Uniformity in Principles

To help every one gain his best chance, we must know what we are after. We must have a better understanding of the principles which we are trying to make good.

Every child, every one in the land, must be recorded, to the end that his rights may be assured.

Every one must have an elementary education, and, before everything else, an elementary education must mean the power to read and write and master the simple processes of mathematics.

The school must have equal respect for every manner of work. It must know that without application and endurance there is no hope, and that with them there will be some result of just as much moment as any other result which it might have gained.

The work of the school must have definite aim, and its ends must be assured. There is too much scattering. Before a child is permitted to leave the school it must be known that he has a definite possession which never can be taken from him. The schools must carry him as far as under the conditions of his life they can be of help to him.

The schools must train for every vocation for which there is any reasonable demand, and the child must be under the control of the school until there is ground for confidence that he has some need of finding his chance, some desire and application, some fitness for employment which will enable him to begin to earn a living.

The child must be allowed his free election of vocation after he has acquired the simpler work of the elementary schools. But he must know that he is not to drop out and not to be allowed to waste his time, at least until he reaches an age or a situation where the case is apparently helpless and hopeless.

The work of each school, being simpler and more definite, must be more intensive. Unnecessary time is consumed. It is worse to waste the time of a child than to take away any other right that he may have. He must get the larger part of his culture through his work. It will be a finer and truer culture than can be gained in any other way. What culture comes through mere instruction is well, but it is secondary and must wait upon the essentials. The same with mere information: if he has the elements which give him the power to get it, he will get it when he needs it or when he wants it. If he does not, the public can not help it.

All of the children of the United States are entitled to be taken out of the list of the illiterates and to be taught to do some definite

thing, and to be made to know that their success depends upon their doing it better than others do. Then the unexpected and the surprising successes will doubtless be multiplied, and, whether they are or not, the nation will be the stronger.

Diversity in Means and Methods

With some reasonable agreement about the measure of opportunity which the educational activities of the nation are bound to hold out to every American child, and with our abundant knowledge of what is going on in every part of the country, there will be all of the uniformity that is desirable, if we encourage the freest diversity and individuality in means and methods. It is not necessary that the schoolhouses be of the same height and color. They need not all have heating plants that balk when called upon for special effort, and forbid an open window at all times. The schools do not all have to have identical courses of study, and there is no reason why they should use the same books. The teachers do not have to have the same convolutions in their brains that have formed in the brains of those physiological psychologists who fall down in their physiology and get beside themselves over their psychology. It is of less moment what one knows when he enters a school than what he knows when he leaves it. It is enough if he has the power and the will to do the work. With some reasonable promise of that, he is to have his chance. The most unpromising freshman often develops into the particular star of the commencement morning. There are to be standards, but they are to be the standards of individual institutions. The degrees of all the colleges ought not to be expected to represent the same thing. We are to prevent fakes and frauds. It is well for a state to protect academic terms from such abuse by fixing the attributes which an institution must have before it can hold itself out to be a high school, an academy, a college, or a university. But, being within the legal requirements, and being honest, it must find its own level and abide its own doings. The pupil, the student, and the teacher, are to use the means they have or can get, in their own way, to their own advantage, and to the common good.

The glory of the American school system is in the fact that it is not to be fixed, and shaped, and determined, and limited by a minister, but by a representative government answerable to a pure democracy. It is in its flexibility, its adaptability to all conditions. This leads some to confuse the process of determination with the

process of carrying out what has been determined upon; or, in other words, to confuse legislative with executive functions.

develop policies which hold out to every one his chance, by the use of the best means we have, and having established the policies and appropriated the means, we are to exercise whatever of the common power may be needed to accomplish the designated ends. But we are never to forget that the worst results are likely to flow from adopting methods which can not be adapted, and from setting up instrumentalities which do not fit situations. The sanguine temperament, the prevailing ambition of the people, may be relied upon to do its part; but if temperament and ambition be unwisely played upon, there is danger of unfortunate result. The information we have of world education, the intellectual and physical work we have to do, the logical adaptation of people to work, the free chance for all, the obligation to reduce illiteracy to an absolute minimum and see that no child is robbed of his right, and the natural rather than forced flow of our national life, will combine to produce an educational system which is much broader at the base than at the top; which makes the most of the child and accomplishes some definite thing for him; which makes him know that he must work, aids his choice and fits him for his best vocation, and carries him as far as he wants to go in acquiring a balanced conception of life, as well as in mastering what is in the books.

Conclusion

I recall a good story which President Roosevelt tells upon himself, in one of his hunting tales, of an exasperating experience with blacktail deer. At the sunset of a weary day a fine buck appeared at an opening in the woods at the sky-line of a mountain, and within fair rifle shot. The President fired both barrels, and says he heard his guide heave a sigh as the deer threw up his head and trotted off unhurt. Directly another appeared at the same opening, and he grasped another rifle and gave him the possibilities of two more shots. The guide sighed clear to his toes as the deer bounded away unhurt. In disgust which words could not express the two mounted their horses and started for the cabin. After going a mile, the guide gathered his courage to offer consolation. "Never mind! I s'pose ye done the best ye could." "No, I'll be blanked if I did,” was the answer. The expletive was justified. It was not the best that he could do. He has made few so bad, and many better, shots since. If we admit that we have made many miss-shots, let us believe that they have not been the best that we can do.

FROM MANUAL

TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS

REPRINTED FROM THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW OF APRIL 1908, BY COURTESY OF THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY

It can not be doubted, and ought not to be disguised, that the early and general belief (before the days of public high schools and so many colleges) that the elementary school system was amply adequate to the needs of the country has been much shaken. in the last quarter century. It is not because of the lessening of either highly trained or popular interest in education; indeed, it is because all manner and grades of education have become more and more a passion with all classes of our people. It is not because of any waning confidence in our educational theories, or in the basic principles of our public schools. The "equal chance for all" becomes more and more valued and jealously guarded as our fundamental political theory works its way out in our governmental practices. The American people have become so accustomed to making and managing schools that they have but indifferent interest about those in which they do not have some sense of proprietorship. But common sentiment, uncertain for a long time, has reached a very confident belief that new situations have arisen which the elementary schools do not reach, and that something rather decisive must be done to adapt their work to the possible expectations of children who are not going to the high schools. It is seen that they must have more definite aims, and must make sure of more exact industrial conclusions, if they are to meet the imperative needs of the children of the wage-earners, as well as the economic, intellectual, and moral necessities of the country.

This development ought not to surprise us. It has come upon

schedule time. It is in the natural order and it is healthful. Schools supported and managed by the public can hardly be expected to anticipate conditions or to outrun popular needs. Neither the foresight nor the warnings of the schoolmasters make much impression. In their essentials the schools respond to public opinion. Before they create new social states they are the instruments of older social situations. New understandings stir and solidify sentiment, and then the school boards and the schoolmasters make the plans for giving effect to it.

The situation results from the fact that every American is entitled to his chance, and because of American temperaments and ambitions. We tell the children in the schools that they are of small account if they neglect their chance. They hear less about increasing their efficiency in ordinary undertakings than they do about going higher up. The "higher up" refers to lawyers, and surgeons, and engineers, and masters of great works, and admirals in the navy, and the presidency itself. The schools which are thought to lead to these positions are literary and classical; if they are scientific, their interest is only in the sciences which are vital to the professions. Our high schools are therefore literary and scientific in this sense. It is true that they have done a little something in manual training, but they have taken good care not to do enough of it, or not to do the kind of it, which would create the danger of their pupils learning a trade. About all of our educational activities have led away from craftsmanship. We have gone on training for the professional and managing vocations until the educational system is unbalanced. If we were to train for vocations at all, we were bound to give all vocations an equal chance. Either we have not seen the greatest need or we have not dared to do the thing most needed because it was not in line with the usual inspirations and ambitions. We have made ourselves believe what, when generally applied, was fallacious and simply impossible. We have misled children and that has made misfits.

For perhaps three decades we have had a vague notion that there was something wrong about our educational system because so many children were going away from the manual industries. To meet the difficulty, we have, in an awkward kind of way, and without any very consistent theory or any very definite plan about it, added manual training annexes to our high schools. We have listened to the manual training leaders with some condescension because we have realized that something in the direction of what they were talking about was desirable, but we have listened to them with so little confidence that (in order to float at all) they have had to spend most of their time looking out for snags. The people who do things only or mainly with their heads have looked upon the manual training exhibits with a kind of admiration which was not psychologically any too clear, and the real mechanics have viewed them with feelings in which skepticism and amusement were mixed.

We have placed the little work in our schools which has any application to manual dexterity so high up in the system that the