EDITORIAL.

WILL you attend the N. E. A. meeting at Charleston?

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HE effort of Harvard University to give several weeks' careful training this summer to 1,450 public school teachers from Cuba is certain to be successful. It is a noble work, whose far-reaching, beneficial results no man can fully measure.

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E begin in this issue a series of articles on The Problems which Confront the College, the Normal School, the Academy, the High School and the Public School at the Opening of the Twentieth Century which ought to command wide attention. Such men as Presidents Tucker, Hadley, Carter, Thwing and Barrows speak with the authority of great intellectual strength, much experience and wide observation. In our next (September) number the ablest normal school men-such men as A. G. Boyden, E. O. Lyte, R. G. Boone, J. W. Cook, E. T. Pierce and others—are expected to discuss the problems before the normal school. In October the discussion will be by well-known academy men, to be followed in November and December by a vigorous treatment of high school and public school problems by some of the wisest leaders in the country. Every educator is alive to some or all of these problems. Their discussion is timely, and will undoubtedly do great good.

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VERY one acknowledges that a vigorous body is essential to the best development of a vigorous mind. But how small a number act on their knowledge in this matter. As summer is here it is well to give this thought. Cannot more be done in school and in college for the physical development of our children and youth? The question becomes serious in this age of tension and strain and nerves. Ought not physical training to be given a definite place in the curriculum? We leave our readers to ponder upon these words from a high authority, Dr. D. A. Sargent, of Harvard University: "At the present time it is possible for a student to attend a course of lectures on physiology and hygiene, write down the results of another man's intellectual efforts, commit them to memory, and a few months later re-write them in an examination book, and get credit for his labor toward a degree. If on the other hand the same young man is moved by the words of the instructor to reform his habits of living and improve his physical condition, he may work faithfully and well for four years in the gymnasium, thereby making himself as any one will admit a better man for anything he is likely to be called upon to do, without receiving the slightest recognition for his efforts from the faculty."

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HE completion of the American common school system by the addition of the high and normal secondary and the university departments is not the work of any set of educators, but the logical and inevitable outcome of the system. Indeed, in Massachusetts, the mother of the common school, the system at first was built downward from the top. Perhaps no considerable American college in its beginning could be so truly called a people's university as Harvard. It was established by the colonial general court, and received, in the first appropriation, probably a larger proportion of the public funds for the year than any similar institution in the country. For years it was supported not only by appropriations, but by contributions, like the great Northern common schools for the negroes in the South at present, and it was only at a late period that the State retired from all concern with it and transferred its bounty to the Agricultural College and School of Technology. The State always supported the high school; as the grammar school at the beginning, later the subsidized academy. At present the establishment of a high school is compulsory in a large class of towns and all the cities, and every child in the State is offered a free high school education at public expense. There are certainly twenty, possibly thirty, state and city normal schools, with free tuition and school supplies, all supported by public funds. After the Revolution the common school overleaped the Berkshire Hills, and from New York made its way, before 1860, to every Western State, and from 1865 to every Southern and Pacific commonwealth and territory. In the majority of these States it began, as in Massachusetts, with the State university, which in the South until 1860 was the most flourishing, if not the only, department of the common school. The free high school in every Northern State was forced upon the people by an imperious necessity. In every one of them the experiment of depend ing on private or denominational schools, academies and colleges for the teachers of the elementary common schools was a complete failure, notwithstanding the persistent habit of subsidizing them in several of the older Middle States. The only rational and successful method of providing teachers for the rapidly increasing school population was to educate the graduates of the elementary department in a school higher in grade in vital connection with everything below. In due time the state and city normal came up to supplement the academical department of the high school, and later the industrial branch. Finally, in several of the Western States the high school was brought upward and mortised into the State university. A people's common school system, containing fifteen million of the seventeen millions of chil

dren and youth, could no more be dependent for its teaching force on the whims of private and sectarian denominational schools and colleges than a man could get on without a permanent head. It is an impossibility that this class of schools can ever be brought into any unity of opinion concerning education itself, or to any consistent and uniform method of training teachers for the common schools, which they uniformly regard as in some way inferior, with no desire to make them better. And it will invariably be found that the advocates of the truncated system, that would leave the children at the age of fourteen or younger to dependence upon private, academical and collegiate schools, generally of the sectarian order, are themselves personally interested in the seminaries and institutions they offer as a substitute for the free high school, or have no especial desire that the number of the superior educated class should be enlarged. The trivial objection. that the high school tends to become a rich man's seminary is disposed of by the fact that its abolition would leave all save the well-to-do class with no opportunity for schooling after fourteen, save from private and sectarian charity. The American people believe that in the near future the Republic depends upon a decided and increasing enlargement of the educated class of both sexes, all classes and races, and do not believe the present investment of $200,000,000 annually, or ten times that sum, too great to insure that result. If the schools in any department are now too much in the hands of professional educators, and in any way failing of their effect, the people will do with the school what they are doing with the church in taking it out of the hands of the clergy and reconstructing it to meet the imperious demands of the civilization of to-day. But the idea that the Capital of the nation and by act of Congress should resolve the school system, for which the whole people pay one half the cost, back to an oldtime country and village district school arrangement, is a notion characteristic of that peculiar class of professional reformers" that abound in that city, concerning whom Senator George F. Hoar once made the remark that "Their reputation is strictly and entirely national."

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NE of the most persistent accusations against the present elementary schools, especially of the large cities, is that, while only one in a hundred will reach the high school, the course of study for all is constructed with the view of leading up from grade to grade until at graduation from the grammar school department all are prepared to enter it. It is maintained that this course of study is not a success for the vast number that fall by the way,

as the average boy hardly reaches the age of twelve in his school life. This objection would have greater weight if those who make it could agree upon a course of elementary educational discipline that would prepare for the sovereign American citizenship that awaits all these children as surely as the small minority whose school life is not ended at twenty-one. The majority of these critics talk in a wild sort of way of a 66 thorough education in the elements." But whether the elements shall be more than the Three R's" we are not informed. In fact, elementary education to-day is as different from the district school curriculum of fifty years ago as the Republic of 1900 from 1850. To say that the children who thirty years hence will constitute the great central phalanx of American life do not need the training in nature knowledge, geography, history, the literature of their language and country, drawing, music and the physical and industrial training that goes therewith, is simply to talk nonsense. They not only need these studies and exercises, but the improvement in methods of instruction, discipline and the entire arrangement of school life makes their present school work easier than that of the past; as a woman can tend a spinning jenny that represents the product of a thousand old spinning wheels with less fatigue than from the old-time day's work at grandmother's wheel fifty years ago. Besides, the idea that children under twelve years of age can be fitted for any special trade or occupation or "sphere" of life in school is born of an ignorance of child nature, of school life and of the probable destiny of American children so profound that it cannot be reached by argument, but must be left as the heritage of an outsider in American affairs. The object of the elementary school is to train the mental faculties, the character and habits; and, above all, to train the children of all sorts in the great American art of living together under just laws in a school that represents the conditions of American citizenship. These studies, discipline and habits of school life in this department do fit them for entering a high school constructed with. the same view, for the reason that, more and more, our city schools are being brought under the natural methods of instruction, discipline and general training for good manhood and womanhood. The notion. that children under twelve years of age can receive a thorough' education in any branch of study, even if the State concentrated itself on this department, is a pure fancy. A child cannot be fenced off from boyhood and manhood and polished up into whatever it is supposed he will become hereafter, for two reasons: 1. His mental faculties and entire nature will not bear the strain. 2. He is not now and cannot be made a finished product; but is in a state of swift

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transition from a babyhood of almost entire animalism to a manhood whose possibilities were never yet discovered. He does not remain the same from one day to another. He must be taken on the wing," and at a snap shot"; and even then the most accurate idea of him becomes a very stale "chestnut" while the educator exults in his success. All that can be done for him in the way of schooling is to help him to take the next step, "leaving the things that are behind, and pressing forward to the things that are before." Whatever may be our theory concerning him, he is in too much of a hurry. to put it on, for he outgrows it faster than his last year's clothes. Now, the high school is constructed to meet the mental and moral necessities in the middle region between childhood and manhood. It presents the same studies, to be dealt with in a manner more nearly approaching thoroughness, while the new studies are simply the completion of those he has dealt with before. There can be no doubt that in a system of schools containing such great diversities of ability, nationality, race and social position as in our great cities, there is a constant need of an almost superhuman wisdom, tact, executive administration and frequent readjustment of studies. And here is the unwisdom of leaving these systems so much to the absolute control of professional educators. Many of the most important functions of school life need, above all things, the roundabout judgment, acquaintance of men and affairs and knowledge of what is before children that is only found in a superior man and woman of the world. Our foremost people cannot safely leave such a prodigious machinery as this to be operated by any professional class. The clergy have failed in the attempt to monopolize popular education, and the educators will fail in the same way if permitted to have their own exclusive way, as many of them now demand. But the peculiar merit of our common school, as of our government and order of society, is its capacity for reform, readjustment and even reconstruction to meet new emergencies. Like our great continental rivers, the tide of American civilization always tends to run itself clear of all pollutions and obstructions, and with the help of a watchful and patriotic people will not be lost in any slough of despond, but will flow with deepening current between broadening banks to the open sea.