone, can never constitute a man a teacher. The machine which makes the teacher a mere automaton is already producing alarming results in this direction. In many of our schools we are approaching the danger line of killing off individuality, of crushing out spontaniety, of dwarfing the teaching ingenuity by reducing everything to the dead level of certain so-called philosophical methods. We are training the teachers to follow the ruts.

2. There is a failure with teachers, if I may use the expression, to distinguish between an individual method and a representative method; between an arrangement which is the invention of the person using it, partaking largely of the nature of a device, and a method which is typical in its nature-which exemplifies the essential characteristics of all related methods. A device is the creation of

the teacher-a method is based upon eternal truths.

Our schools of methods are very often only schools of devices.

3. The school which gives its students power of thought, clearness of expression, aptness of illustration, and a desire to grow, is a good fitting school for its teachers. What branches are taught there is of secondary importance.

4. To build a wall of partition in the normal school or in the college and say that the studies on this side are purely academic and those on that side purely professional is the concentration of stupidity. The most successful normal school is that which most closely combines in its daily work educational thought and educational practice. The attempt to separate them combines the worst elements of a blunder and a crime.

It is a fact that the colleges and normal schools do not realize that it is their province to prepare teachers for high-school work. When they reach this point certain results will follow. They will no longer attempt to prepare teachers for their work by reading and studying a few books during the last half of the course. The science and art of education will be taught during every exercise. There will be no less academic work, but it will be of a very different kind. Each lesson will be taught as based upon educational principles; the student will be required to study it with two ends in view-as he would teach his pupils to study it, and as he himself should study it if he were to teach it. Arithmetic or geography should be just as much a professional study in the normal school as psychology or the history of education. Every exercise should have a schoolroom side.

Of the value of scholarship.-Superintendent Henry Sabin (Iowa): The normal school which makes excellency of scholarship a subordinate aim makes a very grave mistake. On the other hand, the instructor whose only aim is to induce excellence of scholarship has no place whatever in a normal-school faculty. Superintendent A. P. Marble (Worcester, Mass.): The young can not be well trained by an untaught teacher. It is not merely the prescribed curriculum that the pupil must be made acquainted with. This is the framework, so to speak, the skeleton, upon which must grow the parts that make up a symmetrical whole; and this symmetry is produced out of the well-stored mind of an educated teacher. The daily lessons must be enlivened and vivified by related facts and suggested ideas. This can be best done from the storehouse of a mind running over with knowledge, broad and deep, encompassing the subject-matter of the daily tasks. To such broad culture the teacher should, if possible, by all means add an acquaintance with the science and the art of teaching. But valuable as this professional training is, it can never take the place of the indispensable qualification just named.

Theory and experience declare for scholarship.-B. A. Hinsdale: Which is better, much scholarship and little method, or little scholarship and much method? The answer to this question can not for a moment be held in doubt. Both theory and experience declare for scholarship. In fact, the enthusiasm of knowledge is a prime requisite of the best teaching. Few school spectacles are more painful than that of a poor teacher eking out slender learning with an excess of method. The good scholar without professional training will commonly stagger a good deal at first, but if he have the root of the matter in him he will soon find his feet; while the teacher of an ill-organized mind and small equipment gives little promise of ever overcoming his limitations. The what will catch the how long before the how will overtake the what! And this is why all sound educators plead for the improvement of the intellectual equipment of the teachers of the country.

The function of the normal school.-Edward T. Pierce, principal Chico State normal school (Cal.): The first requisite of good teaching is a thorough knowledge of the subjects taught; the second is an insight into the principles of education and the methods of applying them. If the subject matter is slighted, method is purposeless; and knowledge of methods presuppose an understanding of the subject in the teaching of which the methods are to be applied. There fore the normal schools of this State-must, at present, pursue two lines of work— academic and professional-and should slight neither.

J. W. Dickinson, secretary State Board of Education (Mass.): A normal school may be known from any other institution of learning by the character of the exercises to which it may be properly limited. If it devotes its whole attention to teaching the objects and subjects of knowledge in an academical way it has no claim to a distinct existence. Other schools are doing the same thing. If it teaches the philosophy of teaching and the method founded upon it, and the history of teaching from the earliest times to the present day, it is doing its legitimate work. If, at the same time, it attempts to teach the facts and truths of the various sciences, then it imposes a burden upon itself which circumstances may render necessary to a limited extent, but which should not be allowed to interfere with professional teaching beyond the necessity.

What may be required of all candidates.-State Superintendent A. S. Draper (New York): In our cities, the number of candidates for teachers' positions is so great, and the facilities for acquiring proficiency so many, that it is perfectly practicable to require that all candidates shall have completed the high school course and spent a year in a normal school or training class before being given authority to teach. We passed such a law in our State last winter. It was vetoed. But we will have it yet. Some of our cities are doing precisely this now without law. All can do it and have plenty of teachers. It is no hardship to young candidates. It will work incalculable advantage to the schools.

How a high school may prepare teachers.—Superintendent Henry Sabin (Iowa): Occasionally we find a high school which is renowned in all the surrounding country for sending out successful teachers. In such a school, if we investigate, we always find certain conditions:

1. Pupils are taught how to study with a view of getting the most out of a subject, not simply out of the book. They practice vivisection on every subject they take up.

2. They are taught to exhaust the means at their command. If it is only a dictionary, an encyclopædia, a few reference books at home or at school, they make the best use possible of them. Supe abundance of means is sometimes a source of waste to the student.

3. The pupils are expected to ask questions as well as answer them, and the teachers are expected to answer questions as well as ask them. The independence, which the pupil thus gains, goes with him into his school, and serves him well in the absence of strictly professional training. It enables him to solve, without the aid of a key, the innumerable problems which present themselves almost daily in the schoolroom.

Enthusiasm is the life of good school work. Thus the pupils during four years acquire so great devotion to their work, they become so aglow with the delight of acquiring and imparting knowledge that it becomes an appetite, as it were, and they are not happy except when under its influence.

•Of extremely doubtful value.—The best psychology.-H. C. Missimer (Erie, Pa.): The young girls that go into cur training classes fresh from the high school are too immature to understand mental philosophy or psychology. It will only befuddle them. The power to analyze, to dissect, to connect mental processes in their proper relations, is the last and highest achievement of the intellect. It is the result of much observation and wide experience. For a young girl to psychologize, to philosophize about the mental process of the child-mind, without knowing anything about children, or coming into actual mental contact with them is, if not the purest nonsense, of extremely doubtful value.

Again, the abstract study of psychology, as a preparation for teaching, is very apt to send the young teacher into the school with a tendency to impose and practice upon the children a theory instead of a disposition to study actual conditions out of which she ought to develop her own theories and her own methods. Even the discussion of methods, before we are engaged in teaching, is of little value beyond conveying an idea of the nature of the work. The method of somebody else is of no value to me unless it quickens and expands ideas already existing in my own mind.

The best psychology for the teacher-the beginning teacher-is the psychology of vulgar practice. It is the right kind of psychology to rid our minds of foolish, impracticable, and short-sighted notions. It is the psychology that shows us where we shall probably fail, and where to concentrate our energies in order to succeed. Professional psychology should come after the teaching is begun, after common-sense study of the children after the study of actual conditions. Then it will develop, enlarge, and widen the teaching mind.

Special preparation may be exacted even in the country.-Superintendent A. S Draper (New York): We can not expect that all teachers will be as thoroughly prepared for their work as they may and ought to be in the cities. Yet experience shows that some special preparation may be exacted even in the country. Candidates will comply with what is required. Send all you can to the regularly established normal schools, but remember that there can never be enough normal schools maintained to supply all the teachers needed in the common schools, and also that all candidates can not afford to take a complete normal course for the sake of the mere chance of being employed at five or six dollars per week, with the likelihood of being turned out at the next turn of the political wheel. We need short-term training classes throughout the rural districts.

The use of teachers” examinations.-Superintendent A. S. Draper (New York): It is quite the fashion to discredit examinations. It is a foolish habit. The examination has its legitimate use. We do not use it to determine who shall be certified, but who shall not be. We do not say that all who pass an examination shall be certified by any means. We say that the local officer may withhold certificates from any candidate, no matter whether he passes the examination or not, and without giving any reason. We only say that he shall not issue a certificate unless the candidate attends upon a prescribed course of professional instruction or passes the prescribed examination. In the next world we may be able to accomplish ends without means but we can not in this world.

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We will continue to talk about innumerable things, but nothing can be of such supreme importance as the institution of efficient agencies for promoting the professional training of teachers and for preventing the certification of such as are not so trained.

The essential conditions of effective teachers' examinations.-George William Curtis: Teacherships in the schools are not popularly regarded as subjects of patronage. But are they not so practically, and is it wise that they should remain so? What is the present system? I believe that the requirement of certification or license before appointment is universal in all the States of the Union. The examination upon which the certificate or license issues is, then, the cardinal point. What are the vital, essential conditions of effective examination? To be properly effective the examinations must be uniform, entirely competent, and wholly independent of the appointing power. The examiners must be sincerely interested in education, familiar with the duties of a teacher and with the requirements of the art of teaching, and capable of conducting an examination to ascertain both the scholastic attainments and the specific professional fitness of the candidates. Wherever these conditions do not exist, the public school system, and therefore the whole community, suffers.

A reserve corps of teachers-The Milwaukee plan.-Superintendent William E. Anderson, of Milwaukee, Wis.: Some three or four years ago an inquiry into the frequency of teachers' absences, and the average number of substitutes em ployed to fill such absences, suggested a change whereby a larger number of well-qualified teachers than those assigned to places should be kept at the command of the board. In Milwaukee it was found that of a corps of 400 teachers employed at that time there was an average absence of 12 to 15 teachers a day, the absences some days exceeding 20. This includes all vacant places, permanent and temporary. It frequently happens that two or three vacancies exist for which there is no appointee at hand. It was customary, as in other places, to occupy these by so-called substitute teachers having no certificates, or by those having the certificate, but no experience. A rule was adopted empowering a committee and the superintendent to appoint a number of supernumerary teachers, to be called the reserve corps. These teachers were the best that could be obtained during the summer vacation. Their appointment was regular and their salary the same as that of assistant teachers, no deduction being made when their services were not required, providing they reported for service at the office. Members of the reserve corps have their predilections and aptitudes. These, known to the superintendent, are regarded when temporary assignments are made. A vacancy in a seventh or an eighth grade is supplied by a teacher who is supposed to have the capacity for teaching higher grades. A vacancy in the primary grade is supplied by a teacher who is supposed to be adapted to primary work. In the mean time the members of the reserve corps, being selected upon grounds of general efficiency, experience, and training, are eligible for appointment. Their service in temporary classes commends them for appointment, and their detail to occupy recently created vacancies is a kind of preparation for appointment. If the principal is satisfied, a resolution of transfer from the reserve corps to the corps of the school is all that is required. In this way we have been able to satisfy the prerogative of local commissioners who select their own teachers and with the improvement of the plan hope to introduce a larger number of capable teachers to fill vacancies. As the reserve corps is depleted it is recruited by the committee and the superintendent, whose business it is to keep a record of applicants and to hold frequent meetings for interviewing applicants for admission to the reserve corps. The corps was first organized under rules which prohibited the employment of any teachers who had taught in the schools previously. The restriction was, however, removed, and perhaps not for the best interests of the schools. Experience has shown that some teachers were kep: drifting about upon the reserve corps for a