And this point of view will first of all influence the child's starting-point as he begins school. The old plan was to take him fresh from play and the activities of the home and the field, and placing him in a stiff seat with the admonition to "be quiet," set him at work learning symbols. His muscles, aching for the activity to which they are accustomed, cry out against the torture of their imprisonment. His mind, used to the stimulus of real problems and living interests, protests against the emptiness of the task which it is given. But regardless of the danger to his physical development from the incarceration in his prison-seat, and in spite of the equal danger to the development of his mental powers, he is required to submit; for he must "learn to read," and must study his "numbers" and his "language."

of old method

The result of this irrational method of introducing a child to his education is known to every observant Stupefying effects teacher. At first the average child is alert and interested. The sheer novelty of the change from home to school stimulates him. His mind must be active on something, so it busies itself on the lessons prescribed, and he learns to read and number. This stage lasts a year or two and then comes the change. The novelty has worn off, school is no longer new, the teacher has ceased to be infallible, and the books have become a bore. The child loses interest in his work. He ceases to be bright and alert. If he is just an average child he becomes dull and fails to master his lessons; he does not like school and stays out on the smallest excuse. After a year or two more of desultory attendance he drops out of school for good, having reached about the fourth grade. If he is an exceptional child— one in ten or twenty-he survives the process we have

thrust on him and goes on until he completes the course. But the average child, and the child who is below the average, loses out; they become educational castaways. The tragedy of it! Dante says a tragedy is "a bad ending of a good beginning." And how many bad endings of good beginnings are we responsible for with our unnatural and senseless methods!

The new curricu

lum connects with home activities

Under the reorganized curriculum the child will enter on the field of learning by a different pathway. Instead of centering all his energies on the symbols of reading and number as if they were the "chief end of man,” he will simply continue the lines of activity already begun in the farm home. He will continue to observe nature, but with this difference; his observation will now be under the guidance and direction of a teacher and will therefore be nature study. He will continue his interest in the crops and animals of the farm; but because he is now under skilled instruction, he will be studying agriculture. He will continue to use his hands in the construction of objects or their pictures, but because he is now being taught how to make them, he is learning manual training or drawing. The girl will go on with her sewing, her cooking and her housekeeping, but she will be taught such methods and developed in such standards of doing these things that she will be studying domestic science. Not that the names agriculture, manual training and domestic science, will at the beginning be needed to describe what the children are taught, but the foundations of these very important subjects are being laid.

And the reading and the number and the language? We now come to them-the child now comes to them, In

deed he may start these things from the first, but they supplement the real and concrete activities instead of Reading, language monopolizing all the child's time and and number follow effort. Nor will he learn to read any less rapidly than under the old system, for now he has an interest and an enthusiasm in his work that extends to all his studies. Besides, he now feels that he needs to know how to read, and write, and number. For there are the interesting things to be read about-the stories of the birds and the flowers and the people concerning whom he is learning; there are interesting things to write and tell about-things that he is doing in his nature study, his gardening, and all the rest. Here he naturally comes to enter on his language work; and there are the real necessities for numbering things-counting and adding and multiplying in the actual problems being met in his manual work, his concrete geography, his instruction in agriculture or the other real studies of the school.

ized

All this is not to say that the child will learn to read without any care being given to reading, or that he will Teaching of the not need to be taught arithmetic or infundamentals vitalstructed in the use of language. It is entirely certain that he will need the best of teaching in all these things, but the point is, that the teaching can be better, and that the child's interest in these formal studies will be stronger and more effective when they rest on a foundation of subjects that fit directly into the actual life and experience of the pupil. Not only is this truth in accord with the principles of good psychology, but it is being tested and proved in hundreds of schools which have dared step out of the well-known path of tradition into the highway of greater freedom and common sense in the reorganizing of their curricula.