THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Fred Lewis Pattee. Professor Pattee is well known as the author of a History of American Literature, which has had a cordial reception from the educational and the general reading. world. He is a careful and judicious student, and has a faculty for catching the temper and spirit of the age of which he writes. He brings out with especial! clearness the civil and moral conditions, and describes the religious thought underlying so much of literature, with unusual perspicuity. His book will meet the requirements of colleges, high schools and academies. Boston: Silver, Burdett & Co. Price, $1.50.

We have received Vol. II. of the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1897-98, issued by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. Having recently reviewed Vol. I. of this magnificent contribution to the educational literature of the country, we need only say here that the present volume is equal to the first in far-reaching influence and value. There is not a department of public affairs which is more important, none in which abler work is done, than in the department of Education by Dr. Harris and his efficient coworkers. These reports are a cause for national pride and self-congratulation. They are always worthy of profound study by educators and the public.

The National Educational Association has published the JOURNAL OF ProCEEDINGS AND ADDRESSES of the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting, held at Los Angeles, July 11-14, 1899. It makes a large volume, in the same general style as Dr. Harris's reports. All the able and comprehensive papers presented at Los Angeles are given in full. While there are advantages in listening to the living voices of the speakers, still there is gain also in having these thoughtful discourses, within reach, where their weighty utterances can be examined at leisure and thoroughly digested. Many teachers who could not go to California will find consolation for that loss in the instructive pages of this volume. The work has been well prepared, with ample indices, lists of members of the Association, etc. It may be obtained by addressing the Secretary, Irwin Shepard, Winona, Minn.

THE STATE LIBRARY BULLETIN of the University of the State of New York, for Jan., 1900, consists of a summary of legislation by States, on educational matters, for 1899. It is an ably prepared and useful work, placing the results of legislative action throughout the country on this important topic within easy reach of the student. Published at Albany, by the University. Price, 25 cents.

PERIODICALS.

Prof. E. W. Scripture, of Yale University, has an interesting article in the March number of Appleton's Popular Science Monthly on Cross-Education. He points out an important but often overlooked psychological principle of practical education.—The Atlantic Monthly has an important paper from the pen of Le Baron R. Briggs, of Harvard University, on the Transition from School to College. We regret that while pointing out so truthfully the dangers of this critical period in student-life the author did not say more in a constructive way about helps and remedies. The article is, however, very readable and suggestive.—Napoleon on Drunkenness, in the March Century, presents the great French commander in a new role.-Pearson's Magazine tells how real diamonds are made out of sugar and how hay is made by wire. Who Will Save American Cities? is the title of an article in the Catholic World Magazine for February.-A timely article in the March Delineator is devoted to the details of growing seeds, plants, bulbs, etc.-The History of the Michigan State Normal School, by Prof. D. Putnam, is now ready. It represents much labor and research. Cornell University issues a valuable Nature Study Quarterly. The last number deals. with the subject of budding and grafting.

EDUCATION

DEVOTED TO THE SCIENCE, ART, PHILOSOPHY AND

LITERATURE OF EDUCATION.

VOL. XX.

APRIL, 1900.

No. 8.

THE STUDY OF ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN AS PRODUCED BY INJUDICIOUS SCHOOL

ΤΗ

METHODS.

WM. T. HARRIS, LL.D., U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION,

WASHINGTON, D. C.

HIS is a day of inquiry among those who have to do with. education. We see the spectacle of the march of the natural sciences conquering new fields of knowledge; the progress of invention swiftly turning to account what science has discovered by the invention of labor-saving machinery; the rapid multiplication and cheapening of the means of intercommunication; a larger and larger portion of our citizens becoming travelers to the east, west, north or south of our extensive country or over to Europe and even around the world-travel furnishing an educative series of object lessons.

Of the remaining population who do not take these object lessons, nearly all read the newspapers and other periodicals, and learn to see the events of the world through the eyes of trained observers-the events moving in orderly procession and forming the warp of the world-history. In the midst of this great change in the relation of man to his environment, each one finds more and more of his time occupied with the problems of nations, and less with the doings of his village, his county or his state. He finds more interest in the work of specialists

on the frontiers of the empire of Knowledge, and he has less interest in the common-places of everyday life. But all these enrichments from far-off politics and industries, or from reading the secrets disclosed by the laboratory,—all these go to the better understanding of home affairs, and for interpreting the common-place events of everyday life.

We learn to look at what is near us, ourselves being armed with new points of view. We learn to see through and behind the petty details of our lives, aided by the discoveries of the laboratory. And thus we come to be investigators, and our home life assumes for us new interest.

Hence, too, as we said, this has become a day of inquiry for teachers as well as other people.

Teaching is the most conservative of all occupations, excepting always the ministry of religion. For the teacher has to deal with the unformed, undeveloped human being, and educate it into the manners and customs of civilized life, and above all open for it the storehouse of the wisdom of the race. He finds the child full of caprice and wayward impulses. He must exercise restraint on him, and teach him to substitute rational ways of doing and thinking for irrational ones. Thus the teacher is obliged to pull gently but firmly, and without relaxing his pressure, in one direction, while the native impulses of the child ever and anon are straining in the opposite direction, either by spasmodic efforts or by steady and perverse willfulThe teacher is therefore apt to get a sort of cramp by this necessity of a constant pull in the direction of conservative reaction against the wild impulses of the child. He is apt to adopt the conviction that the child is to be coerced, no matter how, to obey the rules of order; he is prone to regard the child as a perverse being who has no rights that he, the teacher, is bound to respect, instead of cherishing the child's self-activity, and desiring (as he ought) before all things to lead the child to adopt rational doing and thinking through his own option and without external compulsion.

ness.

Here we have come to our problem-the teachers' problem. This is the chief object of the teacher in this the day of inquiry: to preserve the child's self-activity and lead him to adopt the courtesies and amenities of life in place of self-seeking; to

adopt the principle of learning the experience of others and profiting by it, in place of following his own bent, heedless of the behest of society.

Hence there has arisen within a few years a great movement known as child-study, and many teachers are now struggling to understand the meaning of Preyer's observations on Infant Development and the writings of Dr. Stanley Hall and his disciples in the " Pedagogical Seminary," and armed with new methods to conduct investigations for themselves. It is a great movement, and we can all see that pedagogy is to gain large results from it, although we must admit that those who take it up as a mere fashion, or what is called in slang a "fad," will not learn much more from it than from anything else taken up in the same way.

In these first stages there is necessarily much time spent on what will prove to be mere rubbish heaps after all is done with them. That is the case in all sciences in their first careers.

I have had for some time in mind a contribution to childstudy in the way of directing attention to one of the most important of all fields of inquiry in education; namely, the mode and manner in which the over-cultivation of the lower faculties. or mental activities works to arrest the mind in that lower faculty or stage of activity. This subject has received but little attention from students of education, and yet there is no subject that deserves more careful investigation, if we except always the subject of the question of the educational values of the branches of study. That alone is of more importance. For we must know the ideals of the race before we can find any place for education. It is the spectacle of human beings at the bottom of the ladder while some of these fellow-beings have climbed to the to pthat suggests to us the idea of helping those at the bottom to ascend the ladder by education.

We must therefore in the science of pedagogy first fix in our minds the ideals, and then next we must see how to elevate the child toward those ideals. We must ascertain what studies are necessary, and at the same time discover how much study of them is good and wholesome, and where they begin to be hurtful and arrest development. We all know how the good teacher loves to have her pupils linger on the round of the

ladder where she is laboring. Under the plea of thoroughness she detains them sometimes a year or more on a lower round of the ladder, not to their advantage but to their detriment. Before they ascend to the next round of the ladder they have become listless and mechanical in their habits of study. And yet it is certain that the school discovered an essential part of its method when it first saw the importance of thoroughness. Thoroughness is necessary in all good instruction, but it is not good when carried to a point where instruction fails to develop the child and where induration or hardening into habit begins. For at first the child increases his development in will-power and arouses many faculties by the thorough exercise of one faculty; then by degrees the repeated acts of will-power begin to produce a habit, and the mind begins to act unconsciously in the lines where it at first acted with so much effort of the will. Then at last the habit becomes nearly all, and the mental development ceases. The other faculties are not any more aroused by the effort, but only one slender line of mental activity is brought into use and unconscious habit does most of the work.

Then induration has taken place, and the continuance of thoroughness along this line robs other activities of nervous energy and absorbs them. A machine-like activity supervenes in place of intellect. What was at first an intellectual synthesis has sunk down into use and wont. It has been relegated to the realm of instinct or to forms of life-activity but little above mere automatism.

Child-study in the United States, under the distinguished leadership of Dr. Stanley Hall, has not, it is true, done much in the study of arrested development. But there is a good reason for it. The province, being almost a new field for science, had to be mapped out first and its objects inventoried. In this work of inventorying an immense task has been accomplished by his disciples, but more especially by Dr. Hall him; self. The beginnings must necessarily be quantitative. Take Dr. Hall's excellent study of dolls for an example of the quantitative survey of the field (see Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. IV. p. 129), or his study of a sand pile (Princeton Review) for a qualitative inventory of the contents of an interesting specimen of the social education of boys through play. Fix the order of