When we sufficiently honor the service which every good home renders to the community; when we measure rightly the large opportunity for civic service which the home confers upon the educated woman, shall we not gladly sacrifice immediate personal advantage and ambition for the privilege of the greater service?

Accepting this standard, the school must necessarily provide suitable opportunities for appropriate training: for the poor girl in the tenement-house district, house-keeping centers, where she may learn how a similar home may be economically and wholesomely administered. For the grammar school, a strand of elementary science and technical training which will make her familiar with the household arts, and so far as may be, the principles underlying them. Technical schools of household arts, for more complete training and related courses of science and art for high school and college which will provide not only for preparation for home-keeping, but will also secure adequate provision for teachers of household science and art. And with these such study of the relation of the home and its administration to the problems of economics and sociology as will set a finer standard and bring back into the home the enlightened service of our most intelligent women.

With this clearer conception of woman's supreme service, and with this significant contribution from school and college, will disappear the present cross-purposes in the education of women.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE IMMIGRANT CHILD

JANE ADDAMS, FOUNDER OF HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO, ILL.
[Stenographic report]

I am always diffident when I come before a professional body of teachers, realizing as I do that it is very easy for those of us who look on to bring indictments against results; and realizing also that one of the most difficult situations you have to meet is the care and instruction of the immigrant child, especially as he is found where I see him, in the midst of crowded city conditions.

And yet in spite of the fact that the public school is the great savior of the immigrant district, and the one agency which inducts the children into the changed conditions of American life, there is a certain indictment which may justly be brought, in that the public school too often separates the child from his parents and widens that old gulf between fathers and sons which is never so cruel and so wide as it is between the immigrants who come to this country and their children who have gone to the public school and feel that they have there learned it all. The parents are thereafter subjected to certain judgment, the judgment of the young which is always harsh and in this instance founded upon the most superficial standard of Americanism. And yet there is a notion of culture which we would define as a knowledge of those things which have been long cherished by men, the things which men have loved because thru generations they have softened and interpreted life, and have

endowed it with value and meaning. Could this standard have been given rather than the things which they see about them as the test of so-called success, then we might feel that the public school has given at least the beginnings of culture which the child ought to have. At present the Italian child goes back to its Italian home more or less disturbed and distracted by the contrast between the school and the home. If he throws off the control of the home because it does not represent the things which he has been taught to value he takes the first step toward the Juvenile Court and all the other operations of the law, because he has prematurely asserted himself long before he is ready to take care of his own affairs.

We find in the carefully prepared figures which Mr. Commons and other sociologists have published that while the number of arrests of immigrants is smaller than the arrests of native born Americans, the number of arrests among children of immigrants is twice as large as the number of arrests among the children of native born Americans. It would seem that in spite of the enormous advantages which the public school gives to these children it in some way loosens them from the authority and control of their parents, and tends to send them, without a sufficient rudder and power of self-direction, into the perilous business of living. Can we not say, perhaps, that the schools ought to do more to connect these children with the best things of the past, to make them realize something of the beauty and charm of the language, the history, and the traditions which their parents represent. It is easy to cut them loose from their parents, it requires cultivation to tie them up in sympathy and understanding. The ignorant teacher cuts them off because he himself cannot understand the situation, the cultivated teacher fastens them because his own mind is open to the charm and beauty of that old-country life. In short, it is the business of the school to give to each child the beginnings of a culture so wide and deep and universal that he can interpret his own parents and countrymen by a standard which is world-wide and not provincial.

The second indictment which may be brought is the failure to place the children into proper relation toward the industry which they will later enter. Miss Arnold has told us that children go into industry for a very short time. I believe that the figures of the United States census show the term to be something like six years for the women in industry as over against twentyfour years for men, in regard to continuity of service. Yet you cannot disregard the six years of the girls nor the twenty-four years of the boys, because they are the immediate occupation into which they enter after they leave the schooleven the girls are bound to go thru that period—that is, the average immigrant girls are before they enter the second serious business of life and maintain homes of their own. Therefore, if they enter industry unintelligently, without some notion of what it means, they find themselves totally unprepared for their first experience with American life, they are thrown out without the proper guide or clue which the public school might and ought to have given to them. Our industry has become so international, that it ought to be easy to use the

materials it offers for immigrant children. The very processes and general principles which industry represents give a chance to prepare these immigrant children in a way which the most elaborated curriculum could not present. Ordinary material does not give the same international suggestion as industrial material does.

Third, I do not believe that the children who have been cut off from their own parents are going to be those who, when they become parents themselves, will know how to hold the family together and to connect it with the I should begin to teach the girls to be good mothers by teaching them to be good daughters. Take a girl whose mother has come from South Italy. The mother cannot adjust herself to the changed condition of housekeeping, does not know how to wash and bake here, and do the other things which she has always done well in Italy, because she has suddenly been transported from a village to a tenement house. If that girl studies these household conditions in relation to the past and to the present needs of the family, she is undertaking the very best possible preparation for her future obligations to a household of her own. And to my mind she can undertake it in no better way. Her own children are mythical and far away, but the little brothers and sisters pull upon her affections and her loyalty, and she longs to have their needs recognized in the school so that the school may give her some help. Her mother complains that the baby is sick in America because she cannot milk her own goat; she insists if she had her own goat's milk the baby would be quite well and flourishing, as the children were in Italy. If that girl can be taught that the milk makes the baby ill because it is not clean and be provided with a simple test that she may know when milk is clean, it may take her into the study not only of the milk within the four walls of the tenement house, but into the inspection of the milk of her district. The milk, however, remains good educational material, it makes even more concrete the connection which you would be glad to use between the household and the affairs of the American city. Let her not follow the mother's example of complaining about changed conditions; let her rather make the adjustment for her mother's entire household. We cannot tell what adjustments the girl herself will be called upon to make ten years from now; but we can give her the clue and the aptitude to adjust the family with which she is identified to the constantly changing conditions of city life. Many of us feel that, splendid as the public schools are in their relation to the immigrant child, they do not understand all of the difficulties which surround that child-all of the moral and emotional perplexities which constantly harass him. The children long that the school teacher should know something about the lives their parents lead and should be able to reprove the hooting children who make fun of the Italian mother because she wears a kerchief on her head, not only because they are rude but also because they are stupid. We send young people to Europe to see Italy, but we do not utilize Italy when it lies about the schoolhouse. If the body of teachers in our great cities could take hold of the immigrant colonies,

could bring out of them their handicrafts and occupations, their traditions, their folk songs and folk lore, the beautiful stories which every immigrant colony is ready to tell and translate; could get the children to bring these things into school as the material from which culture is made and the material upon which culture is based, they would discover that by comparison that which they give them now is a poor meretricious and vulgar thing. Give these children a chance to utilize the historic and industrial material which they see about them and they will begin to have a sense of ease in America, a first consciousness of being at home. I believe if these people are welcomed upon the basis of the resources which they represent and the contributions which they bring, it may come to pass that these schools which deal with immigrants will find that they have a wealth of cultural and industrial material which will make the schools in other neighborhoods positively envious. A girl living in a tenement household, helping along this tremendous adjustment, healing over this great moral upheaval which the parents have suffered and which leaves them bleeding and sensitive such a girl has a richer experience and a finer material than any girl from a more fortunate household can have at the present moment.

I wish I had the power to place before you what it seems to me is the opportunity that the immigrant colonies present to the public school: the most endearing occupation of leading the little child, who will in turn lead his family, and bring them with him into the brotherhood for which they are longing. The immigrant child cannot make this demand upon the school because he does not know how to formulate it; it is for the teacher both to perceive it and to fulfil it.

THE SCHOOL AND THE PRACTICE OF ETHICS

ELLA FLAGG YOUNG, PRINCIPAL, CHICAGO NORMAL SCHOOL

The nineteenth century was a century of progress. Its progress did not lie, however, in finished achievements. Every type of invention and every form of human endeavor bequeathed by the nineteenth century to the twentieth are but suggestions of possibilities not yet attained. The roll of inventions is long; and because of its length some assume that all the needs of mankind will soon be fulfilled. If the electric car, the phonograph, the X-rays, and all other inventions depended for their future upon mankind's needs only, it might be possible that their history could now be written. The inventor and the builder, however, were not the first in the fields of electricity, acoustics, and radio-activity. They were preceded by the scientists, the theorists who had developed fundamental conceptions of the forces of nature and their modes of action. From these conceptions scientists have thru experimentation been able to standardize nature's forces and state working hypotheses for the ways in which those forces will act. It is the conceptions of the forces of nature, their limitations and possibilities, called the laws of nature, that are

back of the marvelous inventions and works in the world of human industry, and of more marvelous ones than have yet been wrought out. The great conceptions are elemental and their suggestions are numberless.

In like manner, conceptions of the powers of the human being and the modes of growth of these powers are influencing teachers to new methods and new subjects. These conceptions are far-reaching and they originate in philosophic minds. They contain, imbedded in their general, abstract statement, suggestions for the gifted teacher; suggestions of the laws underlying the forces in childhood and youth. It is by the comprehension of these forces and the laws controlling them that we teachers may devise (or as it would be expressed in the industrial world, may invent) that organization of the school which will help to the best solution of the problems of contemporary life. We have not yet so fully grasped the conception of development in childhood and youth as stated by the nineteenth-century philosopher as the inventors and the captains of industry have grasped the conception of the forces of nature as stated by the scientist. There is one conception in philosophy that will yet influence the social world more than the speculations about electricity, light, and heat have affected the industrial world. I mean the conception that character develops in childhood thru the exercise, the activity, of the ethical judgment.

The American home and the American school more than those of any other country stand for independent action in childhood. But conduct may be independent of authority and yet not be ethical. That such is the condition in America is shown in the resolutions adopted by this Association last year at Los Angeles and by the general tenor of editorials in newspapers and articles in magazines. It is my purpose to consider wherein the theory of independent judgment fails, even tho America has taken an advance position in the matter of moral training; to consider the effort within the school to fit children and young people to meet the demands which life will make upon their ethical nature, and in doing this I shall have in mind the conception of character developing in childhood thru the exercise of the ethical judgment.

Ethics is the study of conduct from the standpoint of right, of duty, of responsibility, of goodness. Ethical training is the cultivation of the judgment of values in conduct. This judgment of values in conduct is always an expression of the character of the judger. All through this country, questions bearing on work, value in conduct, are discussed in the schools. That which is, the actual conduct, is tried, measured, by the children's and by the students' opinions of what ought to be, their ideals of honesty, kindness, generosity. And yet, on every hand, there is adverse criticism and reflection on the training of the young American. There are two standpoints from which the work of the school is judged: one, that from which is weighed the power of the elementary- or the high-school graduate to give valuable service in the field of labor; and the other, that from which is tested the morality, the character,