Resolved, That the sum of $200, or so much thereof as may be necessary, be, and hereby is, appropriated to defray the necessary clerical expenses of the committee named by a round table of the Department of Superintendence to collect information regarding the progress, means, and results of consolidating rural schools; provided that all bills against this appropriation shall be certified as correct by the chairman of the committee aforesaid.

J. M. GREENWOOD, Chairman.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER,
AUGUSTUS L. DOWNING.
L. D. HARVEY.

The following substitute, presented by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, of New York, was adopted:

Resolved, That the Council expresses its sympathy with, and approval of, the movement for the consolidation of rural school districts and the transportation of children to central schools.

The report of the Committee on Prize Essays on School Hygiene was then submitted by its chairman, A. R. Taylor, as follows:

To the Members of the National Council of Education:

At the Chattanooga meeting of the Department of Superintendence a Committee on School Hygiene was appointed. That committee, thru its chairman, W. T. Harris, made a brief report at the meeting of that department at Columbus, in February, 1899. By request, the report was also read before the Council at the meeting at Los Angeles, in June of the same year. It proposed the offering of prizes for essays on heating, lighting, seating, and ventilation. The recommendations of the committee were approved, and the Board of Directors of the general association appropriated $1,200 for prizes. Four first prizes of $200 each, and four second prizes of $100 each, on the subjects designated, were authorized.

The conduct of this competitive contest was intrusted to a committee of five, consisting of W. T. Harris, W. T. King, Aaron Gove, George P. Brown, and A. R. Taylor. This committee adopted suitable regulations for the competition and issued several thousand copies of a circular, which were mailed to superintendents, principals, school-supply houses, health boards, sanitary experts, educational and scientific journals, and to the general press.

Dr. Mowry, of Hyde Park, Mass.; Principal W. E. Wilson, of Ellensburg, Washington; and Principal John R. Kirk, of Kirksville, Mo., were appointed to pass upon the merits of the essays submitted.

The result shows that little interest was awakened, for scarcely a dozen essays, few of those being of any merit, were submitted. The regulations of the competition reserved the right of the committee to reject all manuscripts, if they were found to be inferior. The judges were unanimous in reporting that in their estimation no essay submitted is worthy the award of a first prize and of publication by the association.

Your committee regrets this outcome of its efforts to secure the desired essays. We are pleased, however, to note the appearance of several meritorious books on the general subject of school hygiene, and indulge the hope that the emphasis now given to the need for an authoritative and scientific treatment of the various problems involved may soon result in a treatise meeting the ideals set forth in the report to the Department of Superintendence.

JULY 12, 1901.

Respectfully submitted,

A. R. TAYLOR, Chairman.

W. F. KING.

W. T. HARRIS.
AARON GOVE.

The Committee on Nominations, thru its chairman, L. H. Jones, submitted the following report:

To the National Council of Education:

Your Committee on Nomination of Officers has the honor to make the following recommendations: For President-J. H. Phillips, of Alabama.

For Vice-President- Miss Mary E. Nicholson, of Indiana.

For Secretary-J. F. Millspaugh, of Minnesota.

For Member of Executive Committee - Superintendent R. G. Boone, of Ohio.

For Members of Committee on Membership—Superintendent J. H. Van Sickle, of Maryland; Superintendent L. D. Harvey, of Wisconsin.

(Signed)

L. H. JONES.

Report of the Committee on Membership:

To the National Council:

Your committee respectfully submits the following nominations:
George P. Brown, Bloomington, Ill., to succeed himself.
Charles H. Keyes, Hartford, Conn., to succeed himself.

CHAS. B. Gilbert.

FRANK A. FITZPATRICK.

Edward R. Shaw, of New York, to succeed William B. Powell, full term.

John Dewey, Chicago, Ill., to succeed the late B. A. Hinsdale, term to expire 1904.
Z. X. Snyder, of Greeley, Colo., to succeed Edward T. Pierce, term to expire 1905.

C. H. KEYES.
J. M. GREENWOOD.
J. H. VAN SICKLE.
W. T. HARRIS.

After a roll-call of the Council, which disclosed the fact that forty-nine members had been present at its sessions, the president announced adjournment sine die.

J. H. PHILLIPS, Secretary.

PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS

ISOLATION IN THE SCHOOL-HOW IT HINDERS AND HOW IT HELPS

W. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION One of the earliest points at which educational reform begins to attack whatever it finds to be established as the order of school education for its day is the isolation of the work of instruction and discipline from the home life of the child.

There is a separation more or less abrupt between the occupations within the home and those in the school. There is a contrast in manner of behavior; the school expects a degree of self-restraint on the part of the child, a considerate attention to the demands of the task before him, not only as to its demands upon him, but also as to those on his fellowpupils and on his teachers.

He leaves behind him in the home a certain spontaneity of action and becomes self-repressive and sometimes painfully conscious of all his little impulses and tendencies. He must inhibit such action as will interfere with the grand purpose of the school.

In his six years of life he has already accumulated a stock of interests that relate to the members of his family and the possessions of his household. He has supplemented this by experience in his neighborhood and discovered very much that goes to supply wants or needs in the stock of interests in his own home.

At the age of six he enters the school and commences to study letters and numbers as his chief business.

The school seems bent on changing him from an ear-minded person to an eye-minded person- from one to whom language consists only of spoken words heard by the ear, to one for whom language consists of printed or written words, or of characters such as the Arabic notation furnishes. All his home and neighborhood interests are set aside in the

schoolroom, or at least subordinated to new disciplines of a comparatively abstract character. For reading and writing deal with arbitrary characters conventionally used to represent, not words, but sounds. The child knows words by ear, but he has no theory of elementary sounds; they are not observed by him, because he does not get so far as to analyze his words. Letters, printed or written, and also the sounds that they represent, are alike strange objects to the child. But eye-mindedness will mean to the child the possibility of holding the word with such a firm grip that he can think more precisely than he can with words known orally, but not visually. It will mean that he can get beyond his merely colloquial vocabulary of a few hundred words of a loose and uncertain meaning, and master new vocabularies invented by poets to express all the shades of feeling and character that human nature is capable of, and other new vocabularies invented by specialists in science to collect and combine all the facts that man knows about nature and man.

Civilization depends on the written and printed word. It has long appeared to be a necessity of society that the child should go to school, just for the sake of becoming eye-minded. But the work of the school is very different from the occupation of the child in the family in his first six years. It is isolated from the home life, and only refers to it incidentally for illustrations and examples; for applications and rudimentary experiences that help to understand the lesson of the day.

Whenever a topic comes up in school that relates in any way to the child's experience, the good teacher always appeals to this body of original observation as a sort of apperception fund—a fund of direct information which helps explain the subject presented in the school lesson.

So, too, the kindergarten has been invented, and a series of games and occupations offered to younger children as a method to connect more closely the school and the home. But the child does not find the home life continued in the kindergarten not the home life of caprice

and wild play. He has come into a social whole, and he must conform to the regulations necessary for the existence of a social whole. He must play the game chosen by the teacher and work at the occupation. set for his class. Everything is prescribed for him. His occupations are not such as he has seen at home. They deal with elements that enter certain processes of manufacture, that exist in his neighborhood, but they are almost as abstract as the letters used to spell words.

This fact has been well observed by educational reformers, and pedagogy has received the fruits of their labors to improve its methods.

The isolation of the school from the home life is made less by turns of skill in methods of instruction, or in methods of discipline; by inventions of a long series of short steps and easy gradients that place it within the power of the child to climb to difficult heights.

Were the child taken from the home entirely and kept in the schoolroom constantly, it would pretty effectually quench what the child had acquired of individuality in home life.

This has been a great evil in a certain class of boarding schools and in orphan asylums.

But, as a fact, the ordinary primary school takes only five hours of the day, five days of the week, and forty weeks of the year. This gives oneninth of the entire time to the schoolroom. If the child consumes fourninths of the time in sleep and four-ninths of the time in continuing his home and neighborhood life, he will have, in the average case, sufficient elasticity to react against the cramp which is threatened by school life.

The concentration of mind on the part of the professional teacher to invent means to lessen the step from home life to school life has tended to make him lose sight of the educative value of what is peculiar to the school itself. The school is sometimes regarded as a sort of necessary evil, which it would be well to eliminate entirely from society, if a suitable substitute could be found. Sometimes, too, it comes to seem as if the home life of the child contained all that is truly desirable. The one who holds this point of view is prone to fall into the same error in regard to the state. He will think that the family should be all in all, and that the state that is to say, the political life of the people should be dispensed with, and thereby an enormous saving effected in the life of man.

Something of this trend of thought in modern pedagogy is found prevailing in the thought of Europe in the last century. It was put into application on a grand scale in France. It was a sort of objectlesson for all that part of mankind that read and think. The French Revolution had been for fifteen years a spectacle to all Europe of a people trying to clear up its mind with regard to the relation between the individual and the state. In the Reign of Terror all Europe made the discovery that with mere individualism each person of necessity comes to suspect every other person. In such a condition society becomes a mob, and the individual finds no safety from suspicion and violence. The reaction in France from the time of the Reign of Terror led farther and farther away from mere individualism, and not only from this, but from any mere life of nature. There came to be an insight into the necessity of the government, the institution of the state, as the guarantee of the life and liberty of the citizen. This insight came with more force to the thinkers living in other countries, and especially in Germany, than it did even to the people in France. In Germany it began to be seen that not only the state, but other institutions, such as the church and the community of productive industry and the family, are institutions which are. needed to make possible the life and liberty of the citizen.

The ideal nature of man gets realized in his institutions. The family is an organization which protects the individual in his immature years of

infancy, in his old age of decrepitude, and, in other words, equalizes the difference of sex, age and condition of health, etc. Civil society is organized so that by division of labor each worker becomes skillful and can accomplish a maximum of production, and yet each person depends upon others in his community, and, in fact, upon all the race, for the variety of articles which he needs to supply his wants. By commerce this dependence is converted into independence. Each citizen is made independent of want by belonging to a social whole. The state, on the other hand, protects the weak against the strong, and secures justice, not by the individual, which would be private revenge, but by the state. The state is the reality of the rational self, which is only partially realized in each individual. Again, the church devotes itself to the preservation of the wisdom of the past. It teaches a view of the world as one in a rational purpose; it offers a summary of this wisdom to all the people, whether mature or immature; it applies this wisdom more or less perfectly or imperfectly to the practical issues of the day in the life of each individual.

The relation of the individual to this larger self incarnated in institutions is that of obedience to authority. The institution, which is a social whole in one of its forms, prescribes to the individual, and he obeys. In all lower and lowest conditions of civilization the punishment of death is most frequently awarded to the individual who deliberately disobeys this authority, vested by institutions in responsible officers, or chiefs; in the family, in civil society, in the state, in the church.

With the phenomena of the French Revolution before them, European thinkers saw how this element of authority comes by and by to be questioned by an educated or enlightened people. Mere authority seems to be alien to the rational will of the individual. Hence, one school of thinkers came to call this rational world, embodied in institutions, the world of self-estrangement (Selbstentfremdung). The individual who becomes intensely conscious of his personality, in the beginnings of a scientific education, comes to attack all authority as a foreign or alien affair. He does not see that it embodies the realization of his greater self. He does not see that to obey institutions is to obey his rational self. To him it is a matter of blind obedience to what is irrational.

Mind, as it appears in infancy and childhood, is the potentiality of man, but not the reality of man. In order to become man in his maturity, the immature child must estrange itself become foreign to what it finds itself to be as child or infant -and it must study the grounds of the commands of authority until it gets an insight into their rationality. Then it returns out of its estrangement and becomes at home in the forms of reason that have been realized in the long course of the history of the human race. The child or infant has no longer the intense delight in his immediate environment, but he delights in finding