The schoolrooms and playgrounds of a truant school should be made especially attractive. All that can be said relative to pleasant surroundings for school children applies with special force to those who run away from school. The attractions of the street must be overcome by the attractions of the school.

Truant schools should teach many things besides schoolbooks, and have many appliances besides ordinary school apparatus. Every truant school should have a complete gymnasium and an attractive bath-room. A strong, clean boy physically is far advanced toward mental and moral purity. Military training and discipline often accomplish much good in truant schools. Guns and swords are attractive to boys, and the immediate response to command is wholesome.

Games are helpful to truants, especially those whose energy and willpower have been weakened by cigarettes. Creating an interest in games and cultivating the spirit of rivalry and emulation often restores lost ambition, and brings back health and vigor. Plenty of exercise will counteract, and sometimes cure, the cigarette habit. Football, basketball, baseball, and tennis are excellent tonics for weak boyhood. Again, a skillful teacher by taking advantage of the "gang" instinct in truants can successfully organize them, first into teams for play, and then into clubs for reading and study. Frequently a boy will do more for his team, or his school, than he will for himself, and will even put aside his cigarettes to increase the chances of his team winning in a physical con

test.

Manual training is an excellent agency for keeping and bringing boys to school. A few months ago manual training was introduced into the truant school of Grand Rapids. The results are flattering. Some of the boys said to me: "We do not need a truant officer on shopdays; we can find ourselves." Our Grand Rapids truant boys at present are having shop-work three times a week. Boys who lack ambition to study books are often anxious to use tools. Manual training is an efficient character builder, and can be used to excellent advantage among boys who lack self-control, to teach them will-power and to eradicate vicious habits.

The general educational value of manual training is great, but even more important in a truant school is its ethical and sociological value. It is difficult to impress abstractions upon weak minds. The child with such a mind cannot comprehend his own inability. He sees no difference between an expression of an idea in his own jargon and its expression in the language of the teacher or a book; but give him something to be made with his hands, and he will at once see the difference between the model and the crude results of his own handiwork. He is slow to see the relations of abstract number and abstract quantity in the schoolroom, but quick to see the relations of concrete number and quantity in the workshop. Attempts at creation stimulate thought and develop accuracy.

The workshop cultivates both hand and mind, and reveals the weakness of each in its products, and reveals them in such a way that the pupil cannot help seeing them, and profiting thereby. He would not have been a truant, if he could have seen its evils, but the workshop puts before his own eyes the evils of waste, false representations, and broken obligations. He there learns to act in sequence and to work honestly. Manual training is a great teacher of moral law.

A truant school is of great value because it saves boys to useful lives who otherwise might become criminals. As an ethical proposition it is worth all it costs to save the boys. Financially it pays, because every dollar expended upon truant schools saves itself many fold in police, court, and prison expenses.

The rapid influx of ignorant immigrants, the poverty and distress in our large cities, and the rapid increase of vice are trying our institutions, and our country is looking to its public schools for salvation. In them all classes meet, and there the evils of society can be assuaged. It is in them that our hopes for the future are centered. The public is realizing the value of truant schools, and year by year greater demands are made for efficient teaching therein. Year by year greater demands will be made upon the grades for preventing truancy. School boards can meet these demands only by employing and keeping good teachers. The best teachers. of a city should be assigned to schools where they are most needed rather than where there is the greatest political pull.

Taxpayers are beginning to see the ethical side of our school system, and to realize that ethical considerations pay financially. A city school system can have no better investment than an efficient truant school. It aids the schools and benefits the truants. It pays morally, mentally, and financially.

WHAT CONSTITUTES AN EFFICIENT SUPERIN

TENDENT?

ISRAEL H. PERES, EX-PRESIDENT OF SCHOOL BOARD, MEMPHIS, TENN. A school superintendent should be a man of mental and moral integrity, swayed by neither his likes nor his dislikes in the performance of his official duty; a man whose every characteristic breathes a present wholesomeness and not a musty antiquity; whose every decision about matters in his province, if not correct or satisfactory, is, at any rate, considered by the most hostile critic as strictly impartial. The least suspicion of his mental and moral integrity in the discharge of his duty renders him unfit, if not fatally dangerous to the purity of the school system. He must have a broad and liberal culture. He himself must be thoroly educated. He is supposed to be, and ought to be, an educational leader, and this he cannot be unless he be an earnest and assiduous scholar. Without

scholarship and culture he commands neither respect nor confidence, and his administration of his high trust results in no permanent good to the system.

He should be a teacher; should have grown up in the teaching profession. By his character, culture, teaching power, sympathy with and comprehension of pupils; by his will, tact, study, and kindly and confident bearing, he should have won promotion to the high calling of a superintendent. His position should be reached because of his recognized ability as a teacher. He should gain the top by earnest work from the bottom upward, as is done by the great captains in industrial and other professional departments of life.

The superintendent should be superior to the teacher in mental power, culture, and experience; if the reverse is true, there is a mal-administration of forces which works a positive injury to the public-school system and tends toward regress instead of progress. If it should be a recog

nized fact that the corps of teachers knows more about the art and science of teaching and the needs of schools and pupils than the superintendent, the evil results of such a situation are patent to the most casual observer, and especially to those who interest themselves in public-school matters.

To quote, the superintendent should be "an educational expert who does not waste his time in mechanical detail." His supreme delight should not be in looking after school furniture, buildings, and grounds, but his greatest interest should be in his profession and in the science and art of pedagogics and education. He should be a trained professional expert before he is elected to office, and his experience should not be permitted to be gained by years of experimenting and routine contact with teachers and pupils. In a word, he should be the master of his position in every respect. He should lead; should be capable of increasing the efficiency of his teachers by reason of his knowledge and capacity.

He should be a man who has done something for education, and who is known or is making himself known to the great body of high-class educators in the United States. He should be an authority upon some pressing problem or some educational matter of moment, and should be recognized as such in the educational world; a man who is looked upon in his profession as a student. He should command from his colleagues an enthusiastic admiration for his ability as an educator and manager of a system of schools, and not evoke a smile of good-natured toleration. To this end he should reinforce his study by attending educational association meetings. An idea developed at the National Educational Association meeting in Charleston in 1900, in connection with superintendents, was that they should attend such meetings in order that they might give ideas to others who are there, if they have any to give, or, if they have none, to catch an idea from those who have. This proposition was strongly advocated. The live, up-to-date superintendents of the United States are, to a large degree, the life and brains of educational

organizations, especially of the National Educational Association, which indicates that the modern superintendent who cares to succeed beyond the dollar-and-cent idea must be a man who can mingle among men for the purpose of exchanging views. There is something inspiring in coming in contact with such men, strong and virile, and to hear them discuss in a practical manner the best thoughts on leading educational topics.

It is proper that a superintendent in his monthly or periodical report should present the number of pupils in attendance, the per cent. of attendance and per cent. of tardiness; but it should also contain matters concerning the educational status of the system of which he should be the vital part and which from time to time come up in the administration of his high office. The greatest farce on earth is to hear or read the report of a superintendent which gives the number of pupils in attendance, the per cent. of attendance and per cent. of tardiness, adding not a word about curriculum; the advancement of pupils in character, training, and learning; nothing about methods; not a bit of original advice about the change, adoption, or rejection of text-books; not a suggestion as to the fitness or unfitness of teachers; not a spark of intellectual fire; not a quickening thought; not an inspiring idea; nothing but figures-figures up and down, all in a row. A superintendent who is content with such a report has neither capacity nor ability beyond place and pay, and expects to retain his position, not because of his capacity, but by reason of "pull.” Such a superintendent no doubt looks upon a gathering of the National Educational Association as itself a farce, and would not deign to descend from his lofty self-sufficiency to mingle with superintendents who have been eminently successful in their chosen profession, who have worked, studied, learned, taught, observed, and progressed, and who have done something vital for education in the United States.

The American School Board Journal, edited by Mr. William George Bruce, some few years ago sent out for discussion the question whether the superintendent should have full power and control in the selection of teachers, text-books, and curriculum, or whether such matters should be left to him, with a revisory and final decision by the board. I was then of the opinion that the answer to this question depended entirely upon the personnel of the board and the personality of the superintendent, and upon the facts surrounding each particular case; that it was impossible to answer the question flatly in the affirmative or negative, because a large number of superintendents did not come up to the full measure of their great calling. But I am a firm believer in one-man power. I believe that the superintendent should be a man of such culture, mental power, and strength of character, educative fitness and managerial capacity, strict impartiality and fairness, that the whole educational part of the school system can be left solely under his control without fear, the part of the board or community, but that his selection of teachers,

on

text-books, curriculum, method, and management will be based on merit, and only on merit, and that the schools of which he is the head will, year by year, substantially and permanently progress. This is not an ideal picture. It is a situation which can be attained, if the taxpayers who work hard for their daily living, and to pay their taxes to support schools, will demand for the position of superintendent a man who is trained absolutely in his profession along the lines herein before indicated; and, for this reason, his election should depend on his fitness and the faithful performance of his duty, and not upon the past records in war or politics. These two considerations should especially be divorced from the election of the superintendent, no matter how much of politics there may be in the election of the school board, or any other municipal agency having the care of the schools.

I take the liberty to incorporate in this paper the editorial comment of the Charleston News and Courier of July 13, 1900:

One man, for example, is made superintendent because he performed good service for his country in the war that closed thirty-five years ago. It may be that he could not write an English sentence to save his life; that he doesn't understand the multiplication table; that he has no acquaintance whatever with the history of our institutions; that he is without the least executive ability; and yet he fills the most important office in the country, because he must have a place, and there is no other office to which he can be assigned in the distribution of the loaves and fishes.

Such men should be left out of the schools, and all such considerations as the foregoing should be divorced from the election when it comes to filling the superintendency, either of the county or of the city schools.

A superintendent should be a student of political and social science. He should understand a philosophy of the development of individuals, nations, and races. He should understand the possibilities of his own section. (Mendenhall of the National Normal.) If he does, he can make his schools keep pace with the social progress from the primitive community to the highly complex social organism of which we are today a part.

To summarize: The superintendent is the life-blood of the school system. He is the main-spring; he is the fountain. From him come energy, ambition, progress, life, and success; or from him emanate a dull conservatism and provincialism, content simply to be pushed along by the general growth, development, and environment. The superintendent most of all should be a man of liberal and broad education, a man of mental strength and power, a man of the present and not of the past. He should be a man who is willing to and does take an interest in educational matters, who is making a study of the science of teaching and education; and no man should be elected a superintendent of any system of schools anywhere in the United States who is not competent from every point of view suggested, for it is he, as much as, if not more than, anyone in the land, who controls the destinies of the coming generations, and "his brains and morals should be the best attainable."