PROGRESS IN EDUCATION.

BY BISHOP JOHN L. SPAULDING

Peoria, Illinois.

Bishop Spaulding sketched the great epochs in the progress of education from the time of the Romans up to the present. He then said, in part: “At the opening of the nineteenth century there is an enthusiasm such as never before existed. Education being a process of conscious evolution, those who assist and guide it must themselves continue to grow. The work accomplished in the United States during the last fifty years in the organization of a great system of schools was never before equaled in the history of any people. In our white native people at present illiteracy has almost ceased to exist. Our progress in higher education has been even more rapid. The number of colleges has more than doubled in the last quarter of a century, while the standards for admission into almost all of them have been raised. Original investigation along scientific lines has been introduced and developed to a wonderful extent. In scientific and technical education, in agricultural and industrial education, we are making genuine and rapid progress. The bishop said that the normal schools of the country had rendered important service in the past, but that their training alone is insufficient, as teachers should have more than mere professional skill. "The more comprehensive our grasp of the power and the meaning of teaching becomes, the easier it shall be to persuade the best men and women to devote themselves to teaching, for we shall make them feel that the teacher does not take up a trade, but the highest art. Education is the furtherance of life, and instruction is education only when the knowledge acquired gives truer ideas of the worth of life and supplies motives for right living."

The struggle among the school book publishers of the country to secure the contracts for furnishing the books for the schools of Utah for the five years following next June has already begun. A. S. Barnes, one of the biggest school book men in the country, was in the city yesterday looking after the interests of Ginn & Co., of Chicago. Other book men are expected. Under the laws of Utah the school books can be changed every five years. The first five years will expire next June, and the fight will be on from this time out to get control of the business of the state for the five years to follow. Salt Lake Herald.

A Model Address to Teachers.

SUPERINTENDENT COOPER of SEATTLE.

"I have no pet schemes to exploit - no experiments to try. I have just one thing set before my ambition in this field, and that is to work out thru you and by your aid plans that will conduce to the lasting benefit of those committed to our care. I have no policy to announce, no platform to promulgate. They would better be worked out, but in any platform which may be developed there is one big plank which should overtop and obscure all others, and upon that I stand unalterably. The plank is this: The interests of the children of this city are sacred and inviolable. They are not to be trifled with for personal, commercial or political purposes. I shall permit no personal interest of my own or that of anyone else, as far as I can prevent it, to stand in the way of the accomplishment of their rights.

"I believe in the mission of the teacher, in the power of right instruction to minister effectively for the good of boys and girls, and have faith that it will be potent enough to overcome in some degree the effect of evil tendencies and bad blood. I believe in the teacher as something superior to books, to mechanism and to methods, and that a teacher of the right sort will prevail mightily, no matter what prescription of method or course of study may obtain. I believe in the teacher who works from the inside-from the highest levels of her own inner life—in one who works from the inside of her pupils from the highest levels of their inner life, for both teacher and boy have a lower level - an animal level- one not made of flesh either, but a level of mean prompting and unworthy passion. I believe in the teacher who looks for the best in pupils, in subjects, in methods, and finding the best, works at it so that thru it the poorer and meaner may be approached and bettered. The discriminating optimist is an injurious thing behind the teacher's desk.

"I believe that there are three things which go along with instruction that are more important than anything in the course of study. These are, first, the mastery of difficulty, the learning of the power of I can and I will; second, the effect of responsibility, the certain residuum left over from having something worth doing and having to do it, whether it is agreeable or not; third, the acquirement of inspiration, the intellectual and moral forces set aflame with right desire.

"I am your assistant rather than you mine. It is my highest function to help you to do your work better. Although I am very sure that there are many here who can do their particular work better than I might do it, yet if by counsel or suggestion or encouragement I can make you more effective at less expenditure, I shall have done well.

"We stand face to face with a year of life for us, and for the children of this city. As we enter upon it let us do so with the feeling that the whole

earth centers about every school room door and every school room door opens into the wide earth. It will be a good year, a happy year, if we will have it so."

Present Tendencies in Secondary Education.

ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWNE
University of California.

The keynote of current educational thought seems to have been sounded by Professor John Dewey in his saying that, the school is not preparation for life: it is life. Education is to provide for the future needs of pupils by providing for their real present needs. One of the most notable and comprehensive tendencies of secondary education, and of all education, is accordingly the tendency to seek an understanding of the living, growing, persons who go to school; and to treat them in a way to promote their healthy growth. This doctrine is sound at bottom. Persons are the most precious things in this life; and child persons as precious as persons fully matured. In this view we have true humanism. It is a view that makes the school interesting. It is moral; for what is morality after all but fullness of personal life? It is religious, too. "The knowledge of ourselves," said John Calvin, "is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance toward finding him."

On the one side, such doctrine as this is leading us into individualism. It prompts the demand for free election of studies in the secondary school; for individualized processes of instruction.

On the other side, the study of development has shown how strangely dependent the individual is on his social relationships. We see, in fact, that there is nothing worth the name of human personality that has not arisen under the stress and strain of getting on with one's fellows. So we have come to attach new significance to the mere fact that in school many young people come together and have varied dealings one with another. We are seeing that social intercourse is not a mere accident of school education but one of the chief things in school education

We may go further and say that, the school is not only life: it is preparation for life. Just because it is life, it looks forward to larger life. Any life that does not look forward is poor and mean; and we should make a losing bargain if we exchanged the old school that concerned itself only with the future, for a new school which concerned itself only with the present.

So our secondary education looks forward to the citizenship which awaits all of our students, and consciously prepares them for its duties. Whether they are destined for the more extended training of the University or not, it undertakes to direct their attention to public affairs, well knowing that the time has already come for them to take anticipatory interest in such things. It takes account, too, of the fact that each citizen must have a life work

peculiarly his own, in order to discharge his full obligation to the body politic. How secondary education may pay due regard to this fact and yet avoid the injustice of binding our youth at an early age to a course in life which may not be rightly their own, is one of the hardest problems with which we have to deal.

May I venture to add, that our secondary education looks even to life beyond this life; or rather to life above and all about this life. We are finding that the seething adolescence of our academies and high schools is above all skeptical and religious. The two things go together and belong together at this age. Education does not altogether meet the needs of the present life of our youth if it does not verge upon the shadowy fields of things too real to be seen.

The more important tendencies of our secondary education seem to lie in the directions I have indicated. Permit me now to call your attention to a more particular consideration of some of the topics already touched upon.

1. And first some tendencies affecting our courses of study. A recent writer has said that "The time for the finishing school has gone by." With equal truth it may be said that the time for the "fitting school" has gone by. I do not mean by "fitting school" a school for the education of youth who are preparing for college; but rather a school which prepares for college whether it educates or not. The proper business of every school is educaThe growing recognition of this fact is one of the most marked of present tendencies. The sharp distinction between preparing for college and "preparation for life" is fading out. I think we may say our present working hypothesis is that, so far as general culture is concerned, preparation for higher school, rightly conceived, coincides with preparation for life. I do not extend this principle to secondary schools of a vocational character. And I am not enough of a doctrinaire to accept it as a finality with a regard even to schools of general culture. But it has stood examination and trial sufficiently well to warrant us in employing it as a working hypothesis. Taken in conjunction with a second assumption which I will mention later, I think it will prove very useful in the future organization of our secondary education.

We may put it in different ways. Secondary education which is not good enough for the purposes of the colleges is not good enough for the purposes of life. Education which fails to give good secondary preparation for life, fails also to dary preparation for college. Either way you turn it, the doctrine calls for some reëxamination of our school curriculums, and perhaps for some little change.

In the history of our courses of study, we begin with one fixed and strongly unified course for all. The demand for a recognition of varied needs has led to numerous changes from this old invariable standard. Parallel courses we were first offered, each of them fixed and definite. The options were allowed in one or all of these parallel courses. The number of such courses was increased. The range of options was enlarged. Then we began to hear of the doctrine of free election. This seems to be the polar opposite of

that fixed course for all with which we started. It was necessary for us to come to this extreme, and get a survey of the whole movement from this side, in order to find out just where in the intervening territory we belong.

Will you permit a New Yorker who has long been a Californian to say that some of us on the Pacific Coast have looked with a certain wonder on the outbreak of the idea of the free election of studies in the East during the past year or two. The reported discussions of this subject sound strangely like echoes of our own battles of eight or ten years ago. The sun has not yet learned to move from West to East. So I can explain this phenomenon only by supposing that President Jordan, in the free field of a new university, was able to precipitate a movement which President Eliot has got underway more gradually in the established order of these older states.

We have not come to doctrinal agreement in California; but we have found a modus vivendi and have settled down to the detailed consideration of the question where between the two extremes, of the fixed course and the course with nothing fixed, the highest educational efficiency is to be found.

Speaking broadly, the doctrine that the school is real life may be expected to work to the advantage of teachers and teaching. It puts the school into closer touch with the home, and carries into the school the better standards of the community. The growth of wealth and the sharpening of social distinctions may in some measure negative this tendency; but in other ways it will be reinforced by those very conditions. It is not too much to expect

that the new century will see a new generation of new school men. If there has been no Thomas Arnold nor Edward Thring in our American schools, we have had many excellent teachers, from Ezekiel Cheever down. Let our best men find encouragement and recognition, both public and fraternal, awaiting them within the teaching profession, as other men have found in other professions; and our teachers of world-greatness will in due time appear.

Domestic Art in Education.

Mary S. Woolman in The Southern Workman.

The world is slow in realizing that the hand- work of a nation is potent in developing its mental and spiritual life. The modern teacher in selecting the subjects for the curriculum must consider the interests of childhood and youth, the immediate application in life of the acquirements of the school room and the studies which tend to increase the spirit of service in the pupils. The education which gives due importance to creative hand - work is most completely fashioning the will power of the students. Power in life comes thru an obedient will, which needs in its training as actual use as do the limbs of a child in its physical development. The aim of manual training is misunderstood As a part of school work its object is not to prepare a pupil for a trade, but to afford a training to the motor parts which will make the boy or girl capable of intelligent activity.

of the brain

The child is