son than you do, they who have had at most ten children, you who have had them by the hundreds. The citizens want to manage their own schools as they do their own sidewalks; and they want the state to leave them alone; they do not, as a class, recognize the vast improvements that have been made possible to local schools by the state exercise of its inherent power over school matters. The fact that education is a bigger thing than sidewalks, bridges, and any purely local matter is slow to come to American communities and a prejudice against state direction of schools and teachers is easily arroused by any editor with very little thought and no argument. To my mind there are few things more responsible for the backwardness of education in America today than the ease with which a citizen may influence a school in his own community.

TENURE OF OFFICE.

You may spend years in careful study and practice, you may be recognized by the highest educational authorities as a student, and organizer, and an excellent school man, but the corner grocer can turn you out if his wife don't like your daughter's style. There are hundreds of teachers in this state who dare not after a week's hard teaching refuse to take a Sunday School class when they ought to be resting. There are hundreds of school positions in this state in which the occupant is watched, tended and corrected like a little boy, and made to feel his subserviency by a hundred little contemptible slights and snubs and by a system that will make out of any man a fidgety, nervous, suspicious, uncertain little person without a single opinion on religion, politics or any debatable subject. I remember when I was a boy a young woman of wealth and social prominence came from the city to our country town because of the mineral waters there. It fell to me to take her boat riding on the river for her morning outing. There were two girls who lived on our street who used to ask me every day what the young woman said, how she got into the boat, and what she wore; they made a paper pattern of a cape she had left in our boat house, and imitated her in various ways. Boy-like I told Miss B of this, and the remark she made was commonplace enough, but like some commonplace things that happen in youth, it remained in my memory.

She

said "They are not sure of their position." That is exactly what ails the teachers of New York state; they have no adequate hope that a faithful performance of duty will insure them a continuance of employment. They dare not buy a home on longtime payments; they cannot conceive large long plans for the development of a school. They are intellectual tramps here today and gone tomorrow.

Because one teacher here and there is lazy or mentally inefficient or otherwise unfit, or because some petty political tyrant likes to have the women call on him, the community at large is keeping its schools upset, weak and feeble by its uncertainty in the employment of teachers. The state has been making it harder and harder for a person to become a teacher; a higher class of intelligence is going into the work. It would seem eminently proper for the state to protect its own and to pass laws insuring retention except after a hearing on charges preferred. As the president has said "Tenure of office is the thing this Association ought to push with all its strength as a requisite to the advancement of education."

TEACHER MUST DO BETTER TEACHING.

Concurrent with the improvement of the teacher's condition must come the full measure of improvement in his service or the whole scheme will fail to enjoy a steady and a meritorious growth. Herein lies a danger that every leader in educational reforms has recognized. There is a great amount of dead weight to be carried consisting of the per cent of teachers who never have regarded the calling seriously, who made little preparation themselves, who resist attempts to make them study, who came into the calling to pass away the time while something better was turning up, and whose habit of mind is to do as little work as a teacher as possible. It is the extensive distribution of this kind of person throughout our ranks in larger number than in any profession, that presents the most discouraging front to any solid movement to make the tenure of teachers secure and their wages high. The person approached for his vote on such a measure is almost always able to call to mind at once, some case of a lazy, and inefficient teacher, or of some narrow-minded impossible pedagogue that he has known, and the thought of making

such persons permanent or financially independent is so distasteful that it prevents consideration of the fact that the greater efficiency secured in good teachers, by the confidence of steady employment would far overbalance the waste caused by the lazy ones. The low grade of efficiency of the teacher is still one of the serious problems confronting those who seek to bring education nearer to an adequate realization of ideals. In the last circular sent by your committee to the presidents of the associations of the various states and territories, the question is asked "In what chief respects does the condition of the teacher in your locality need improving?" Maine says "in better preparation for work." New Hampshire says "in better scholarship and professional training," and so the word comes back from all down the Atlantic coast. Florida says "in devotion to the calling and stability in it." The same answers come from Louisiana and around the southern boundary to California and up to the state of Washington and across the northern tier of states back to Maine. Kentucky says "the teacher needs inducement for better scholarship," Ohio says "the teacher needs more education and better education," Iowa says "our state needs more able teachers" and Colorado replies "What we need is more high-grade men and a recognition. of the fact that a college education is not too high a requirement for a man who wants to teach an elementary school." This need for better equipped teachers the teachers' associations themselves have got to meet. It requires all the popularizing influences that may be secured. Attempts of supervising officers to force professional study upon the teaching body have always

been attended with more or less friction and have always failed of the improvement of the service that was aimed at. Yet it seems that professional study is the inevitable price that must be paid for professional advancement; and it seems as though it were advancing in this state in the face of ridicule, indifference, and actual opposition.

This Association is aiming to popularize and advance professional study through its reading circle, a plan devised to foster professional growth of teachers.

MEANS OF INTERCHANGE OF THOUGHT. The great need of the Association in the

conduct of the different movements which I have reviewed here is a printed medium for interchange of thought among the nembers. The purpose of the Association cannot be met by any educational journal at present in existence. The necessity that such papers are under to make money for their owners precludes them from going the whole way which this Association ought to and will go in some directions. The development of our bulletin into a larger and more frequently issued organ of the Association would seem to be a necessity of the times.

THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY.

In closing this rather informal report of the present outlook of the condition of the teacher your servant reminds you again of the ripeness of the time for doing something. The force of the example of the Ahearn-Davis legislation must not be lost upon the educational world at large. Those of us that are enjoying its benefits want you to get about you an atmosphere of the same kind. There are within the sound of my voice those that would sooner teach a school than do anything else on God's green earth, who love the sight of boys and girls trooping in at the open door, who see in the calling the demand for thought, and invention, and adaptation, as interesting and as fascinating as the mental exercise of any other work, who see the possibility of good results of good teaching indissolubly connected with the future progress of this beloved land, whose daily work is imbued with a consciousness of public duty and public necessity, and public service, that dignifies it and consecrates it; men and women who love what they are doing and who do it well because they love it. I and many ordinary schoolmasters like me want to unite with such persons not for the purpose of blowing the horn for any particular man or party or movement or hobby, but for quiet, tactful, devoted, and effective work towards making the business of the teacher in fact as it is in promise an occupation of eminent service and a calling of sincere regard.

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.Pres. David Starr Jordan.

Representing nothing on God's earth now
And naught in the waters below it,

As the pledge of a nation that passed away
Keep it dear friend and show it.
Show it to those who will lend an ear.
To the tale this trifle will tell,
Of liberty born of a patriot's dream,
Of a storm-cradled nation that fell.

Too poor to possess the precious ores,

And too much of a stranger to borrow, We issued to-day our promise to pay

And hoped to redeem it to-morrow.

The days rolled on and the weeks became years,

But our coffers were empty still.

Gold was so scarce that the treasury quaked, If a dollar should drop in the till.

But the faith that was in us was strong

indeed,

Though our poverty well we discerned. And this little note represented the pay That our suffering veterans earned. They knew it had hardly a value in gold, But as gold our soldiers received it. It gazed in our eyes with a promise to pay And every true soldier believed it.

But our boys thought little of price or pay
Or of bills that were overdue.

We knew if it bought our bread to-day,
It was all our poor country could do.
Keep it. It tells all our history o'er.

From the birth of the dream to its last. Modest and born of the angel of hope Like our hope of success IT PASSED.

I

AM gratified at the recognition of penmanship in recent numbers of your most excellent journal as reflecting a healthful awakening in this most fundamental study. The paper by Prof. Zaner was timely and well expressed some valuable and professional experience and observation. Yet I cannot agree with all of his conclusions and remedies, especially the return to the long ago tried and abandoned custom of dosing children with letters three-quarters of an inch high on the theory that it will prevent "excessive finger action" and "pen gripping," which it will most assuredly necessitate. A better

and surer plan would be to train beginners, first on the blackboard with chalk and later on large sheets of manila paper with pencil until the writing forms and motions are thoroughly habituated; then reduce the same to current size on writing paper with ample pen and ink practice. The celebrated Porson attributed his remarkable penmanship to such elementary training by his father.

The professor's sovereign remedy for writing poorly, "to require no small writing of children until ten years of age" is obviously impracticable and abortive, but may mislead zealous teachers, lacking in foresight and experience, into serious consequences by attempting a remedy which savors of the old lady's advice to her daughter on learning to swim, "don't go near the water!"

It is one of the earliest ambitions of the child to be able to write as he sees others doing and the time of this aspiration is

1

the occasion to teach him the proper essentials of letters and ways of producing them to express ideas. To ignore, thwart or delay this desire to a later period, when other subjects and ambitions engross his mind, means usually to defeat its ultimate attainment properly by a loss of the healthy pride and interest and feeling of its necessity as well as the cumulative benefits of habitual practice which today is the chief reason "why people write poorly."

Educators realize that it is impracticable to deprive children of the privilege and advantage of ordinary writing in school work until half the school course is completed in the other branches requiring penmanship as a means of expression. His paper, excellent in so many respects, points to the necessity of defining the various stages for penmanship teaching adapted to the school curriculum rather than to the age of pupil which at best is but approximate since child development, sex and temperament even must determine the character of penmanship instruction at any given age.

My own extended experience and conclusion is that the art of writing can and should be begun in the primary and continued with penmanship study through advancing grades until graduation. I have accordingly undertaken to ascertain and define the course in proper writing stages for each school grade for the guidance of intelligent teachers in my "Illustrated Lessons and Lectures on Penmanship," recently published, which I hope may have inspired the writer of the paper referred

to.

DR.

R. HENRY BARNARD, LL. D., probably the most eminent of American educators of the nineteenth century, died at his home in Hartford, Conn., July 5. in his ninetieth year. His death occurred in the same room in which he was born in 1811. Although fifteen years younger than Horace Mann and Mary Lyon, he began his professional career about the same time

they did and was in his prime in the times of Webster, Clay and Calhoun. Still, he was an active worker up to the present year. His career virtually embraces the whole history of the American school system.

Mr. Barnard's education was acquired in an academy at Monson, Mass., and at Yale College, graduating at nineteen with honors. Among his fellow students were many who