fashion in education will not bring about such adoration of diplomas and degrees that the personal element in teachers will not always be recognized even in the absence of the documentary evidence of qualification which institutions can offer; for really there is no means of grading or graduating persons in such a way as to show their personal worth and ability. The best that can be said of the diploma is that it is prima facie evidence of qualifications. It is not fundamental but rather a valuable and desirable conventionality.

As for the non-average individual I believe he now has his due share of attention and training wherever he and his average classmates have a teacher of good personality, sound scholarship, and ability to devise methods of procedure adapted to each day's needs without referring back to a book or a normal school or a teachers' college or the directions of a principal or superintendent. Such a teacher sees his class whether in school or college as made up of individuals of exceedingly diversified talents. He knows that he cannot keep the members of his class abreast of one another for a very long period of time. He knows that the brighter non-average members must, from time to time, have special promotions or be damaged by the inertia of marking time. He knows that the slow non-average individuals must for the sake of a fair understanding of subjects occasionally be reclassified or left with lower classes when the average members are promoted, i. e., they must be given more time.

Surely there is no valid reason for compelling the brighter, stronger individual to adopt continuously the slower pace of the average individual or to be promoted with solemn regularity from room to room along with his slower classmates for any period of time. And there is likewise no good defense for continually lashing the slow non-average individual to keep him ostensibly abreast of the average individual.

And again the non-average individual in a democratic country or any country cannot rightfully claim more of the teacher's attention and energy than the average individual receives. The one of high endowments cannot claim more privileges than the one of low endowments, and conversely, the dull and weak individual has no right to more attention than the bright strong one unless he can be said to get it through the occasional reclassification which takes him thru subjects a second time as classmate of younger students who are pursuing the subjects for the first time.

In conclusion: There seems to be no immediate relief for the non-average individual. Some persons are doubtless about to suggest as a remedy that we have more manual-training schools, more commercial schools, more departments of various kinds. All the new schools and departments doubtless help in their way. But the non-average individual is in all these schools and in all school and college departments and classes.

Hence the remedy lies in securing teachers and college professors of uniformly high scholarship, personal force, and professional ability and skill

along with such adjustability in grading and promoting that no individual receiving instruction will be compelled to remain very long in any class which is not adapted to his needs.

WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIALS IN SUBJECTS IN THE
ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL COURSE?

ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

So far as education in the broad and large is concerned, we recall the fact that it had passed through many stages before it became definitely centered in a definite institution known as the school. There was a great deal of education before there were any schools as we know them. There came a time when a new education began to claim attention, and that new education consisted of the three R's, or in time it was known as the seven liberal arts. There has been many a new education since that time, and each in turn has been heralded and welcomed by one party as a fresh revelation and has been denounced by an opposing party as a mere novelty and fad.

But every great change in education has been closely interwoven with other changes, in which the whole social fabric has been involved. The essential subjects of one age have been different from the essential subjects of another age. The subjects have changed because the times have changed. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were in one stage mere accomplishments or altogether unknown. At another stage they would seem to be all in all. If so great a change as this could take place, what change may there not be? Is anything, in fact, essential at all times, and everywhere?

Whether there are really any permanent subjects or not depends on what meaning we give to the word "subject." I shall not stop to quibble concerning the term; but, simply diving in somewhere near the middle of this wide. question, I should like to say that historically the most permanent subject of all seems to me that which we designate as morals and manners. And that is so because it is pre-eminently the subject which lends interest to all the rest and determines the value of all. With all the changes which have been and are yet to be, we can hardly conceive of any rounded process of education in which this subject does not hold its place, in the earliest age of history or in the last, in America, Mars, or the satellites of Sirius. So long as human nature is what it is, the practice of virtue, the making of the moral life, must be among the things that claim the chief regard of men, simply because they have the human character. And human nature is about as constant a fact as history has yet discovered. When we get beyond human nature we need not greatly concern ourselves with education.

Yet moral education differs so greatly with differing social conditions that this subject hardly seems the same in widely separated periods. At one time it is incidental to religion, at another it is mainly civic or military or industrial.

The fact is, that in all ages it has many aspects and must be approached from different sides. Which of its elements shall take the leading part will depend at any given time on the conditions of that time. Just now in the public schools of America it is primarily a civic matter. It may in the future be primarily an industrial matter. But no one aspect will ever exhaust its significance. And the chief practical consideration for us is this, that we must teach the subject of morals in many ways, direct and indirect. Among these ways, I believe direct instruction in the principles and the particulars of right and honorable conduct has a place of no small importance and should be more strongly emphasized.

When we come to consider, after this universal subject, what may be the essential subjects at any given period, as at this present period, in which we are chiefly concerned, we find we are dealing with an interesting side of social history, namely, the history of the school, in which education has become sharply defined and institutionalized. When the school fairly came into being as the organized agency of education and the only agency organized for education alone, it was only a small part of education that became its recognized function. Whatever occasional and partial organization there may have been for other parts and kinds of education, the school settled down at an early day to a narrow preoccupation with the literary side of instruction and with a few subjects closely connected with this literary side. Public education now proceeded on two parallel and for the most part disconnected lines, the education of the school on the one hand, and the education given incidentally by other agencies on the other hand. I suppose every human institution has and always will have an educational side. Education for industrial life is one of the forms of education thus left over for incidental treatment. So the industrial education of the home and of the guild, the apprenticeship system, in a word, went on side by side with the more definitely organized literary education of the school. The recent history of education is in large part the history of the expansion of that specialized educational instrumentality, the literary school, to take in some of the outlying ranges of education, and particularly its enlargement through additions from the field occupied by one form or another of apprenticeship.

There are various reasons why the school must inevitably expand in this way. The agency organized and carried on for the express purposes of education was certain to be in the long run a more effective instrument of education than that which was merely subordinate and tributary to some other purpose. The difference might not be apparent when one class of people served an apprenticeship and another class received a literary education. But with the nineteenth century, and earlier in some states, successful attempts were made to give all the people the benefit of a literary education. The contrast between the general effectiveness of school methods and the wastefulness and inequalities of apprentice methods became more clearly apparent. But certain minor advantages of apprenticeship became apparent, too, and the methods of the

schools underwent a gradual change, particularly in the way of object lessons and laboratory practice. So the school became fitted to deal with some phases of education which had hitherto been beyond its reach. Besides all this, a subtle change has been going on in men's attitude toward education. It is coming to be less a subordinate and more an independent and commanding interest. An illustration of this change, on a large scale, may be seen in certain European countries, where there is now a manifest tendency to concentrate the scattered educational activities of the government under the educational rather than the technical branches of administration. Agricultural education, for example, may logically fall under either the agricultural or the educational department. Hitherto the interest in such education has been largely agricultural and it has been under the direction of departments of agriculture. With the growth of intelligent interest in the educational bearings of the subject, there has appeared a tendency to co-ordinate agricultural education with the general educational system; and so with other branches of instruction, in science and the arts. A similar tendency appears in the gradual extension of instruction in our schools and universities, whereby certain subjects become school subjects which had long been reserved for the workshop and for the apprentice.

So it happens that our schools are coming to be broadly educational institutions instead of narrowly literary institutions. And this movement is undoubtedly to continue, for the people will that it shall be so and the whole social momentum of the time carries us in this direction. The three R's and the other subjects connected with these cannot continue to hold the field. against all comers. Some of the subjects taken over from the manual arts are destined to take their place beside them.

This change we can none of us prevent if we would, and I am sure we would not prevent it if we could. But there is one thing to be done about it that in some measure we can do. We can see that the good of the old order is carried over into the new. The older subjects made for intelligence, the newer subjects make for manual skill. In order that the full value of manual skill may be realized, we need to hold fast to the earlier emphasis on pure intelligence.

The nineteenth-century ideal of education, particularly the nineteenthcentury ideal in the United States, was one of the finest things in the history of civilization. It was the conception of the freeman of old Athens carried over into the new world and made an ideal for all men, forasmuch as all men shall be free. To make men wise, self-regulated, self-reliant, this was held to be a better thing than to give them mastery of a trade; for those who were so educated could turn to what they would, could master new employments as the need should arise. And whatever their labor in life might be, or the rewards of their labor, it would yield them the greatest possible values, for they would know how to use it to the higher ends, for themselves, for their friends, and for their country. We may allow something for enthusiasm and exaggerations

but fundamentally this view holds good, and I hope that with all of our pursuit of new and promising ideals, we shall keep faith with this deeply grounded conviction. Moreover, we need to put into our training for manual skill which fills a serious lack in that earlier schooling, the same liberal spirit which characterized the old. In accordance with this spirit, we shall make the special skill of any single trade rest upon some mastery of the broad fundamentals of drawing, manual training, and free design. The subjects in the domain of manual pursuits which have the strongest claim to a place among the essentials in our courses of study are those which will give the best introduction to a wide range of special dexterities, and render the learner as free as possible to adjust himself to change of occupation or to progressive improvements in a single occupation.

Finally, with this inevitable expansion of the functions of the school, certain things will take a high place in the educational curriculum which once belonged solely to the domain of play. For generations our schools have made place for free play, but merely as recreation from tasks. Now with the tendency to a hardening of social conditions, particularly in our large cities, play becomes almost as important a consideration in the schools as work. We need it more than ever for health; we need it that the few and precious hours of leisure may be made refreshing and not debasing; we need it to give flexibility and freedom to the spirit of the individual, now hard-pressed by the growing crowd and the struggle for existence; we need it that the moving of pure joy among our people may carry us toward the finer forms of expression and give us a spontaneous national art.

Let me speak of only one subject here, which belongs to the common ground of art and play. We need music in our modern life, almost as much as we need bread; and we need it in our schools almost as much as we need the multiplication table. We need it in our lives, not only to help us worship, but that we may carry away something better than a ringing headache from our precious hours of diversion. We need it in our schools, not as a tolerated fad, but as one of the things that shall make our individual and national character.

In fact, the sum of all I have tried to say is this: That the fads and luxuries of one age may be the necessities of another. We must take on new studies with a new age; and we must bind the old and the new together by an everlasting moral conviction, and an everlasting insistence on that intelligence that shall make men free.

DISCUSSION

CLARENCE F. CARROLL, superintendent of schools, Rochester, N. Y.—In general we most heartily agree with the theories relating to the school curriculum, advanced by our honored commissioner of education. I am impelled to add that it gives me great pleasure to express my appreciation of the general tone of the paper, and the attitude of the man who takes his place today as our leader in this association. Our commissioner is facing the