strong in its emotional suggestion, becomes a large factor in influencing character. (b) Once a feeling is present in a child's nature either by instinct or by suggestion it will be deepened by the constant recall of ideas which have connected with them the particular feeling desired. To speak constantly and admiringly of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and others, who have been the impersonations of social sympathy and personal fearlessness, is only to deepen sympathy for humanity and individual courage. The second method, therefore, of strengthening an emotion is to recall it again and again by speaking of situations or persons with which that emotion is habitually associated. (c) The third method is to use expression and action. However fearful we may be, if we assume the demeanor and the physical attitude of courage we tend to stamp out fear and to strengthen the feeling which habitually goes with the given physical response. The truth of the Lange-James theory of emotions for the teacher is that a child should be given every possible opportunity to act out in school life the desirable emotions which a chance situation may stimulate. All of these methods are indirect. We get at the emotion by first getting hold of something else. The three ways are, first, the use of example; second, the recall of ideas associated with emotions, and third, the encouragement of expression which is appropriate to certain types of feeling.

The opportunities in school life for emotional control are many. Discipline as opposed to instruction offers the largest opportunity. It is because the emotions play so large a part in a disciplinary situation that it is more subtle and more difficult to deal with. The average child who needs severe discipline is hard to deal with pre-eminently because he is mastered by his own feeling. It is difficult to use moral suasion on the instant because it is difficult to get the child, immersed in his own emotion, to give attention to such examples, ideas, and actions as might suggest the counter and more desirable feelings, which the teacher is after.

Classroom instruction, which usually deals with the purely intellectual elements, offers its own opportunities, however. History, biography, and civics are subjects which give large opportunity for the teacher, as the representative of social opinion, to associate his personal emotional estimates with the ideas that come under discussion. Literature, which is usually spoken of as a subject affording opportunity for training moral character, has many emotional elements but they should not be used directly for controlling the social conduct of children. Following the classification given earlier in the address the emotions here used are aesthetic and recreative rather than vital and social. If character comes from literature, as it does, it is as a by-product rather than as the result of a direct aim and effort.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF ORGANIZED CHILD STUDY IN AMERICA TO EDUCATIONAL THEORY AND PRACTICE, AS APPLIED TO GRAMMAR GRADES

FLETCHER B. DRESSLAR, DEPT. OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

There is no time for a thoro discussion of this topic. I must content myself with a mere summary of the more important results, and a few suggestions touching their significance in our care of the children of the upper grades.

1. Careful observation on the growth of children by Bowditch, Boaz, and many others, has brought to light the fact that most girls of twelve have reached a maturity comparable with boys of about fourteen, and that along with this superiority in bodily development there is a superiority in mental power and self-control.

The educational corollary of this knowledge has been put into practice rather tardily, I fear. In the upper grammar grades under women teachers, and in the first year of the high school, the standards set for excellence in classwork are standards measured more by what girls are able to do than by the ability of the boys. Mentally as well as physically girls are, at this period, almost two years in advance of the boys, and it is unfair to expect the same degree of carefulness, neatness, and finish from the boys, easily obtained from the girls. Many discouragements and dismissals or withdrawals have directly resulted from this unfair measurement of the boys. It may be that just here we will discover the weakest place in our system of co-education.

2. Many studies dealing with the motor abilities of children have emphasized anew and enlarged in detail the peculiar abilities and inabilities of the children in muscular adjustments. These studies have brought to our attention in a forcible way that it is a very easy matter for a teacher to expect children to do what they are physically unprepared to do. They have further shown that growth in physical training and manual training in all its forms should emphasize first and fundamentally the larger and coarser muscular adjustments, and that we should adjust our courses of study accordingly.

3. As a result of various and extended investigations it has been found that many children are mentally slow and stupid on account of physical defects within the power of the teacher or physician to correct. The difficulties growing out of defective eyes or ears have been brought to our attention in so many striking ways that a large percentage of the teachers in our elementary schools today are consciously striving to organize the work in such a way and to so condition the children that abnormalities will not be engendered, or that those which do exist may be counteracted and corrected. As a result, our schoolhouses are better lighted, our books are better printed, defective vision is corrected by proper glasses, those who are deaf are more carefully directed, and in many other ways the work of the school is so ordered as to

avoid imposing upon defective ones and especially to prevent abnormalities from developing in these directions. School administration now recognizes the essential need of trained specialists to examine into the health of the children, to the end that their physical well-being may be competently considered and properly guarded, for we now know that mental progress depends far more on sound normal health than we had even suspected heretofore. And especially have we learned that defective physical life lends itself readily to moral degradation in later life. As a result of the clearer knowledge of these facts, it has been found wise in Germany to establish a system of Hilfsschulen, or auxiliary schools, into which are gathered from the grades those defective children who are suffering on account of neglect and who at the same time are hindrances to the progress of normal children. It has been found that under special treatment and considerate care many of these children, who would otherwise get little or nothing from enforced schooling in the regular classes, develop into useful and worthy learners. The school physician will soon be as necessary a part of our school machinery as he already is in other lands.

4. As the result of a great variety of studies, I think we can safely say that it has been made clear to us that one of the best ways to get at the moral nature of the child is thru good health and proper environment, both in the school and out of it. This point of view is not a new one, but it has been greatly emphasized, clarified, and strengthened thru the study of those degenerate children, who cause the world so much trouble in their later lives. I think we have come to see in a convincing way that the child is not conceived and born in sin, but that he may be conceived and born of unworthy parentage and their physical weaknesses may entail upon him conditions which make it harder for him to live a normal life than for children not so handicapped. In other words, we have found that good physical inheritance, proper nourishment, pure air, and wholesome physical exercises and play, are often the best preventives as well as the best correctives in things moral.

5. Thru careful study of the games and plays of children, we have learned that these have developed to fill the natural needs and demands of child-life, and that they are better adapted to the physical growth of the normal child than any gymnastic exercises yet devised. And furthermore, that thru these games and plays children are brought into the most normal social and ethical relations. These studies have had a large influence upon the growth of the movement for larger playgrounds, as well as upon physical culture in general. They have operated to bring the teacher to see that thruout the ages the instinct for play has unconsciously directed children toward self-education, and has vital relations to growth and unity of personality.

Children who are cheated out of large opportunities for play, are thereby seriously hindered in their education. "Childhood is for play," says Groos, and whether we accept this dictum as it stands or not, we must feel that we now know enough to demand playgrounds and ample ones for every public school in our land. If this is not a new gospel, it is now felt to be a truer one.

6. We have learned thru study of the native interests of children that much of the schoolwork we have insisted upon has had no vital effect upon their childish lives and has aroused no active participation therein. As a result of this point of view, school men have been forced to more careful consideration of the curricula, to question carefully the needs and reactions of children, and to attempt to adjust the elements in any worthy education to the active organizing interests of the child-mind. This changed point of view is not wholly the product of the last twenty-five years, but it has been emphasized, clarified, and brought to our attention in so many striking ways that it has come to be a large element in our professional consciousness. Interest is one of the most significant words in our educational vocabulary. This conception touches our schoolwork at every point and charges teachers to carefully inquire into the relations of their work with the child-mind. The emphasis derived from these studies has had much to do with the enlargement and modification of curricula; it has changed elementary science into naturestudy; it has changed sailor geography into home geography; it has helped to eliminate much from arithmetic and to modify very materially the methods of dealing with that which we now give. It has curtailed grammar and enlarged literature, and has been a large element in eliminating brutal punishment from the schoolroom. It has made the work of the teacher more joyous, more endurable, and has helped to establish relations between pupil and parent previously impossible.

7. Interesting studies, such as those inaugurated by Mr. Johnson concerning rudimentary society among boys, have brought to light the peculiar ability of boys to deal with boys. Out of these general studies have come all sorts of organizations for self-government and self-control; we may cite such movements as those typified by the George Junior Republic, the Columbia Park Boys' Club, the School City, and many more of like nature. School management and control have largely shifted their point of view from devising rules to prevent breaches of discipline, to earnest attempts to so condition the children while in school that they will realize that schools and teaching are devised for them and not for teachers. Meanness in school is no longer a sin against the teacher, but against the school and school-fellows. The word discipline has largely given place to management, and even this word contains a growing content of co-operation. Consequently the days of flogging indiscriminately and injudiciously have about disappeared. And real true whole-hearted obedience in the schools is more in evidence than ever before. Those teachers who knew no better and who could keep school only by vigorous applications of the rod have been almost eliminated. School government has come to be more a matter of moral training and social co-operation.

8. It has been made plain by many studies that the meanings put into common words by children are far more varied and far less exact when compared with adult standards than the world had previously supposed. The ignorance of children concerning the common events and facts about them, especially

of those children brought up in cities, is far more dense than our teachers had taken for granted. The experience of the modern city child is so narrow and incomplete that it is impossible for us to suppose that it puts into language and literature any adequate sort of rational relations. The contents of the minds of children upon entering school in no sort of way fulfill the standard taken for granted by the average teacher. Investigations in this field have brought out these facts very clearly. It is an important contribution to bring to the attention of those preparing to teach and who have not made any serious attempt to get into touch with the thought life of children.

We have come to see thru studies of the mental life of a child that it depends for its content far more upon its environment than we had expected; that not only are children influenced by the environment in the school, in the home, and in the church, but by ideals gathered from the general community in which they live. We learn, too, that those ideals which appeal to them are derived from the active lives of the adults who surround them. In other words, social imitation is far more significant than the world had previously understood.

The results of these studies have made us realize far more fully than before how easy it is for us to misinterpret and misjudge children because their words are used to carry only their meanings, and our words are used with a meaning they cannot fully receive. When teachers realize these things, the facts operate to influence them in at least three ways: They select words to accord with experience; they strive more diligently and intelligently to enrich the pupil's experience in order that they may better understand each other, and they also see that the meaning of words may be, and often must be, absorbed from the teacher's attitude toward them and their relations to words already more fully known. Those words, freighted with meanings the child cannot interpret, must not be imposed, but they can become a most effective means for suggesting meanings, enticing thought and prefiguring possible experience.

These facts have also had a decided bearing upon textbook making, on the selection of the material presented in a course of study, and have especially emphasized the importance of real contact, and real experience with a manysided world. We know better now than we did before, that ability to reproduce words and definitions does not signify ability to understand them.

9. Numerous studies have brought to light many interesting facts regarding the emotional and intellectual conditions of the early adolescent period. It has been found that it is a period when new emotions, new sentiments, and a new outlook upon life, are born; it is a time when old connections are enlarged, new thought relations are established, new instincts are awakened, and new interests dominate. In this period the egocentric attitude begins to give place to the altruistic, religious emotions are awakened, large ideals are formed, and personal initiative suggests new attempts and new points of view.

Those teachers and school authorities, those preachers and anxious parents, who have caught the meanings of these larger views of youth, and have sought