ceed at any rate of which he was capable, getting full advantage of ability and diligence, thus giving an incentive to full effort, which was lacking in the regular class-work for which he found himself doing just enough to get through with credit.

The slow, but faithful, man's reason, corresponding to the last of these arguments, would be that he finds himself able to progress as rapidly as consistent with thorough work without the danger of being carried faster than he can go with credit or of being left hopelessly behind.

A distinct advantage of the individual method, so patent that it need not be elaborated, is the opportunity given to any man, graduate or undergraduate, to enter at any time upon any subject for which he is prepared, and to follow it to any desirable or possible extent. The possibilities to the graduate student, to the undergraduate student of limited means, who can conveniently work but part of the year, and to the mature man desiring to investigate a single field, are very great, and the method in this particular seems to conform in the highest degree to the true university idea.

On previous occasions the writer has strenuously advocated before this body the individual method of teaching. He has done this without personal experience with the method, simply because it appealed to his reason as the rational way to deal with individuals no two of whom are alike. His experiment of the past year has taught him many things concerning the details of the work and has made his faith in the method absolute and unchangeable. (For discussion see page 99.)

PEDAGOGIC METHODS IN ENGINEERING

COLLEGES.

BY WILLIAM KENT,

Dean of the College of Applied Science, Syracuse University.

The great advances in engineering practice in the past twenty-five years have been largely due first to the dissatisfaction of engineers and their employers with the way in which things were done in the past, and secondly, to the exercise of the engineer's brains in finding out better ways of doing them.

The work of the engineer has included the systematic study of the properties of his raw materials and of the ways in which these raw materials could be handled, so as to utilize them with the greatest possible saving of time and labor and so as to secure a maximum value of the finished product. This work of the engineer is still going on. People are not yet satisfied with what has been accomplished, and never were engineers more active in trying to find out still better ways of working. The same ideas apply to the technical colleges. Splendid as is the work they have done, no one is yet quite satisfied with them either in the kind of raw material they handle, the method of handling it, or the value of the finished product. Dissatisfaction that merely ends in complaint is of no use to the world, but dissatisfaction that leads thoughtful men to study how things may be improved is of the greatest benefit.

The technical college at present is not in condition

to control the quantity or the quality of its raw material, the high school graduate. He must be accepted with all his imperfections. The problem for the educator is to study and classify these imperfections and devise ways and means of getting rid of them, so as to make the young men better students, and then, when they have acquired the proper study-habit, to devise ways and means of giving them such professional training as they should have, in the most efficient manner possible.

Let us consider the average freshman upon his arrival in the technical college. For the preceding twelve years he is supposed to have had training in the English language. He has criticized Shakespeare, Addison and Carlyle, and yet he cannot write a good composition of five hundred words on any subject which requires the use of his observing powers. His penmanship and his spelling are apt to be execrable and his paper is lacking in neatness. His spoken English is likely to be just as bad. If he has studied a lesson, he cannot recite it in such a manner as to convey information to his hearers. As to arithmetic, he has studied that from four to six years in the grammar school, but neglected it in the high school; and he cannot solve a complicated problem in compound interest, or in mensuration, without making mistakes. His reasoning powers are supposed to have been cultivated in his mathematical, linguistic and scientific courses, but he shows a greater desire to receive information passively as it may be handed out to him rather than to use his thinking powers to obtain it for himself.

This criticism of the young freshman is not intended as any reflection either on his moral character, or on his natural mental ability. His deficiencies are probably largely due not to his natural incapacity, but to defects in his early training, and these defects may to a large degree be remedied by proper training in the technical school.

Take the case of spelling, for instance. The evidence that the spelling of the freshman can be imimproved is found in the following quotation from an article by Professor J. S. Clark, Head of the English Department in the Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., printed in The Nation, November, 1906:

"We have uniformly given, in the tests, one hundred and fifty words, and have 'passed' all those who have misspelled not more than twenty out of the 150. Yet, although great pains were taken to pronounce every word distinctly, and to define it both directly and by giving a sentence containing it, nearly 60 per cent. of the freshmen, on an average, have failed to pass the test from year to year. For many years we have required all who have thus failed to enter a sub-freshman class, one hour a week, and to continue there until they either materially improved their spelling or demonstrated to us that they positively could not learn to spell. The work of this sub-freshman class, significantly dubbed by our students 'the pity-sakes class,' has, of course, not counted among the required number of hours in the college curriculum. Although most of the young people who have gravitated into this class have been vehement in declaring that they positively never could learn to spell,

we have found, from year to year, less than one per cent. of incorrigibly bad spellers among them. We have not pretended to perform miracles, or to render carefully observant, during the rest of their lives, young people who came to us habitually careless and non-observant. But we have found that a very few hours of drill have been sufficient to cause practically all of the members of each successive class to pass readily tests quite as severe as those in which they failed on entering college. . . . Nearly all the improvement that we have been able to secure in the spelling of our students in this sub-freshman class has been obtained simply by requiring them to spell syllables analytically. In other words, we have insisted that they learn to observe carefully the successive construction of polysyllables.

"After this somewhat wide experience and observation, I am convinced that much of the talk about the difficulty of learning to spell English is not founded on fact. I am also convinced that most of the bad orthography exhibited by our secondary school graduates is due to the unwise, unscientific, and unpsychological method of teaching orthography to young pupils in our grammar and high schools, generally known as 'the word method.' Invaluable as this method is in teaching the young child to read, it certainly teaches him not to spell."

The young student's deficiencies in arithmetic may easily be corrected by making him practise some arithmetical work in connection with mathematical problems of the freshman and sophomore years. His failure to use his eyes in observing the things around