The most potent of all forces is the personal life of the teacher. Young lives are easily molded and directed by the strong, earnest life of a Christian teacher. If our schools are taught by men and women of sound ethical and spiritual lives, devoted in the most conscientious way to the work of building up in the children the highest elements of worthy manhood and noble womanly character, shall we not have met the most important condition of religious education?

In conclusion, it is maintained that the highest good of the individual and of society as a whole demands that the public schools of America, along with physical, intellectual, and other forms of culture, shall make some systematic effort to develop and train the highest spiritual consciousness of the children, and shall seek during the school life to bring into the experience of the child the typical and fundamental activities of the broad religious life of society. To do this in a rational way, without narrowness or sectarianism, but in the broadest, most catholic manner, is not only the duty, but a great privilege, of the school.

DISCUSSION

R. A. OGG, superintendent of schools, Kokomo, Ind.-There should be no chasm between the school and the church. They are working to a common end. Let me deal with the question in the concrete, and speak of some of the particular problems that arise. There are those who hold that school-teachers should not teach in the Sunday school. To this I must reply that the fact of being a teacher neither creates nor releases from the obligation to render service to the church in its various activities. The teacher of experience and power in the school is needed to aid in making teaching in the Sunday school more valuable, and, if health will permit, the duty is clear. Some doubt may properly exist as to the attitude of the school toward the exercises in connection with certain church festivals, as Christmas and Easter, the Jewish New Year, etc. The demand of the church for some of the time of the children to prepare for these occasions is to the detriment of the school. Shall children be excused? There must be caution here that the school may be protected. But in so far as pupils can be allowed to participate in these exercises, it should be done, that they may feel that the school is in harmony with the work of the church. A question sometimes arises as to the propriety of the schools having exercises for these special church occasions, whether the school may not discount, or at least anticipate, the Christmas exercises of the church. Such is possible, and the more so because the school is able to drill more fully for these performances. But, on the whole, the influence is good, for the child finds that the same ideals exist in the school and the church. The question of supreme importance is that of the use of the Bible. The hostility to its use that existed a few years since has largely ceased. To my mind there can be no real question in this land that the Bible should be used. It is the exclusive book of the church; it ought not to be the excluded book of the school. While many teachers use the best literature they can find for teaching ethics, and with good reason, it remains true that there is no other book so replete with ethical teachings as the book of the church, and children should not be allowed to regard it as foreign to the schools. As principal of a high school, I formerly used the Bible for regular devotional exercises, and yet, I am sure, never offended any in my school. When I left the school, my pupils could think of no more appropriate gift as a token of their good-will than a fine Bible, and in

the gift Catholic and Jew united with Protestant with equal enthusiasm. The Bible stories cannot be excelled for real value, and some of the best teaching of the Bible I ever saw was by two teachers this last year thru the use of the biographies of some of the Bible heroes.

THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF ART: CAUSE AND CURE OF ART UNRESPONSIVENESS IN CHILDREN

CHARLES DE GARMO, PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION, CORNELL UNIVERSITY, ITHACA, N. Y.

Few will claim for our art instruction that it produces all that is desirable in its influence upon the subsequent lives of the people. We see that it is not always poverty, so much as artistic insensibility, that renders the common American life so pathetically barren of art influence. Our houses, our walls, our furniture, our tables, our clothes all bear witness to art unresponsiveness, if not in the school itself, at least in the period when the school is a thing of the past.

Yet the school tries to do its duty in this as in other departments. Millions of children are patiently, not to say painfully, taught something of art appreciation, something of the power to produce art; a little ability to use the pencil is imparted, a little familiarity with art masterpieces is acquired. Yet genuine enthusiasm among the children during the progress of the work, and permanent transforming influence of the art work upon subsequent life, are all too rare. Not infrequently the art instruction is like a spell of hot weather, a thing first to be endured and then forgotten.

It does not concern us to inquire whether the art instruction in our schools is not as good as that in any other department. This may be unhesitatingly granted. Yet here, as elsewhere, mistaken ideas as to the end and means may paralyze the efforts of thousands of teachers and millions of pupils.

First of all, we need to note the case of those rare examples of artistic genius found now and then among children. It is from this class that the great artists always come. A breath may stir their sensitive souls into an enduring passion for art. To see a true work of art is with them to worship it; to possess a pencil or a brush is to acquire skill. The school, however, does not produce genius; it can at best but discover it, and offer it opportunity. The inborn art impulse will do the rest.

The burden of our work lies in the fact that teachers without artistic genius must teach the pupils who are likewise deficient. The mass of children have but latent and limited artistic possibilities, which can be developed into permanent usefulness only by methods and aims that appeal most powerfully to the strongest artistic motives. With such

pupils mere exposure to art does not awaken artistic appreciation; mere drill upon technique does not give artistic power. Lacking the vital motives that lend inspiration to vision, and patience to the acquisition of skill, the eye remains dull and the hand inert.

If, therefore, our art instruction is to become more fruitful, we must perceive more clearly what are the most potent art motives that can be brought to bear upon children.

Let us first examine our current art ideals, to learn, if possible, in what they are defective. It is a curious fact that, tho evolution has for forty years determined the course of biology, of history, of sociology, of ethics, and of psychology, its influence is only here and there to be traced in education. Even Spencer, the great evolutionist, when he wrote a book on education, for the most part left evolution out of it. Just as up to the present it has been the custom to make a cross-section of the adult mind in order to learn what the child's mind is, so it has been the practice to make a cross-section of developed art to find out what the child should be taught. In other words, we have gone to the art genius to learn the ends and means of art education. The first effect is that we are blinded to true artistic progress by accepting the art genius' dictum that art is an end in itself. This is what Professor Baldwin calls the autotelic theory of studies—each becomes its own end. The fact that there has been a progress in art, that it has had diverse origins among primitive people, that it has adapted itself to the genius. of a nation or an age-all this is forgotten. It is assumed that there is an absolute art, whose end can be in nothing but itself, and whose celestial emanations are somehow to illumine the soul of youth. The result is that what I call "Madonna art" loads the walls of our schoolrooms. Catalogs are constantly sent out from art and educational centers, three-fourths of whose selections are chosen from romantic art, the Madonna being the leading type. The effect can hardly be otherwise than abnormal. Being stimulated to admire what they cannot possibly appreciate, some are thrown into a harmful state of sentimentality; others are left in a state of indifference or youthful contempt; none, with the possible exception of a genius now and then, are healthfully stimulated by such means to a higher artistic life. The motive is too remote, too abstract, too far removed from anything that pertains to life. As soon as art is abstracted from the motives that lead a people to action, it does, indeed, become an end in itself. Its products are shut up in museums, to be viewed from time to time by gaping or perspiring multitudes. The artist dwells apart from the common activities of the people, a producer and a worshiper of an abstract product, which is as remote from real life as astronomy is from engineering. The fundamental defect of such conceptions is that, being abstracted from intellectual, from economic, from political activities of the people, they

stimulate no activities, hence do not contribute to the progress or survival of individuals or classes or nations. Whatever is out of relation to

the active realities of life can appeal at best only to the select few, chiefly the geniuses, and the sentimentalists. The classes that find it necessary to struggle in order to meet their requisites for survival, such as lead to economic thrift, to resistance to the temptations that economic success carries in its train, to intellectual mastery of the sciences underlying professional careers, will endure such autotelic art instruction as they must, but will abandon its practice as soon as they can. This holds both of attempts to teach art appreciation and to impart artistic skill.

Is it not manifestly absurd to feed modern American children on romantic art, or any other form that is so remote in time and so foreign in conception as to be ages removed from any living interests of thought or action? Only a wholly erroneous idea of the origin and functions of art, and an equally delusive conception of the normal processes of education, can account for such wholesale efforts to reach undesirable ends by irrational methods. What rapture can we expect a healthy-minded boy to feel when he beholds a picture of the immaculate conception, or a modern girl when she sees a Madonna? The ideals embodied in a Madonna lie a thousand years behind the modern girl, while as a stimulus to art productivity the technique lies as far ahead. Not even as representatives of motherhood and infancy are these pictures effective, for it is not their purpose to represent these ideas. They do not inspire such wholesome delight in the mind of a child as that which arises even from a good picture of a brood of chickens or a basket of kittens.

Lacking the experience and historic background that can alone render such works of art intelligible, children can get only false or perverted fondness for them; and, even if understanding is present, these works of other ages, inspired by obsolete ideals, can no longer awaken a vivid interest in the beholder.

From every standpoint, therefore, autotelic ideas of art must be condemned when they fix the matter and method of the art in our schools, since they ignore development in art and in children, and since, being devoid of motives that lead to activity, that promote intellectual or economic or social survival, they are fit only for small esoteric groups whose leisure or profession or sentiment leads them to worship art for art's sake.

When it comes to acquisition of skill, I readily admit that it is possible for a good teacher to secure not a little in the absence of any adequate training in art appreciation. A gifted miss of twelve in one of our Ithaca schools, infinitely wearied with the art instruction, bored as much as a healthy child can be, so that she was in danger of acquiring a permanent disgust for drawing, was taken from the drawing class and put under the instruction of an artist in the university. Not only was the

lost interest restored, but very rapid progress was secured.

Good drill

here will develop skill in drawing, as it will in any other subject. Yet when we come to the masses of children, who must be taught by teachers who are not artists, and who teach art no better than they teach arithmetic or grammar, we come again to the imperative need of strong artistic motives. I have said enough, perhaps, if not entirely to convince you that such motives cannot be found in art regarded as an end in itself, yet enough at least to raise the question whether we can longer adhere to ideals that regard both subject and child as beyond the pale of the processes of development.

Having satisfied ourselves that autotelic art is false in theory and defective in practice, it remains for us to inquire how the fact of development in subject and child should influence the ends we should seek to attain, and the means whereby we may reach them.

Even a cursory study of the origin of art leads to the conviction that nowhere and at no time did art, as a thing apart from life, ever spring, Minerva-like, into existence. It has always been associated with some active struggle for existence, or other strong instinctive line of conduct. At times we associate the beginnings of art with play, then with warlike or erotic motives, then with primitive religion, often with things that promote the economic well-being of the individual or community. note, moreover, that some form of feeling always accompanies artistic production or process, as in song and dance, in personal adornment, in artistic construction or arrangement.

We

From an economic standpoint, this feeling is the artistic satisfaction arising from the harmonious grouping of the elements of economic goods. This would appear in the manufacture of utensils, of implements of warfare, of articles of clothing or of food, of structures for shelter. The satisfaction of the savage in such harmonious arrangement of crude materials has developed into the refined artistic joy of the modern man in his home and its adornment, in his clothing and his food, and in the representations of his spiritual life. In the last analysis, however, the highest artistic pleasure finds its genesis in the harmonious grouping of the elements that have to do with his individual or class or national survival; hence with his important life-activities. Having its chief origin, then, in the things most important for living, we have an explanation of the fact that every great epoch of art has mirrored the age that produced it, not some other age with other ideals.

The genesis of art should show us, moreover, that our art education will be ineffective to the extent that it abandons the present and the vital for the distant and the fanciful or the sentimental. To some extent the development of the child follows that of the race, especially in the unfolding of its power to conceive, and in other respects it is a product of its own time. As a formal principle, the harmonious grouping of