The heroes in the boys' stories who are the most popular, who secure the most unbounded enthusiasm from the boy, are those scouts, or detectives, or sea captains, who, forgetting their own safety, risk their lives for some one else. The person who is merely selfish is never a popular hero to the boy of these years. In the same way with the girl, while the emphasis is upon romance, mere self-achievement, the winning of wealth or power, or position does not in itself characterize fairly their leading heroes. It is the same principle that underlies their games, or their gangs, or their domestic life. It is the larger unit that is appearing in consciousness, and the largest interests of boys and girls alike are centered about those persons who, in some obvious way, actually do things for others and in a way that appeals to the children.

A fourth line of inquiry that gives us equally clear results is as to the age of conversions and of first crime. The bulk of all conversions occur during the period from twelve to eighteen. Data in regard to this matter have been worked out extensively by Starbuck and Coe. Results from my own investigations would make it appear that three and one-half as many persons join the church during the years from twelve to eighteen as during all the rest of life. If one regard religion as essentially characterized by the service of others, one then sees the significance of these figures in terms of adolescence. What way may the school recognize this reaching out of the social nature of boys and girls during adolescence? In some way there must be developed in the school to a large degree the spirit of school loyalty, not for the benefit of the school, but for the benefit of the pupil; for here is offered an opportunity for loyalty that is larger than loyalty for self. This is one of the advantages of school athletics. It tends to call out and devolop this school spirit that makes definitely toward the development of the spirit of loyalty.

There are, however, more intimate ways than this of approaching the problem. It is a matter of common observation that the pupil comes into more general social relations with others in connection with dancing and eating than in most other ways. When a group of individuals come together for social purposes it is our custom to see that they have opportunity to eat, after which social relationships seem to be vastly easier than before. The after-dinner speech would be impossible before dinner, quite aside from the contradiction involved in the terms. A new state of mind has been induced by the individuals eating together. The psychology of the banquet deserves an investigation it has not yet received. When a group of individuals come together about the piano and sing, they, too, quite unconsciously to themselves, come into a new social relation. Individuals who march together, who dance together, also come to a greater or lesser extent into this feeling of increased social unity. One of the ways in which a school may definetely appeal to the social feeling, is to have music that shall secure co-operation from the whole school at once, that shall bring out in a wholesome and strong way, not merely the development of the æsthetic feeling, but, of much more importance than this, of those feelings of social unity to which I have already referred as forming the basis of social life. Hence, is it not a fair judgment, that music deserves a place in the school program quite apart from the so-called æsthetic discipline that may be given in connection with it? Gymnastic and folk dancing, for similar reasons, may well form an integral part of the program. Here

the physical reaches up to the social plane. There is, however, a still deeper significance that must be given to the social instinct. We are living in a time when democracy is being tried, when the value of the individual is being tested. Preparation for democracy is by democracy. It is true that a sufficiently strong disciplinarian may be able, without the force of public opinion, to enforce law as a power from outside. This accomplishes little in building ability for self government. The social feeling of the school must be led to crystalize and form the traditions of good government. Public opinion must not tolerate dishonesty in the classrooms. It must maintain order and a high standard of social co-operation in the school. That government is real, and makes for the molding of character, which is the best expression of the truest feelings of the governed themselves. It is a common thing to have an individual in early life so thoroly governed that upon reaching adult life he has no capacity for self-government.

The high-school program and methods of administration should be constructed with reference to this social spirit and tradition that is forming so rapidly in the character of boys and girls during these years. Unless the public opinion in a school is on the side of things that make for high morality, it were better there were no schools. No intellectual efficiency in the classroom can possibly counterbalance the evil of social traditions. The tradition of the gang, of the school, of the crowd must be on the side of government, of self-government, of self-control; and I take it that the capacity to accomplish exactly this thing with the children is one of the major ends to be secured by the school, far outweighing-during these years-the value of any mental objects.

Situation as Regards the Course of Study*.

BY JOHN DEWEY.

A school board or a superintendent can lay out a course of study down to the point of stating exactly the number of pages of text-books to be covered in each year, each term and month of the year. He may prescribe the exact integers and fraction of integers with which the child shall make scholastic acquaintance during any period of his instruction; he may directly or indirectly define the exact shapes to be reproduced in drawing, or mention the exact recipes to be followed in cooking. Doubtless the experience of the individual teacher who makes the connections between these things and the life of the child will receive incidental attention in laying out these courses. But, so long as the teacher has no definite voice the attention will only be incidental; and, as a further consequence, the average teacher will give only incidental study to the problems involved. If his work is the task of carrying out the instructions imposed upon him, then his time and thought must be absorbed in the matter of execution. There is no motive for interest of a thoroly vital and alert sort in questions of the intrinsic value of the subject-matter and its adaptation to the needs of child growth. He may be called upon by official requirements, or the pressure of circumstance, to be a student of educational books and journals, but conditions relieve him of the

*Extract from an article in the June Educational Review.

necessity of being a student of the most fundamental educational problems in their most urgent reality.

The teacher needs to study the mechanics of successfully carrying into effect the prescribed matter of instruction; he does not have to study that matter itself, or in its educative bearing. Needless to say, the effect of this upon the actual course of study is to emphasize the thought and time given to those subjects and phases of subjects where there is most promise of success in doing the exact things prescribed. The three R's are again magnified, and the technical and routine aspects of the newer studies tend to crowd out those elements that give them their deeper significance in intellectual and moral life. Since, however, the school must have relief from monotony, must have "interest," must have diversification and recreation, these studies become too easily tools for the introduction of the supposedly necessary excitement and amusement of the child. The judicious observer who sees below the surface, but not to the foundation, again discounts these studies. Meanwhile the actual efficiency of the three R's is hampered and lessened by the superaddition of the new ways of employing time, whether they be routine or exciting in character.

It may easily be said that the classroom teacher at present is not sufficiently educated to be intrusted with any part in shaping a course of study. I waive the fundamental question—the question of democracy—whether the needed education can be secured without giving more responsibility even to the comparatively uneducated. The objection suggests another fundamental condition in our present school procedure-the question of the status of the teacher as regards selection and appointment.

The real course of study must come to the child from the teacher. What gets to the child is dependent upon what is in the mind and consciousness of the teacher, and upon the way it is in his mind. It is thru the teacher that the value even of what is contained in the text-book is brought home to the child; just in the degree in which the teacher's understanding of the material of the lessons is vital, adequate, and comprehensive will that material come to the child in the same form; in the degree in which the teacher's understanding is mechanical, superficial, and restricted the child's appreciation will be correspondingly limited and perverted. If this be true, it is obviously futile to plan large expansions of the studies of the curriculum beyond the education of the teacher. I am far from deDying the capacity on the part of truth above and beyond the comprehension of the teacher to filter thru to the mind of an aspiring child; but, upon the whole, it is certain, beyond controversy, that the success of the teacher in teaching, and of the pupil in learning, will depend upon the intellectual equipment of the teacher.

To put literature into a course of study quite irrespective of the teacher's personal appreciation of literary value-to say nothing of accurate discrimination as to the facts-is to go at the matter from the wrong end. To enact that at a given date all the grades of a certain city shall have nature study is to invite confusion and distraction. It would be comic (if it were not tragic) to suppose that all that is required to make music and drawing a part of the course of study is to have the school board legislate that a certain amount of the time of the pupil,

covering a certain prescribed ground, shall be given to work with pencil and paper, and to musical exercises. There is no magic by which these things can pass over from the printed page of the school manual to the child's consciousness. If the teacher has no standard of value in relation to them, no intimate personal response of feeling to them, no conception of the methods of art which alone bring the child to a corresponding intellectual and emotional attitude, these studies will remain what precisely they so often are passing recreations, modes of showing off, or exercises in technique.

The special teacher has arisen because of the recognition of the inadequate preparation of the average teacher to get the best results with these newer subjects. Special teaching, however, shifts rather than solves the problem. As already indicated, the question is a twofold one. It is a question, not only of what is known, but of how it is known. The special instructor in nature study of art may have a better command of the what-of the actual material to be taught,— but be deficient in the consciousness of the relations borne by that particular subject to other forms of experience in the child, and, therefore, to his own personal growth. When this is the case we exchange king log for king stork. We exchange an ignorant and superficial teaching for a vigorous but one-sided, because over. specialized, mode of instruction. The special teacher in manual training or what not, having no philosophy of education,—having, that is, no view of the whole of which his own subject is a part,-isolates that study and works it out wholly in terms of itself. His beginning and his end, as well as the intermediate materials and methods, fall within manual training. This may give technical facility, but it is not (save incidentally) education.

This is not an attack upon special or departmental teaching. On the contrary, I have just pointed out that this mode of teaching has arisen absolutely in response to the demands of the situation. Since our present teachers are so largely an outcome of the older education, the so-called all-round teacher is for the most part a myth. Moreover, it is a mistake to suppose that we can secure the allround teacher merely by instructing him in a larger number of branches. In the first place, human capacity is limited. The person whose interests and powers are all-round is not as a rule teaching in grade schools. He is at the head of the great scientific, industrial, and political enterprises of civilization. But granted that the average teacher could master ten distinct studies as well as five, it still remains true that without intellectual organization, without difinite insight into the relation of these studies to one another and to the whole of life, without ability to present them to the child from the standpoint of such insight, we simply add an overburdened and confused teacher to the overburdened and confused child. In a word, to make the teaching in the newer studies thoroly effective, whether by specialists or by the all-around teacher, there must, in addition to knowledge of the particular branch, be sanity, steadiness, and system in the mental attitude of the instructor. It is folly to suppose that we can carry on the education of the child apart from the education of the teacher.

If I were to touch upon certain other matters fundamentally connected with the problem of securing the teachers who make the nominal course of study a reality, I should be started upon an almost endless road. However, we must not

pass on without at last noticing that the question is one of political, as well as of intellectual, organization. An adequate view of the whole situation would take into account the general social conditions upon which depends the actual supplying of teachers to the schoolroom. The education of the candidate, of the wouldbe teacher, might be precisely that outlined above, and yet it would remain, to a large extent, inoperative, if the appointment of school teachers was at the mercy of personal intrique, political bargaining, and the effort of some individual or class to get power in the community thru manipulation of patronage. It is sentimental to suppose that any large and decisive reform in the course of study can take place as long as such agencies influence what actually comes in a living way to the life of a child.

Nor in a more comprehensive view could we be entirely silent upon the need of commercial as well as political reform. Publishing companies affect not only the text books and apparatus, the garb with which the curriculum clothes itself, but also and in direct fashion the course of study itself. New studies are introduced because some pushing firm, by a happy coincidence, has exactly the books which are needed to make that study successful. Old studies which should be entirely displaced (if there be any logic in the introduction of the new one) are retained because there is a vested interest behind them. Happy is the large school system which is free from the congestion and distraction arising from just such causes as these. And yet there are those who discuss the relative merits of what they are pleased to call old and new education as if it were purely an abstract and intellectual matter.

But I cannot enter upon these larger phases. It is enough if we recognize the typical signs indicating the impossibility of separating either the theoretical discussion of the course of study or the problem of its practical efficiency from intellectual and social conditions which at first sight are far removed; it is enough to recognize that certain conditions imbedded in the present scheme of school administration affect so profoundly results reached by the newer studies, by manual training, art, and nature study, that it is absurd to discuss the value or lack of value of the latter, without taking these conditions into account. I recur to my original proposition: that these studies are not having their own career, are not exhibiting their own powers, but are hampered and compromised by a school machinery originated and developed with reference to quite different ends and aims. The real conflict is not between a certain group of studies, the three R's, those having to do with the symbols and tools of intellectual life, and other studies representing the personal development of the child, but between our professed ends and the means we are using to realize these ends. The popular assumption, however, is to the contrary. It is still the common belief (and not merely in popular thought, but among those who profess to speak with authority) that the two groups of studies are definitely opposed to each other in their aims and methods, in the mental attitude demanded from the child, in the kind of work called for from the instructor. It is assumed that we have a conflict between one group of studies dealing only with the forms and symbols of knowledge, studies to be mastered by mechanical drill, and between those which appeal to the vital concerns of child life and afford present satisfaction. This