But, more specifically, what do these changes involve in the ideal school of the future? The transition from the grammar to the high school in this country corresponds far better than the European system to the need of changed environment at the age of fourteen; and this constitutes a rare opportunity, which has, however, been thrown away. Altho education, as we have seen, begins here, and many races have no other than a brief training at the dawn of the ephebic period, by a strange irony of fate secondary education has more or less lapsed to a mere link. Its functions are partly those of preparation for college, and are partly shaped by the mere momentum of the lower grades. The high school has lost its independence, and of all stages and grades has least interest in the large problems of education, namely, what to teach and how, in order to develop the nascent periods during the teens and to save powers now new-born in most profusion, but sure to be atrophied or perverted if not studied with tact and federated with individual adaptation.

For all these problems as a class, high-school teachers care less than those of any other grade, if, indeed, they suspect their existence. For them adolescence is just a stage when children are so much farther along than in the grammar school, and know so much less than they must to enter college. For such teachers the task is simply to convert their pupils into freshmen, and they await with hope or fear the assignment of their stint in the form of college requirements. They have abandoned all initiative; have renounced their birthright of interpreting, and ministering to, the needs of one stage of life; have had little professional training; have little interest in education in the large meaning of that term; and care little for work of the lower grades. Their motto almost seems to be, Non vitae sed scholae discimus. The result is that boys, who insist more on their own individuality, leave the high school in the country at large about 60 per cent. of its pupils are now girls. Noble ideals are gone; the independent function of the secondary stage of education is almost abandoned; and the pupil and teacher devote themselves to a routine of tasks in an artificial program imposed by the will of others, and fitting, not for the world, but for college. The pupils do not regard their work as set on a basis which gives it a value and meaning in itself to which each day contributes. Nothing can be done then until the high school takes a stronger hold on the interests and affections of the pupil.

At the sessions of the representatives of New England high schools and colleges, all the discussions and interests center more and more in the details of how to fit in this and that study, and whether a little more or less should be required or methods tinkered. College requirements, and suggestions how they may be best met, have ceased to be educational themes in any large sense. It is high time to reverse this relation. The college depends on the high school, and not vice versa. The latter should declare its independence, and proceed to solve its own problems in its

own way; it should strive to fit for life those whose education stops here, and should bring the college to meet its own demands. It should ask again how best to feed the interests and capacities peculiar to this age; how to fill and develop mind, heart, will, and body, rather than how to distill a budget of prepared knowledge decreed by professors who know no more of the needs of this age than teachers of other grades. The current "link" theory and practice interfere, moreover, with the natural selective functions; favor uniformity and inflexibility; and ignore the needs of the majority of high-school pupils who go no farther.

Under this condition it is idle to study adolescence or to plan for it, because nothing worth while can be done; altho the inverse relation I plead for would be vastly to the interests of the colleges, and would in a few years greatly increase their classes and the efficacy of the whole system. Few institutions of modern civilization so distrust human nature as does the modern American high school, when under college domina

For lower grades the law of compulsory attendance is analogous to a high protective tariff, which removes the stimulus to better methods of manufacture, and interferes with the law of competition which is the mainspring of evolution. The high school is no less effectively protected against the currents of new ideas, and is left to be a victim of tradition, routine, the iron law of mechanism. It takes the easiest way by working under the shelter and dictation of the college above and on the momentum of the grammar school below. This, I believe, accounts for the rapidly decreasing numbers as we go up the high-school classes; for the decreasing proportion of high-school boys who go to college; for the preponderance of girls in the high school; and for the educational apathy of the high-school teacher, who is prone to all the narrowness and affectation of the specialist, without his redeeming virtue of productiveness in research.

The teacher must teach more, and know more; he must be a living fountain, not a stagnant pool. He should not be a dealer in desiccated, second-hand knowledge, a mere giver-out and hearer of lessons. That is the chief and humiliating difference between our secondary teachers and those abroad, who are mostly doctors of philosophy, as they should be. If we could move many university professors to the college, many college professors to the high school, many high-school teachers to the grammar school, and some grammar-school teachers, with at least a sprinkling of college graduates, into the kindergarten, it would do much. In the German and French schools the teacher is one who knows a great deal about his subject and is nearer to original sources; who tells the great truths of the sciences almost like stories; and who does not affect the airs and methods of the university professor. Very many secondary teachers are masters and authorities. Here, most of our university pedagogy is a mere device for so influencing high-school principals and teachers as to

correlate curricula, in order to corral in students, and little interest is taken in the grammar grades, and none in the kindergarten.

I have spoken frankly, and have dealt only with general principles over a vast field, far too large to be adequately discussed here. I have carefully avoided all details, altho I have fully worked them out on paper at great length, for each topic to the close of the high-school period or the age of nineteen, when physical growth is essentially completed. This material will soon appear in a volume. The chief petition in my daily prayer now is for a millionaire. With the means at hand, I have no shadow of doubt or fear but that in five years from the date of any adequate gift we shall be able to invite all interested to a system of education, covering this ground, which will be a practical realization of much present prophecy, and which will commend itself even to the most conservative defenders of things as they are and have been, because the best things established will be in it. But it will be essentially pedocentric rather than scholiocentric; it may be a little like the Reformation, which insisted that the sabbath, the Bible, and the church were made for man and not he for them; it will fit both the practices and the results of modern science and psychological study; it will make religion and morals more effective; and, perhaps above all, it will give individuality in the school its full rights as befits a republican form of government, and will contribute something to bring the race to the higher maturity of the superman that is to be, effectiveness in developing which is the highest and final test of art, science, religion, home, state, literature, and every human institution.

DISCUSSION

AARON GOVE, Superintendent of schools, District No. 1, Denver, Colo. The paper to which we have just listened gives me much gratification and some surprise. It presents conclusions reached by the eminent author after years of profound thought and careful experiment. While the entire professional world is acquainted with President Hall, and has known in a general way of the philosophical and experimental work at Clark University, so far as I know this is the first presentation showing results. It does not follow that the conclusions reached by President Hall are absolute or final, neither is it necessary that agreement in the conclusions follows. The value of the paper to me is what seems to have been discovered and accomplished by almost a generation's work in investigation of the proper methods of approach to the pupil's mind. Omitting the first, or kindergarten, period, and the last, or the high-school, period, it is the treatment of the grammar school that delights me most, and serves to confirm me in my own observation and experience, because, like some other men, I rejoice when I meet accord with others. Superintendents, who often are quite as much men of action as of thought, are confronted with problems in school administration which scarcely appear to the philosopher and theorist. I understand the paper, altho I have not read it and have heard it read but once, to declare that the grammar-school period of the boy's life is the time for drill, memory-training, severe application to tasks with an accounting for their accomplishIn other words, that what has been denominated by some of the critics "soft

ment.

pedagogy" and "mellow education" should be reduced to its minimum during the grammar-school period. If this be the tenor of the paper-and we shall all be able to read it later-it serves to restore to many doubters confidence in our pedagogical philosophers, whose teachings, often presented under circumstances of wrong interpretation, misapplication, and superficial acquaintance, have suffered in the hands of their friends. That a hive of bees in the yard or on the playground of the schoolhouse is theoretically beautiful and helpful, and has been even recommended as an essential adjunct, is an illustration of how our friends in that field have taught us that, while theory must always precede practice, practice should not always follow theory.

Some of us have complained of the time wasted in school in experimenting along lines indicated by pedagogic experts; we have had a notion that the experimenting should be limited to the smallest practicable field until tolerably right conclusions are reached, at which time the whole can enter into the practice of new and hitherto unintroduced methods.

I take this occasion, altho perhaps not strictly in line of anything said in the paper, to declare my belief in the misfortune of identical coeducation in the high schools; also my belief, based upon my immediate environment, that the grammar-school boy of today is not as well fitted for the high school as he was ten years ago; that the letting up of assignment and demanded accomplishment of tasks, the introduction of entertainment and the misinterpretation of the "doctrine of interest," have tended to make the young fellows weak in mental power, and consequently weak in grasping problems and overcoming obstacles. That the high-school girls should be differently treated from the highschool boys is my belief; because, as Dr. Hall has just informed us, of the extraordinary and positive separation in the mental, social, and physical natures, as he has demonstrated by most careful and patient experiment and investigation.

If our high schools are to be continued as coeducational institutions, the boy should take four years for his work, while the girl takes six; the boy should be held in school all day; the girl should be dismissed from the schoolhouse at noon. Not less work should be given her, rather more, but of a different kind. On account of extra calls outside of school duties, including the home, society, and music, and perhaps art; on account of changes in physical constitution, and on account of the importance of outdoor life, she can well afford to take six years to acquire that mental discipline for which four is ample for her brother.

I regard this paper as one of the most instructive presented to this Council within my recollection. I reiterate my pleasure in finding myself so close to Dr. Hall. The pleasure is heightened by the previous feeling that I had been called here to the not pleasant task of disapproving what I might hear. The paper will receive, when printed, wide attention, and careful and thoughtful essays will be written and printed thruout the land upon the many phases presented and the unusual inspiration which it contains.

MISS LUCIA STICKNEY, Cleveland, O.-Dr. Hall has told us of the need, and of the time for supplying the need, of the spiritual in the form of legend and myth. We recognize the fact that literature is the medium for the moral and spiritual in education, and we are making our boys and girls, even those who are taking a business course in our schools, familiar with the religious ideas of the ancient nations and of the peoples of the Middle Ages. We exhume them in mythology. We present the ideal in character and strength from the Greek and Roman and Norse heathenism. We dwell on the romantic in chivalry, and we seem to study to avoid the stories of our own Bible, which should be dear and sacred to every child of every faith in our schools. We seem to be afraid of what they have no prejudice against and, what is wrong perhaps, no impression of. We blush to confess the ignorance of our children of our cutivated homes as to Bible literature. We lose the best opportunities of giving them a moral lesson, apparently because we are afraid of meeting the question, which has nothing in it, at our time of liberal

thought and purpose, to be afraid of. When all are demanding the recognition of higher and deeper things in our school work, we are going out of our way to avoid the best medium at hand for bringing these things into it.

HIGH-SCHOOL STATISTICAL INFORMATION

JAMES M. GREENWOOD, SUPERINTENDENT OF CITY SCHOOLS,
KANSAS CITY, MO.

Owing to some omissions in the minutes of the Council, I found myself in a dilemma after I had received and read the proceedings of the Charleston meeting. On motion of Dr. Hinsdale, it was moved and carried that the investigation I had commenced on high schools. should be continued, and that two other members of the Council should be associated with me as a committee to make a report at this meeting. Hon. Frank A. Hill, of Massachusetts, and Hon. E. W. Coy, of Ohio, were nominated, but the minutes contained nothing of this, and as neither gentleman was present at the session when the announcement was made, I was forced reluctantly to drop the matter so far as committee work was concerned, but I continued the investigation on my own responsibility.

The special report which I now submit is suggestive, and it is designed to call attention to three or four phases of thought in this department of public education. I need not dwell upon the imperfect methods, in vogue in various cities of this country, of tabulating high-school statistics, and the difficulty one experiences in collecting definite information, especially as to the persistence and character of attendance in classical, English, and manual-training high schools; the lines of work in which the greatest number of failures occur; the actual cost of maintaining such schools, based on the total enrollment; the average daily attendance, including all expenses of whatsoever nature. Many reports fail to show the total expenditures in such a way as to be of any value in the compilation of statistics.

For information concerning the attendance, reasons for dropping out of school, failure in class standing, I have drawn entirely from the schools of Kansas City, and for expenditures from several cities in different sections of the country.

Kansas City is different in some respects from any other large city of the country, in enrolling a larger per cent. of its entire population in high school, in having a larger per cent. of graduates to the entire population, and also in having a larger per cent. of pupils enrolled in the high schools in proportion to the total enrollment of pupils in all the schools, unless it be Springfield, Mass. These facts are not accidental. They are the results of definite causes that have operated for years, which I need not specify in this connection.