believe that either the historical theory or the sociological theory solves this problem of the curriculum. I have rejected the traditional theory that we must accept as very good most of what is, and add the new as public opinion may dictate. And I have said in terms as unequivocal as they are brief that to my thinking, as I view the external world of reality and the real world of the soul, we shall find our solution in a genetic psychology that reveals the processes and stages, the functions and the interests, the motives, the ideals, and the principles of the soul as it journeys and sojourns from birth to death.

SHOULD THE SCHOOL FURNISH BETTER TRAINING FOR THE NON-AVERAGE CHILD?

JOHN R. KIRK, PRESIDENT STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, KIRKSVILLE, MO.

Training is a term badly overworked. It is unwisely and needlessly made to stand for instruction, for education, and for the discipline which results from regulated effort. It savors too much of formal repetition, studied imitation, and unprofitable routine. It puts drilling in the forefront. It puts personal initiative and thinking in the background. The dog and pony show illustrates what can be done by training.

All children doubtless need much training, but most of them need instruction and guidance and practice in constructive thinking more than they need training. They need to be led or directed in the application and test of their knowledge. They need to be encouraged in both concrete and general expressions of their personal conceptions of things. They need exercise and direction in the use of their creative ingenuity. They need opportunity for personal effort. They need to be given the benefit of recognizing their own mistakes. The most perfect training sometimes degenerates into semiconscious and irresponsible repetition, such as we see when children solve arithmetic problems by models set for them by teachers or textbooks. Training in the form of numerous repetitions produces habits and automatic actions but not necessarily a fair and friendly and inquisitive attitude toward the truth. Training as such permits but little opportunity for mistakes that are worth noticing. It deprives the student of the opportunity to reflect or cogitate upon his own blunders. It tends to destroy rational initiative. Even manual training deserves to have its name changed; for if it isn't brain training and also heart and mind culture it falls short of its opportunity.

Perhaps we all agree that the non-average child should have better training and better instruction, though we see slight probability of securing such training and instruction. The term "non-average" is conceded to be inexact and somewhat unscientific. We all doubtless agree with the psychologists that there is no such thing as an average child or an average man; but we use the term for the sake of discussing a condition which needs effective treatment. In the case of forty children in an elementary school or high-school class,

or forty men in a college class, we may for convenience classify them in three groups: Group A comprises a half-dozen or more who are at a given time evidently superior in intellect to the remainder of the class. They learn and comprehend nearly all subjects with quickness and ease. They are nonaverage individuals of the higher type. Group B comprises some twenty or more who learn with reasonable facility a majority of the essential subjects. A few may not be very good in music or drawing or in the co-ordination of mind and body, one a little weak in mathematics and another in language, but the members of this group may for practical purposes be called average individuals. Group C comprises from five to ten persons who are mentally weaker and slower than those of Group B; they have less power of concentration, less of self-control. Some of them learn one or two subjects fairly well and completely fail in several other subjects. Some get obscure conceptions of all subjects which they attempt to study.

So we may say for the sake of comparison that in any class of forty persons about twenty may be called average individuals. From six to ten are nonaverage, because they are noticeably more intelligent and more ready to acquire, assimilate, and use knowledge than the average; while from five to ten are non-average because they cannot learn so well or think so well as the large middle group. If one from Group A be compared with one from Group C in quickness of comprehension and in readiness of expression, we may say roughly that the one from Group A will do at least ten times as well as one from Group C. If comparison be made in the ability to comprehend and manipulate numbers, one from Group A will solve many problems while one from Group C solves one problem; and sometimes it will happen that the one from Group A will have incomparably better comprehension of each problem than the one from Group C has. Comparisons may be made indefinitely with all sorts of subjects and the same remarkable differences will be discovered between the brightest and strongest members of a class on the one hand and the slowest and dullest ones on the other.

Grading and classifying pupils is usually a crude and unscientific process, a mere approximation of values. A majority of pupils are undoubtedly graded or ranked as average or non-average, regardless of the relation of their mental types to the mental type of their teachers; but the fact of being average or non-average in a class depends in large part upon the type of mind of the teacher as compared with the types of mind in those who are taught. A change of teachers may in a short period of time produce a change in a given pupil from average to non-average or the converse. Suppose, for example, a teacher to be of the highly intellectual type, fond of logical reasoning regardless of thought content, and with little or no taste for concrete illustrations. (And there are many such teachers, the product of our best school and college life.) Under such a teacher suppose there is a pupil of the type of the concrete thinker, i. e., one who sees and thinks in the forms and the actualities of wood and stone and earth and sky. Then let the teacher of the intellectual type be

exchanged for another teacher, say, of the concrete thinking type, i. e., of the same type of mind as the pupil. Is it not evident that the rank of the pupil as compared with classmates will in the course of time be changed? I believe there are no careful observers who have not seen in school and college life the utter inability of the teacher or professor to grade or rank a given pupil or student justly, because of marked differences between the type of mind and habit of thinking of the teacher on the one hand and of the person to be taught on the other.

Again, suppose the children in a class or the men in a college to have teachers of a uniform mental type for a series of years. Is it not evident that children and students of one type of mind will be at an advantage while others will be at a permanent disadvantage, and therefore that the differences in rank as to average and non-average will be appreciably due to the conditions of instruction rather than the relative abilities of those taught?

Here a question arises: For what group of children or students is the curriculum of studies prepared and to whom is it adapted?

We probably agree at once that both the course of study and the daily lessons usually are and always ought to be prepared for and adapted to the middle group or the so-called average persons. This seems to be true in schools, colleges, and institutions of all grades and ranks; but occasionally a high-class professor, absorbed in the investigation of subject-matter, will in his lectures address instruction to the precious few highest and best intellects in his class, while the average and the lower non-average groups sit in somnolent bewilderment getting nothing but obscure conceptions of the profundity of the lecturer; and not a few of the good teachers in elementary and high schools know perfectly well the bright, quick, fluent members of their classes and can see no other course of duty than that of exploiting visitors by the use of the surprising knowledge and ability of the few apparent leaders of nonaverage pupils of the higher type.

There are good reasons for adapting the curriculum to the uses and highest good of the largest numbers. If the subject-matter be adapted to the best in a school or class, then the middle group do not get their share of instruction while the poorest group get extremely little. If instruction and training be adapted to the poorest group, then the middle or average group will dawdle a great deal and those in the highest group will be encouraged in idleness or else they will be stupefied by inaction. Since, therefore, practical utility requires that the curriculum and the daily lessons be adapted to the middle group or average persons then the non-average persons are not equally well provided for. The requirements are too low for the highest group and altogether too great for the non-average persons in the lowest group.

These facts appear to be so self-evident that argument in their support would seem needless; and doubtless none will deny the desirability of better training and instruction for the non-average persons in both the highest and lowest groups. I take it further that the purpose of assigning this subject a

place in the program is not to prove a case but to suggest, if possible, some means of improving a well-known but unavoidable condition. It does not seem to me that the subject is a popular one. There is something about it that grates unpleasantly upon our professional ears. To give the subject serious treatment is an open acknowledgment of a constant defect in the great agency through which we seek public betterment.

I fear that the attention of the school superintendent is felt to be necessarily centered on the vast and necessary machinery of his system, and that he is not likely to have much energy left for such details as the individual care and treatment of children and students in his system. I believe the inequalities of instruction and training are not likely to be remedied directly through the department of administration.

In a fifth-grade schoolroom with sixty children attending daily, or a college class with a hundred members, it is conceded that instruction must be chiefly mass instruction; that the teacher and lecturer can have comparatively little direct knowledge of the individuals to be taught. The first remedy occurring to us is to divide the class and secure two instructors instead of one. All must admit the desirability and concede the impossibility of doing this on a large scale. Even if it were done the teacher in the fifth grade would still have thirty individuals in a class; the lecturer, fifty. There would still be the same grouping as before. A, the small group of individuals in the lead; B, the large group of middle-class or average individuals; and C, the hopeless group whom the teacher in despair feels at times like classifying as defectives; and sometimes there is an individual or a group of individuals who approach the border-line of the defectives.

Some would have an extra teacher for each schoolroom to aid the backward individuals in catching up and keeping up; but this plan is unduly expensive and it is unfair. If it were practicable and if it could offer half the time of the extra teacher to the backward individuals and half to help the talented ones to catch up with the next higher class it would more nearly approach fairness. Some there are who would have exclusively individual instruction for each child or student. If this were practicable it would be unwise, because it could offer nothing to compensate for the interplay of student upon student which in a well-managed class of any rank or grade is almost as valuable as the instruction given by the teacher.

Instruction by lectures has this same weakness and then it is usually followed by the "quiz" which further confines the thinking of many within the narrow thought channels of one.

View the case as we may, there seems to be no external machinery which will produce the desired results. We must therefore go within the several classrooms and lecture-rooms, there to discover the means of relief or else to acknowledge that a satisfactory adjustment of the difficulty is impossible.

Perhaps ideal results can come only when all our classrooms and lecturerooms are presided over by ideal teachers. I think normal schools and

teachers' colleges help some toward betterment; but real efficiency in reaching individually the average and non-average student cannot be secured by the mere training of mediocre persons in methods of procedure. It cannot be secured in a short period of time by any sort of emotional reform. It can be but partially effected by the instruction and training of elementary teachers. It cannot be secured through people who depend upon ready-made or hand-medown processes learned from a book or a teacher and held in consciousness as prescriptions while being applied. It will never come through the acceptance of the doctrine, gratuitously promulgated from numerous organized circles in higher education, to the effect that a half-educated person is good enough to teach children up to and including the last day in the elementary school, while fully educated teachers must be secured for the next day in school, i. e., for the first day in the high school. Many university men are now urging that the normal schools confine themselves to the exclusive routine of drilling and training immature young high-school graduates about two years in the doctrines, prescriptions, recipes, and practices of pedagogy with a view to making and molding such high-school graduates into elementary teachers. These men do not see education as a whole. Their horizon is circumscribed by their ambitions. They would unwisely establish a caste system and take to themselves that part of the preparation of teachers which is really worth while. Wherever their creed is operative the normal schools tend gradually to become young ladies' seminaries and the more mature, forceful, capable, ambitious, prospective teachers, both men and women, go to the next best place to prepare themselves. The trouble about teachable pedagogy as a subject by itself is that the most of it is not in such organized form that the teaching of it contributes to mental virility or to scholarly habits and tastes. Hence pedagogical training and instruction unaccompanied by academic instruction is usually a pretty weak mental diet.

The fact in the case is that if anyone needs a real college education it is the teacher who guides the children through the various subjects used in the grammar-school grades; and on the other hand if anyone needs critical and available knowledge of human nature in the uncertain periods of childhood and adolescence it is the teacher of the high-school child; and it would doubtless be rash to claim that more than one-half of the high-school teachers have such knowledge or that they are likely to get it through the lecture courses in the theories of education given in the typical teachers' college or department of pedagogy in a university. But when a normal-school diploma is made to include and cover a good college education, and when a diploma from a teachers' college in the university represents knowledge of childhood and adolescence along with teaching skill gained by some kind of personal experience, and when teachers are employed in view of their personal qualities as well as their alleged training and their degrees, then there will be some hope for an approach to universally efficient instruction that will effectively reach. all individuals to be instructed. And it is to be hoped that mere custom or