get scant attention. On the other hand, if the school is really absorbed in what would seem to be the characteristic function of a genuine normal school there would not be space nor inclination to furnish the general and special scholarship in the knowledges that must be presupposed in any good scheme of professional instruction. My conclusion, therefore, is that the normal school is not well adapted to the work of the college, and to the extent that it attempts it there will be a falling-off in the quality of the work along professional lines which it was especially organized to do if it was sincere in the selection of its name. There will not be that unity of sentiment, that enthusiastic devotion to the study of childhood, that open-mindedness with regard to the course of study, that willingness and desire to submit the methods of the classroom to the test of the most rigorous criticism in the light that has been thrown upon teaching by the sciences that relate to the correlated life of body and mind, that ought to be found in a teacher's seminary.

IV. TRAINING FOR SECONDARY VS. ELEMENTARY TEACHERS

Can the normal schools having the ordinary organization give satisfactory professional training to secondary as well as to elementary teachers?

It is quite generally conceded, at last, that the normal schools are doing a fair piece of work in the preparation of elementary teachers. If it is really possible for them to do as well for secondary teachers the agencies are at hand for the solution of a problem that is pressing with growing urgency upon the minds of the educational people whose chief interests lie in the secondary schools.

That the training that elementary teachers now receive would be of great value to secondary teachers I do not for a moment doubt. The high school presupposes the elementary school, hence it presupposes the first twelve or fifteen years of the life of the child. To have a fairly accurate conception of what has been going on in these wonderful years is to have a most admirable preparation for the high-school period. Many of the colleges and universities have been so favorably impressed with the work of the state normal schools that they are willing to admit to their junior classes such of the graduates of their two-year courses as were ready for the university when they entered the normal school. With suitable work in the higher institutions, in the way of liberalizing their scholarship, such persons become admirable teachers for secondary schools. Their professional training identifies them very thoroly with the teaching idea. Their disciplines in the university redeem them from the narrowness of a limited grasp of the higher development of the knowledges, and stimulate them in a most interesting way along the lines of superior scholarship. No students are more enthusiastic and few are so ambitious for professional scholarship with all that it implies in the way of general and special scholarship in the knowledges. Of course they have much to learn about the high-school boy and girl and of the educational values of the secondary curriculum. But they are extremely desirable, as a general proposi

tion. Large numbers of them are extending their courses of study in this way and are doing fine things, in consequence, for the high schools. Their university work is done with the thought of teaching running thru it all, and they thus have the advantage of assimilating and estimating notions. Their training and experience along professional lines give them the apperceiving conceptions by which they can make the most of their new disciplines. Where they are willing to do more postgraduate work in the teachers' colleges they become quite ideal and indicate to us what is really meant by a professional teacher.

That the normal schools must prepare elementary teachers is, I think, universally conceded. If they should not do this they ought to surrender their charters and reorganize as teachers' colleges. Now the thing of all things that is fundamentally necessary to the grade teacher is the warmest sympathy with child life and the clearest understanding of the best methods of its motivation. She must make up her mind to live with childhood. She must shorten her step to its slow intellectual pace. She must content herself in her school work with the simplicities of elementary knowledge, so far as her teaching is concerned. She cannot hope to have her recitations filled with the intellectual delights that come to the teachers in the secondary and superior schools. The demands made upon her are peculiarly exhausting, since alertness, vivacity, constant watchfulness, genuine mothering, are the price of any success with young children. Real comradeship with them, in any reciprocal sense, is hardly possible. Because of these trying conditions the normal school must be suffused, surcharged, saturated, with interest in the young child. In a very true sense he is clay in the hands of the potter. An unsuitable position for a considerable portion of each day may mean curvature of the spine, with all of its attendant penalties. A neglect to attend properly to the quantity and disposition of light may result in defective vision, with all of its embarrassing handicaps. Windows carelessly left open may entail catarrhal troubles with all of their evil and offensive consequences. Improper desks mean possible round shoulders. Everywhere there is physical plasticity, but a vanishing plasticity, leaving behind it symmetry, if the teacher is wise and watchful, or deformity, if she has been neither.

In the mental life there is the same impressibility. It is a time of beginnings and relative helplessness. Nothing is easier than a maladjustment of tasks against which the child is too ignorant to file a conscious protest. Few things are more difficult than a generous understanding of the opening life, a discovery of the employments most suitable to its successive stages, and a proper adaptation of the latter to the former.

When the high-school stage arrives a radical change in the development of the pupil is at hand. New ambitions are awakened. The old routine, for which the growing child has a very hospitable place in certain periods of his unfolding, has become inexpressibly irksome. Individual initiative succeeds. imitation or obedience. The social instincts are quickened. Sentimental

attachments suddenly blossom out with exaggerated efflorescence. In brief, the multitudinous phenomena of adolescence, with all of their iridescent changes, appear and childhood is a thing of the past.

How can a school whose main prepossessions are in the directions of childhood meet in the most satisfactory way the demands of a school whose most absorbing interests should be in the unstable, emotional, transforming epoch of the adolescent? How can it furnish the atmosphere and the requisite guidance for two such dissimilar stages of growth when each seems to demand, in the interests of the best results, the exclusion of the other? Let us remember that we are seeking not fairly good conditions, but the best conditions. This is one of the aspects of the secondary teacher's preparation that the normal school seems not well fitted to give.

But the intellectual attitude changes quite as radically as the emotional. The teaching, or instruction, must be greatly modified in its method. It is true that in the higher grades it approaches that of the high school, but in the lower grades it is quite radically different. Imagine the primary teacher employing the Socratic irony! Yet in the high school it has a legitimate place altho not a prominent one. The young child has slight critical capacity upon which the teacher can bank. His drawings of the human form lack necks and attach the arms to the side of the head, yet they do not offend his notions of accuracy. The high-school pupil needs the challenge, the cornering, the defeat, perhaps, as well as the sympathetic attitude of praise and agreement. He has found footings which give him confidence to hold his own against the contention of a teacher, perhaps. Scholarship is a possible passion and the subjects of instruction more and more absorb his mind. The studies are new and demand a new emphasis. The younger child is chiefly occupied with the individualism of the world, but the high-school pupil seeks more and more to find the unity as well of the phenomena of the world. To state it a little differently, the high-school age is the stage in which the pupil is entering upon the epoch of conscious reflection; he is beginning the more explicit identification of himself with the genius of the modern world, which is essentially scientific. These epochs of growth are so generally recognized that I need not follow this line of thought further than to say that the method of observation and illustration must now give way in a growing degree to the method of demonstration in which the necessity of the relations is made apparent.

It may be answered that the normal school is capable of adjusting itself to these varying conditions by organizing separate departments which shall not overlap each other. But this is only another way of saying that the two classes of schools may exist side by side under the same general management. That is true enough, but that will make a sort of university of the normal school and there will be necessitated an elaborate and distinct equipment for each. As there must be a training-school for the elementary teachers so there must be, for the highest success, a parallel opportunity for the secondary

teachers. I do not advocate an exact parallel, but an application of the same general principle.

I must content myself with one additional suggestion. It is quite possible for the normal school to present the general features of a pedagogical philosophy. It must be very general, however, to be comprehended by all. It may be carried to higher and higher planes as the ability of the pupil renders it possible, and such a development of the subject is extremely valuable in toning up the general character of the institution. But each subject of the curriculum needs a method treatment which unfolds its inherent logic and its adaptation to the needs of the developing pupil. For illustration, arithmetic must be studied from a new point of view. The normal student had his last contact with it in the grades of the grammar school while on his way to the high school. He was then too young to be conscious of his own generalizations or to rise to any just conception of the unifying ideas that make it a science. The subject must be re-examined from the standpoint of its logical organization so that the student can look down upon it as it emerges in all of its seeming complexity from a few very simple principles. This is what is meant by the normalschool people when they declare that their work upon the subjects of the course of study is not academic but professional.

What has been said with respect to arithmetic is to be considered as said with regard to the other subjects of the elementary school. But the subjects of the secondary school need a similar treatment and such a suggestion implies an academic preparation that a college course will barely cover. If we are to have really superior teachers for the secondary schools we must not be satisfied with anything short of what Germany is doing for her schools of that grade. It is absurd to expect our existing normal schools to accomplish any such results. Meanwhile, these institutions are the only existing agencies, except the teachers' colleges and pedagogical departments of the universities, that can afford any great relief at present. The latter are so few in number that they can .accommodate very few relatively. The former are fewer still but they are having a profound influence. Until the present ferment shall have aroused the public mind to the necessity of making the secondary schools as attractive pecuniarily as the colleges-and why should they not be ?-men and women of superior ability and preparation will not select them for life-work except in occasional instances where principalships pay a living wage. A few miles. from where I am now writing is a township high school. Its principal is a graduate of the Illinois State Normal University and of an excellent Ohio college. He is a professional teacher in all that the name implies, and the community regards him as a good bargain at something like thirty-five hundred dollars a year. He took his professional course before his college course, but he served a long apprenticeship as an assistant before he rose to the dignity of principal. He is a good illustration of what I have had before my mind as I have written of the secondary teacher and of his preparation, altho there should be an educational institution which could do for him in two or

three

years what he did for himself in several times two or three years while he held a subordinate position.

I have made an incidental reference to the practice school as a feature of the institution that will prepare secondary teachers. Doubtless the work of the normal student in actual teaching under normal conditions, altho done in the elementary grades, will be of material help in high schools. There should be an opportunity to study a model high school and also to do actual teaching work as a part of the preparation of the secondary teachers, however. The problem is far more difficult than in the elementary school because of the greater maturity of the pupils and of their more fully developed consciousness of the work of their teachers. It can be done and well done if deferred until the scholarship and maturity of the teacher are of such a quality as to win the confidence of the pupils. What is at first lacking in skill can be compensated for by a fine culture and attractive personal qualities. Persons of such attainments understand the meaning of criticism and accomplish in a few weeks under such conditions what would otherwise cost months or even years of experience, if they were ever able to achieve it at all.

I have not dared to discuss those other very desirable qualities of the secondary teacher which are matters of individual personality rather than the result of professional training.

My conclusion as the result of my experience and study is that the normal school as generally organized at present is not the best possible agency for the preparation of secondary teachers.

XV (special)

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS FOR THE SECONDARY SCHOOLS OF GERMANY

CHARLES DEGARMO, PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

CONDITIONS OF ADMISSION TO EXAMINATIONS

The so-called secondary schools of Germany cover a period of nine years in the educational life of the student; roughly from nine or ten to eighteen or nineteen years of age. The first three years of this course may be said to belong to elementary, the next four years to secondary, and the last two years to higher education. To be trained for such a school, the candidate needs the professional preparation of the elementary, the high-school, and the college teacher. To meet such conditions the Germans divide their certificates in the various subjects into first and second and third grades, the scope of which will be explained later.

It takes some sixty closely-printed pages to describe all the requirements for the granting of these certificates in Prussia alone. Many of them relate to social, economic, and educational conditions which find no counterpart among us. For this reason, the statement of what is required in the German