AVING been but a few weeks in California, I have not seen enough of its schools for me to speak intelligently of their defects as distinguished from the weak points in schools of other states. It is evident that one weak point has been the suppression of the secondary schools in regions outside of the large cities. By this suppression, a barrier has been placed in the way of students seeking a higher education, while at the same time the lack of higher schools has deprived the grammar schools of the stimulus which comes from advanced work.

Without this stimulus the work of the lower schools is condemned to mediocrity. How serious this weakness may be, I am not yet prepared to say, and it may be that the new High School law will remov: the difficulty altogether.

Taking our country as a whole, and without any special reference to the conditions in California, the greatest defect of the public school system seems to me to be this: the lack of discrimination on the part of school officers and of the public at large between good teachers and

poor ones.

The best teachers are a source of help to the whole community, exerting an influence which cannot be measured in dollars, and which will be felt in the lives of all the children with whom they come. in contact. They are men and women of character and scholarship, and character and scholarship involve the highest mental and moral ideals. In the words of Professor Bryan, "Science knows no source of life but life. If virtue and honesty and integrity are to be propogated, they must be propogated by people who possess them. If this child-world about us that we know and love is to grow into righteous manhood and womanhood, it must have a chance to see how righteousness looks when it is lived." If we could have in every school in California "a man or woman whose total influence is a civilizing power, we should get from our educational system all it can give and all we desire."

Taking the country over, a large percentage of our schools-the numerical majority perhaps are taught by makeshift teachers-persons without scholarship and without ideals. These exert no more influence on the intellectual and

moral growth of students than scarecrows do on the growth of corn. Yet between these and the real teachers there is no great difference made so far as the salaries are concerned. The salaries bear very little appreciable relation to the All over our country, good teachers are liable to have their salaries cut down to a bare living figure, because the imitation teachers can be had at any salary to fill their places. Worse than this, poor teachers are often put in the place of good ones at the dictation of those men we call practical politicians, and public sentiment makes no adequate remonstrance. Politics in school affairs has the same general effect that arsenic has in bread. Much of it means death; a little is deadly. If it were real politics it would not be so bad, for there are real teachers in every shade of political faith, but the ward politics, which would treat positions in the schools as personal spoils, is not real politics at all. It occupies the same moral grade as burglary and bunco steering. Favors dealt out in such ways are rewards, not for political effort, but for personal service, usually of a disgraceful sort. Wherever politics enters the school you will find sooner or later the saloon influence behind it. School officers who thus abuse the trust assigned to them have, to use the words of John Brown: "a perfect right to be hung."

matter of fitness for the work.

But leaving all corrupt practices out of consideration, the fact remains that from our primary schools to our universities the best teachers are paid too little; the poor teachers too much. In salaries and privileges there is no adequate discrimation between the best and the worst.

A poorly educated teacher should be an absurdity. A teacher should never

be poorly educated. Yet no class of people seem to have less appreciation of the value of education than have many of our teachers. Their stock in trade is education, but they seem to have no faith in the value of the wares they sell. If they regarded education as all important to young men and women, they would secure it for themselves. One would certainly expect that every teacher would be filled with the love of learning, that he would be eager in the pursuit of knowledge, and would let slip no opportunity of securing it. If they all felt so, every teacher, from the lowest to the highest, would be an apostle of higher education, a member of the advance guard of civilization. Nevertheless in some states, to become a teacher in the public schools is to renounce all aspirations for broad or accurate knowledge. Ability to secure a license is too often all that is demanded. The case is by no means so bad as this in California, but it is true that here, as elsewhere, the average teacher puts too low an estimate on his work and lays too little stress on the value of thorough preparation.

That our schools do not realize the difference between teachers of low ideals and teachers who are apostles of civilization, and that good and bad share and share alike the scanty fund devoted to public instruction, is to my mind the greatest weakness of our school system.

II.

Portia said, "I can easier teach twenty what were good to do than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching." Likewise, it is a much easier task to point out the flaws in our public school system than to correct them. Perfection, nevertheless, lies along the road of fault finding. Criticism first blazes the way. Improvement follows in its path.

The tree at whose base I would first place my torch is one so often praised and admired that many have come to consider it a beautiful growth. I refer to the extremely rigid system of "classification by examinations" inaugurated and maintained by County Boards of Education.

Classification in a degree is necessary, but, when it becomes so rigidly elaborate as to overshadow the growth of the child and render the teacher little more than an automoton, the system is then obviously and extremely pernicious. The excessive competition so often encouraged in our schools undermines the health of pupils, works injury to the teacher, and does no good whatever, except it be to give the examiners the satisfaction of knowing in which one of nine divisions every pupil in the county is to be fitted. Our grading system gives symmetry and uniformity, yet in our ecstatic admiration of the exterior, we too often forget the minds and hearts beneath. Blinded by the splendor of show, many judge of a school as a captain does of a company of soldiers. The eye is cast along the ranks, and, if heads, feet, and guns are in line, if, in other words, the individual is merged in the mass, the man swallowed up in the system, perfection is reached. Uniformity is undoubtedly the proper standard in military tactics, but, when the human mind must be cropped off or stretched out so as to fit the "measure" manufactured by our County Boards of Education, I am reminded of the methods of the inflexible Attic highwayman, Procrustes, who bound his victims on iron beds, and, as the case required, cut off the legs or stretched them out to "adapt" the poor unfortunates to the length of their reeking couch. As A. M. Frederick says in the Pacific Educational Journal:

The Procrustes of this age
Is the Pedagogic sage

With his hundred-credit guage;
On percentage slats they lie,

Boys who suffer, girls who die.

Under the methods of classifying now in vogue, much of the hard work teachers are compelled to do is worse than wasted, and no one knows this better than they themselves. Doing the right thing at the right time is the greatest time-saving appliance ever discovered. Ten minutes spent with a pupil on a lesson he should have, is worth a week spent on work that is either beyond or far beneath him. If a boy is ready for meat, don't feed him soup or pie; feed him meat.

Again. It is impossible to achieve the greatest measure of success attainable, when teachers are forced to bow to false idols. To explain: Every teacher feels a keen dread of being pronounced a failure. Now this feeling in conjunction with the fact that his reputation depends in a degree upon the results of the "coming tests," forces him to make the "requirements" of the County Board bone. and flesh of his inspiration-or desperation. tion. This is the "hurling of lawful genius from the throne," a travesty of the true spirit of education. Our classes, like Procrustes's beds, are for the "average" boy or girl. Woe is he or she who is either above or below the average. above, a system of dieting (mental antifat) is employed that he may be brought back to the ordinary; if, on the other hand, the pupil be one who digests learning with difficulty, the teacher administers "cram" for the poor child's dyspepsia.

If

It is often argued that a written examination is the best test of a child's advancement—as though intellectual progress is a matter wholly of verbs and decimals. Who would not refer to judge of