pretty well looked after. We have ceased handling the pupils in masses and are dealing more and more with individuals; but exceptionally capable individuals are so few that it it is exceedingly difficult to deal with them in an adequate way in any graded public-school system. Pupils here and there who might, without jeopardizing health, accomplish far more than their classmates, being able, with comparatively little effort, to keep pace with the rest, are satisfied and fail to develop the powers which are latent in them. While the average and the less capable pupils are gaining the ideal of hard work, these few are gaining the idea that all things can be had without effort, or with little effort. This idea is apt to follow them through life, and to make them really less effective than some of those of smaller natural gifts who have gained the habit of intense application.

For the last six or seven years, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and for the last five years in the city which I represent, there have been selected here and there, from the sixth grammer grade, pupils who show unusual capacity. With the consent of their parents, these pupils have been gathered together into convenient centers, and under teachers more than ordinarily capable, these few picked pupils have been allowed, while continuing the regular grammar-grade work, to begin some of their high-school studies two years before the ordinary time of entering a high school. They go to the high school with one year of Latin, with a year of either French or German, and with a year of English to their credit, and accordingly they finish the four years' high-school course in three years. The saving of a year's time is important, but the most important consideration, to my mind, is that they learn to exercise their exceptional powers instead of settling down into contented mediocrity.

J. F. MILLSPAUGH, president of State Normal School, Los Angeles, Cal.-Theoretically, there is an average child. Those in every way better endowed than the average we call bright children; those less happily endowed we call dull. To thus classify children would be proper enough, if we used a fair standard in making it; but we do not. We assume a number of particular qualities as desirable, group into a class the children who possess them, and call that class the standard by which to measure other children. We have inherited a belief in the efficacy of a certain curriculum of studies. These studies were originally selected because they were adapted to the needs of the one class of childrenthe other classes were not supposed to be worth choosing studies for. For generations we have been using this curriculum as a means of standardizing our children. Now this is just as sensible as it would be to adopt trotting as the sole standard of worth in a horse. We should then be obliged to condemn as worthless the heavy Clydesdale because he cannot trot as fast as Maud S. The truth is that the Creator has a place, a useful, honorable place, for every type of human being that he has created, and we have no right to use an offensive term in classifying any individual because he differs from some one else whom it is the fashion to think more worth while. The test of worth should be: how well does one perform the part for which he was created, not how well can he perform the part for which someone else was created. We have been trying for some years to give the so-called exceptional child a chance; but we have not ceased to try to make something out of him for which he was not created. The exceptional child that we call dull has been forced to take a program suitable for the exceptional child that we call bright. The result has been ruinous to the dull child and harmful to the bright child.

What we need to do is squarely to face the facts. Let us differentiate our school curriculum in such a way as more nearly to meet the needs of all classes of ability. We are doing this to some extent in high schools; we have classical high schools, English high schools, manual training high schools, commercial high schools, polytechnic high schools. Let us carry the plan down into the grades in a still more thorogoing fashion. Is it impracticable to have schools built upon the truth that some children have a native endowment of one kind; others of another kind?

This would not mean educational neglect of any department of the being, though it might shatter some of our notions of an all-around training. We could reasonably hope

that it would give us a larger number than we now have of well-trained men representing all types. It would not cheapen education, but enrich it.

L. E. WOLFE, superintendent of schools, San Antonio, Tex.-I like very much what Mr. Millspaugh has said. When you say that a certain pupil is dull, and that a certain other pupil is bright, you should base your statement upon something fundamental. We have been accustomed to base our statement upon the traditional course of study. In this traditional course of study the great thing is to interpret the printed page; but is there not something more fundamental than this ability; namely, the ability to render service to society? It seems to me that the most fundamental thing is service to the social unit. This service may be in various fields—in the field of books, in the professions, in business, in mechanical construction, in agriculture. When we make the course of study as many-sided as the capabilities of the pupil and the industrial demands of life, we find that many pupils classed as dull under the traditional course of study cannot be so classed under this modern course of study. The traditional course of study has been shaped largely to prepare pupils for the professions and for leadership in business, and not for a many-sided social service.

If this question be looked at from the standpoint of humanity, society owes to each individual an opportunity to develop the best that is in him—to prepare himself for a maximum of social service. If the question be looked at from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest, it is the highest interest of society to train each of its members for a maximum of social service. The solidarity of society is so fixed and the laws governing this solidarity so inexorable, that society cannot escape responsibility for the shortcomings of any one of its members any more than this natural body can escape responsibility for the weakness of any one of its organs.

Not only is the traditional course of study peculiarly adapted to a comparatively small number of pupils, but the teaching force of the past without exception, and of the present with few exceptions, has been composed of those who were adapted to the mastery of the book course of study, and therefore lacked appreciation of those natural gifts in the pupil which make for achievement in the field of practical endeavor rather than in books. In fact, the great army of women teachers so excelled in books during their school days as to be relieved by their mothers almost wholly from domestic duties. Is it likely that women thus brought up would have a due appreciation of talents that do not go to the mastery of books? In like manner, the boys who have become school teachers are usually inferior to other members of the family in mechanical skill.

F. A. FITZPATRICK, Boston, Mass.-If I interpret these remarks correctly, the impression that I get is, that it is very difficult to tell whether these exceptional children are very exceptional or not. We don't want to exclude any of them. We don't want to bar out the child who is a botanist, or the child who is a baseball player; we want to get out the best that is in them just the same. Without doubt, at its present stage, this is a very difficult problem, of which we are just entering upon the threshold of discovery.

We know that the difference between men and women in this world is not a difference in intellectual power; it is more largely a difference in will-power, and this is especially true with children. We know too, that school tasks are so small that any child can accomplish them, provided he has the right stimulus. In other words, the work of the eight grades can be completed by any child of eleven or twelve years in two years; and there are many instances of boys of twelve or thirteen, of fifteen or sixteen years who have done this work and graduated from college in seven years.

What we want, as Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Van Sickle have indicated, is to see that these children have the stimulus which will react upon them. Of course you can't always tell about that. Phillips Brooks was an ordinary scholar at Harvard. He had no love for athletics; he had no fondness for the prescribed study; he did not enter into the literary societies with any interest; he had no record of excellent scholarship. He did haunt the library. He made few acquaintances. When he was graduated from college, according

to a time-honored custom in Boston, his friends secured for him a position in the Boston Latin School. Within a few weeks, complaints began to arise about him-that he could not hold the boys; his disciplinary powers were weak. He was forced ultimately to resign because he was incompetent to handle that school. Yet he became one of the greatest leaders of men of his generation. Now, of course we could not predict what Phillips Brooks would become.

When you begin to compare people, you cannot tell whether one will enter the great world-life from the standpoint of poetry, or whether he will enter from the standpoint of mathematics, or whether he will enter it from the side of a novelist, or from the side of the engineer, or from the side of the orator. Who could have said that Michael Angelo, or Victor Hugo, or George Eliot, or Homer, would be greater than others?

What we want to do is to avoid, by our routine and our prescriptive ways, the destruction of this budding capacity. The hope of a democracy is in its leaders. Leaders are of such value to any community that their worth is inestimable. It has been said that in England, if fifty thousand people were to be taken out of the ranks of the best literary people, the leading statesmen, the leading physicians, the leading lawyers, merchants, engineers, inventors and transplanted to Australia, that England would drop in fifty years to a third-class power; and conversely, Australia would develop in a corresponding degree,

JOHN T. PRINCE, agent for State Board of Education, West Newton, Mass.-Thus far in the discussion, we have confined ourselves to the intellectually exceptional child. I would like to ask some members of the Council who have had experience, to tell us what has been done with the morally exceptional child, or the physically exceptional child. These defects are quite as important as the other, however important that may be. In regard to the treatment of delinquents in Massachussetts, I think we are as far advanced as they are in any state in the country; but I am convinced that we are working on wrong lines. We have good truant schools, and we are sending our children to them. But we are not getting hold of the right children, nor all of the children, nor are we getting hold of them in the right way. I believe if the school men would give more attention to this question, directing the charitably disposed people who are inclined to take up this question without the knowledge that they should have, we should do very much more than we are doing.

A DISCUSSION OF THE REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON
INSTRUCTION IN LIBRARY ADMINISTRATION
IN NORMAL SCHOOLS

FRANK F. BUNKER, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF CITY SCHOOLS,
LOS ANGELES, CAL.

This report of your committee clearly was written in the spirit of a desire to bring about a closer relationship between the public school and the public library. With this objective I am in the most hearty accord. There are two reasons why I want greatly to increase the interdependence of these two institutions.

Our textbooks, good as they are-and they never were so excellent as nowcan never be more than compendiums of the facts and general notions which the writers consider essential. The space limitation of any text is such that it is impossible to include that wealth of detail and picturesque incident which is essential to interest as well as to a clear comprehension of the point under consideration. For instance, to put a pupil in any sort of sympathetic touch with a foreign country, with its agricultural, industrial, and climatic conditions;

with its picturesque and historical features; with its modes of life, it is necessary that the child should receive his impressions in concrete form, and chiefly in mental pictures which he can clearly visualize. It is not necessary, neither is it desirable, that the pupil should remember all the details which have to be presented in order to get a given picture; indeed, with most of us, in time, such details fade from consciousness, leaving in their stead only a general feeling, a sense of perspective. But since concrete pictures are the only materials out of which generalizations are fashioned, it follows that a mass of concrete and related detail is necessary if we would have the child understand the general statements which he finds in his text. It is true that one cannot put a general conception, a vague term, an abstract definition, an abstract idea or notion, into a child's mind, and have him hold this until he gets old enough or gets experience enough to clothe it in its proper image. If he holds it at all, except thru verbal memory, he holds it because it is an image. The range of information in any field of knowledge is so vast and so varied that a textbook which would include the concrete material necessary to creating essential images clearly cannot be less than a library of books. Our texts are attempts to encompass this mass of detail within two covers. Of necessity they can be little more than a convenient outline of principles and generalizations, so abstract that picture-thinking from them is impossible. That schoolroom practice, which does not go beyond the text, can be nothing more than a system of memorizing words and phrases, because the body of material which is necessary to the understanding of the given generalization lies outside the text. The chief source of the supply of such material is found, obviously, in the public library, and the teacher who does not use the library freely for her own help and inspiration, as well as to secure material for the use of her classes, is without uplift. Permit me to say that in this I am speaking from experience, for the course of study for the grades in geography and history, which has been introduced in the Seattle schools during the past year, is based almost entirely upon material which is to be found only in magazines, in books of reference, and in the children' books supplied, most liberally, by the public library of that city. The results, in increased interest, thru the introduction of a fresh content coming to the children from outside the text, have been remarkable, as testified to, not alone by principals and teachers, but by parents who, with satisfaction, have recognized the vitalizing effect on their own children.

There is another reason why our schools should lean heavily upon the public library. Our work is weak indeed if it fails to inspire the student with an eagerness to extend his study beyond the limits of the particular school course selected. I believe it possible, thru readjusting the content of our cultural courses, and thru changing the methods of schoolroom practice, so to lay the foundations of culture as to irresistibly impel the young person leaving the public school to seek to broaden his education along the lines of the interests which he has already established. The school that does not bring the student

to the realization that education is a continuous process, with no break when he leaves school, falls far short of its high purpose. In short, the pupil should be brought to see in the public library an institution where he can continue his education thruout life-a place to which he can go for intellectual and spiritual inspiration. The school is remiss if it does not prepare the pupil for the process of self-education, and stimulate him to desire it.

As to the desirability, then, of close accord between the public school and the library which I take to be the end sought by your committee, I am in the closest sympathy. In my own work I have tried earnestly to get the teachers and children into the library, and the library into the schools.

In attempting to secure the relationship which I want to see brought about, I have met two serious difficulties, both relating to the teacher's preparation, one having to do with her lack of familiarity with library machinery, the other growing out of her ignorance of children's literature, its nature, scope, and function.

I thought it impossible, in this day of progressive educational practice, to find any recent graduate of our normal schools in ignorance of the use of Poole's Index or the card catalogue; yet I find many who have never seen either. One would think it natural that, inasmuch as our normal schools are preparing their teachers to go out and educate children, about the first thing they would do would be to see that their students get a clear survey of the literature which has been written for children, and to develop in them standards of discrimination in the same. I am a graduate of one normal school. I was a member of the faculty of another. I know intimately the work of several others, and superficially that of many more. I have yet to hear of any normal school, either East or West, attempting to give its students any systematic work in the very field wherein the teacher ought to exercise her greatest influence. The San Francisco State Normal School is doing most along this line of any school with which I am familiar. However, the work there is limited to a training in the use of children's books which are supplementary to school subjects. But where I find one teacher who knows so little about library routine that it is to her incomprehensible, I find many more who have no notion what books children are interested in, or what to suggest when the parent asks for advice, or what kind of reading is available and should be secured to supplement the classroom work, in such subjects as science, history, geography, literature, and general reading. There are two difficulties, then, growing out of the lack of proper preparation on the part of our teachers, which must be met before the library can be used to its maximum by the school-the lack of how to use the library, and the lack of a comprehensive knowledge of the field of children's literature. Beyond some four and one-half pages, chiefly a bibliography, the report of your own Committee on Instruction in Library Administration in the Normal Schools deals with the first of these only. The report is an excellent handbook of the elements of library practice. It is well arranged and clearly