jects, but the heads of some departments demand more work from subjects who expect to teach. In botany thirty hours (five courses) is recommended, tho twelve hours might be sufficient for the student who will teach botany as a minor subject. The English department asks for six hours of higher work besides the eighteen hours nominally required.

The language departments demand more work, German and Latin each asking for thirty hours. Greek should be accompanied by an extensive course in Latin. Mathematics requires about twenty-four hours, while in physics only sixteen hours are required. Physiography and zoology demand only eighteen hours.

At the University of Rochester thirty hours or one-sixth of the work required for a degree is the minimum preparation for the teacher of a special subject in the high school. Of this work in the special subject from five to fifteen hours. are required, the other courses in the subject or group of subjects being elective. The university has no specific regulation as to the recommendation of its candidates but the plan mentioned represents very closely the standard applied to judging the fitness of a student for high-school work.

At Indiana University the major-subject requirement usually represents the amount of training that is the basis for recommendation to teach in good high schools. The major subject requires forty-five hours in the departments of Latin, English, history, physics, mathematics, and botany. In modern language the requirement is sixty hours. Besides the regular requirement in a subject the department may control twenty hours, in work closely related to the major subject. By permission a student may do more work than the fortyfive hours required in the special subject. Students (special) who are specializing in certain subjects will usually receive preference in recommendation as teachers of those subjects. Students who do not graduate may receive a statement of the amount of work they have done in any department. Where a teacher is required who can teach several subjects the student is required to major in but one subject. Two years' work would be sufficient in any subject the candidate might be expected to teach, with the exception of modern language not studied before entering college.

West Virginia University requires thirty hours of English, twenty hours of history, and ten hours of physics. In Latin the student should, at the very least, have read all of Caesar's Gallic War, eight of Cicero's shorter orations, besides his letters De Amicitia and De Senectute; Virgil's Aeneid, together with the Eclogues and Georgics; the Odes and Epodes of Horace, and one book of Livy's History of Rome. No one charge should attempt to teach Latin until he has enough Greek to read the Anabasis, the Iliad, and the Odyssey.

There is a difference in opinion among the instructors of Ohio State University as to the exact amount of work that should be required of a student who intends to teach a certain subject. About thirty hours (22 U. of I.) or one-sixth of the total amount of work required for graduation will probably

represent an average of the requirements. Some instructors require students. to take teachers' courses in the subjects they expect to teach.

The State University of Washington adapts its requirements to the grade of high school needing teachers. There are about seven high schools of the first class in the state. For recommendation to teach in this group the student must make the special subject he is to teach his major. To teach in schools of the second class he must also have about two years' work in any other subject he may be required to teach. To teach in schools of the third group, college preparation is required in two or three subjects but no definite standard is set.

The University of Colorado requires thirty hours' work, but this need not all be absolutely in one course or department; it may be in closely allied departments. Teachers of English and of foreign languages must have twenty-five hours' credit.

The School of Pedagogy of New York University prepares mainly for the work of the elementary schools. The institution has no definite requirement as to the amount of work a student must do to receive recommendation for a position as teacher in secondary schools.

At Columbia University the prerequisite for admission to secondary training in English is twenty-four hours in English. This work must include courses in composition and in literature. The literature studies must have included both the historical and critical phases.

The student must take six hours' work in the professional course which includes a study of the subject-matter from the teacher's point of view and a study of teaching. The student must also take the prescribed work in observation and practice teaching.

The minimum requirement for mathematics is eighteen hours but the best students usually exceed this amount. Many take from sixteen to twenty hours more than the amount required. The university requires six hours' work in the professional or training-courses. A graduate training-course of four hours may be taken.

A teacher of Latin should have a fairly complete and accurate reading knowledge of the language. He should understand the syntax and structure of the language and, in addition, should be versed in the auxiliary subjects of antiquities and literature, sufficient for the necessary illustration of his teaching. Eighteen hours must be taken before the student may be admitted to the training-courses. Twelve hours' work is required.

The official minimum requirement for the student who expects to teach geography is three years' work, three hours a week. This course includes a course in general geography covering the elements of mathematical geography, meteorology, and climatology, the land forms and the ocean, in which study the endeavor is made to go beyond the scope of these subjects as presented in any one of the leading textbooks. In addition to this, each student is required to make a special study in the course, of the origin and classification

of land forms, of the climate of the United States, and dynamical geology in the more advanced courses in the department of geology of Columbia. University.

The minimum requirement should be supplemented by work in economics, geology, and advanced work in physiography.

XVII (special)

WILL THE SAME TRAINING IN THE NORMAL SCHOOL SERVE TO PREPARE THE TEACHER FOR BOTH ELEMENTARY AND HIGH-SCHOOL WORK?

JOHN R. KIRK, PRESIDENT OF STATE NORMAL SCHOOL KIRKSVILLE, MO. I. GENERAL STATEMENT

1. It is unwise and wasteful to classify prospective teachers at the beginning of their professional preparation because they all have inherited traits and capabilities which should be the criteria for their differentiation into classes.

2. It requires two or three years of instruction, intermingled with experimentation, to determine what these qualities are.

3. From the nature of the case, two or three years in the normal school or teachers' college should be devoted to such general courses of instruction and experimentation as will reveal to the student what his talents are.

4. The final differentiation into elementary teachers and high-school teachers should probably take place during the fourth year in the normal school and in the teachers' college. Even then it is doubtful whether the two classes of teachers need to be separated very widely. Perhaps 90 per cent. of all the professional or technical instruction and preliminary experience in the preparation of teachers should be common to the two classes under consideration.

5. The most effective and practicable scheme in the preparation of all teachers furnishes academic and professional instruction side by side and in the later periods joins with these some constructive experience in teaching.

II. BASIC FACTS

Professional preparation for all teaching below the college is predetermined. by the following facts:

1. Adolescence frequently begins pretty low down in the elementary school period and ends early in the high-school period. It sometimes begins late in the high-school period and continues beyond the time of high-school graduation.

2. As to aptitudes and disposition, children differ among themselves in the elementary school fully as much as they do in the high school.

3. Elementary-school children manifest in some degree practically all the traits and impulses discovered in high-school children.

4. The subjects in the curriculum (whether for elementary schools or high schools) are relatively simple and easy, while the children to be taught (whether in elementary school or high school) are infinitely varied and exceedingly hard to understand and direct.

5. Sound scholarship in the content of the school curriculum is essential. But it constitutes only part of the teachers' burden of thought and study. The paramount problem is the school child.

III. ARGUMENT

Training is a bad word for our purpose. It savors too much of studied imitation, of conscious repetition, and the exaltation of routine. It suggests the substitution of drilling for thinking. It signifies prescriptions and rules dictated by instructors and acquired by would-be teachers. The dog and pony show illustrates what can be done by training. The prospective teacher needs instruction and practice in constructive thinking more than he needs training. He needs frequently to apply and test his knowledge in concrete experience of his own. He needs direction and exercise in the use of his constructive ingenuity. Opportunities for application and test of his knowledge are many and varied. In the great cities the potency of mechanism stifles spontaneity and power of personal reaction. In the country at large there is much opportunity for wholesome professional growth thru practice which is not overdirected. This may be in practice schools, or thru substitute work in schools of villages and small cities, but, best of all, in rural schools.

The typical graduate of the normal school and of the teachers' college goes about his work in too large a degree conscious of rules and prescriptions learned by him while undergoing training. But he should be nearly unconscious of acquired methods. He should attack his work with his energies centered upon the curious, inquisitive, kaleidoscopic group of persons given him to teach or exploit. During his professional preparation his skill in adaptation and his creative imagination need stimulating to the utmost. By effort he should acquire the ability to lose himself in guiding the learner and in adapting knowledge to the use of the learner. There is something in all this infinitely better than the thing we call training.

The curriculum used in educating children is relatively simple and stable; but the children furnish a varying stream of thought and action exceedingly complex and difficult to comprehend. We count out a few hundred facts to be taught in the high school. We classify, tabulate, and label them. We give ample reference to bibliographies. Most of the high-school teachers have spent some years in college learning the contents of the curriculum. We permit them to make diagnoses off hand and administer the medicine with reckless unconcern. Our prescriptions are dealt out chiefly by the rule of cut and try. No one has attempted to classify, measure, and label the children of the high-school classes.

Custom compels the elementary teacher to learn the natural traits of

children and to appeal to the children thru things which are known to them. But custom allows the high-school teacher tolerably free rein to follow his tastes and inclinations. Hence he usually patterns after those who taught him. With somewhat better scholastic acquirements than the elementary teacher has, he is frequently a narrower person, living more within his limited specialties, and teaching subjects, not persons. He is sometimes woefully ignorant of the child to be taught.

We are not likely to make progress, excepting in spots, until some parts of our educational creed are reconstructed. One of them innocently promulgated from the circles of higher education is 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 a fully educated person is needed to take charge of the child on the next day in school, i. e., the first day in the high school. By this tenet the typical normal school graduate with insufficient academic attainments and much dogma stands for the half-educated person, while the university graduate crammed and surfeited with ill-digested facts and theories acquired in college lecture rooms represents the fully educated person. This creed is convenient and practical. It is more easily lived up to than a better creed would be. It is damaging to all education.

I think we should repudiate these invidious discriminations, for if anyone needs a college education it is the teacher who guides the children thru the varied subjects used in the grammar-school grades. If anyone needs critical and available knowledge of human nature in the uncertain period of childhood and the stormy stages of adolescence it is the teacher of the high-school child.

Most of the normal schools offer limited courses which high-school graduates finish in two years. This custom precludes separation of students with a view to preparing them for different kinds of service, because it is impossible in so short a time to differentiate and test the students sufficiently to determine the kind of teaching to which they are severally adapted. Out of a lot of two-year-old colts a horse-trainer, judging from structure, may select the trotting horse or the roadster or the one to pull the beer wagon; but we cannot so classify prospective teachers. One professor of education in a great university informs me that the girls entering his department have already decided to be high-school teachers. There is an educational caste in his state. He says the graduates of his department would be humiliated were they required to teach in elementary schools; but some of these prospective teachers are by nature and acquired traits adapted to the work of primary teachers and nothing else; others among them are versatile, forceful persons, adapted to the varied life of the grammar-school teacher and wholly unfit for the confining specialties of secondary education. But it requires many months of time to classify these persons and so direct their study and work that no part of their professional lives shall be wasted. It therefore seems clear that a teachers' college or normal school offering such a short cut to professional life as a two