Vol. LXXXIII.-No. 2

It is certain that teachers need to reason together, stand together, work together and fight together for the things they need. If we should actively co-operate for increased efficiency, increased service, at every school centre we could revolutionize living conditions in state in five years.

No one knows so well as we the tragedies of inefficient, incompetent teaching. We have seen children dwarfed for life by an incompetent nurse, who accidentally let them fall; we have seen men permanently injured by unskilled doctors; but we have seen many more children mortally injured in body and spirit by inefficient and indifferent instruction under conditions humanly intolerable.

Let us focus our attention with determination and zeal on a policy of the efficient individual teacher, the efficient school system, efficiently and adequately administered.

Each teacher is a working centre of influence. Two simple illustrations recently came under my observation:

At the close of a school term last spring, a committeeman of a two-teacher school, that had hitherto always been inefficient, came to me and said: "We never knew before what a good primary teacher was until we got Miss S. Now we know and will pay for the best we can get." Another school, through the influence of one efficient, interested teacher, had so spread an inspiring community spirit that it has redirected along efficient ideas the four or five adjacent districts.

The old idea of the school limited it to four walls; now it is limited only by the bounds of the district. The school is now organized for community upbuilding from every point of view and the centre of organized community effort.

On this point of the support of the committee and the support of the public, we are inclined to be too easily discouraged through forgetting that public opinion is a thing too big to be quickly changed, and that it is too independent to be forced. We are quite as often surprised by the support we receive from an unexpectedly progressive public opinion as disappointed by the reverse; and we must not let our enthusiasm for our community be dimmed nor the leadership of the school in community upbuilding be disheartened by occasional or even habitual reverses. Our aim is too sure and too high to demand a reward or admit a defeat.

The compulsory attendance law, enforced for four months, for the ages from eight to twelve years, increased the school attendance twelve

A. E. WINSHIP, Editor

per cent. The five cent levy on every $100 worth of property creating the State Equalizing Fund lengthened the school term very nearly five weeks.

We can learn valuable lessons from big business in this matter of efficient organization and co-organization. Intelligent, specialized results under expert supervision are accepted only under the well recognized standards that are demanded of all successful workers. A few mornings ago, I happened to be on the fourth floor of a large department store. In a section of this floor the superintendent of the store was teaching and examining about one-half of the force of the store on the standards of efficient salesmanship. It is understood as a matter of course in all large and successful group enterprises that such standards of professional knowledge and methods are demanded. We should certainly not be afraid of centralizing government that has for its only object raising the professional individual standards of the highest of professions on which the standards of all other professions depend.

We shall make more progress if we lay less emphasis on the plea of poorly paid teachers, more determined insistence on efficiency of professional standards and administration.

To the teacher who is doing good work supervision is one of the greatest assets. Work

done well and work well looked after are two forces which joined together make the sum of an efficient system.

Many a good teacher has lost efficiency through lack of an appreciative supervision.

Any teacher who is free to locate where she chooses should be guided in her choice not by whether she shall go to a city or to a country school. That choice is relatively unimportant. She should go where her work will be sympathetically but efficiently supervised.

What is the status of women as school teachers? Educated as they are, cultivated and energetic as they are, the great majority serve the state in virtually the only profession open to them at a bare living wage and less. A profession that holds two-thirds of its members so cheaply strikes at the heart of efficient progSurely their ambition should be stimulated and the ability they have demonstrated in patient, patriotic service should be utilized for larger constructive work, for more clearly recognized leadership than has been done. No hurtful competition with men will arise; it will on the contrary strengthen the present system,

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dignify the service women now render and greatly increase the efficiency of the whole profession.

I make no plea for incompetency on the score of sex. I believe that the untrained, inefficient teacher is paid as well as the inefficient worker in any profession, but the efficient teacher is worse paid than any other efficient worker.

The same amount of money was invested in automobiles in 1914 as in school property in North Carolina,-$9,000,000. The cost of upkeep for motor cars was more than the total salary of teachers.

In giving these figures I confess once more to the feeling that if the teachers transacted their affairs with the aggressive methods used by the automobile men-by intelligent publicity, efficient administration, promotion for merit-that perhaps the public would give a more generous response to our efforts.

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been said that when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, they first fell on their knees and then on the aborigines, but if so, then the next thing they did was to build a church and a schoolhouse."

And because Massachusetts has cultivated highly the minds of her folks, she has passed us in wealth and power.

The per capita wealth in Massachusetts is $1,805, whereas in North Carolina it is $794, in

South Carolina $869, in Georgia $883, in Alabama $964, in Tennessee $864. For each child of school age within her borders, Massachusetts spends $25a year, while our Southern states in training the brains of each of their children, spend only as follows:

Florida, $8 a year; Louisiana, Texas and Kentucky, $7 each; Arkansas, Virginia and Tennessee, $6 each; Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, $4 each; South Carolina, $3.

Massachusetts has only four persons. in each 1,000 over ten years of age, native whites of native parentage, who cannot read and write. Vir

North Carolina's natural resources, the raw material of educational efficiency, are so rich as to put the whole responsibility on our ability to manufacture them into whatever educational values our foresight and faith determine. The big mill supply houses, machinery concerns, automobile companies are giving tangible evidence every day of their faith in the commercial development of the state, and they are shrewdly and scientifically seeing that they guide that development in the way they want it to go. North Carolina now leads the Union in the number of cotton mills and factories, in the amount of raw cotton consumed.

North Carolina is the best developed industrial state in the South in number of plants, in variety of manufactures, in the distribution of capital employed, and in the use of home produced raw material. We are second in total horse-power used, second in total capital employed, second in the value added by manufacture, second in the number of producing spindles, and fifth in the total value of manufactured products.

In contrasting what Massachusetts has done with her resources with what has been done by other states, Clarence Poe in a recent article

says:

lina 105, Georgia 80, Alabama 101.

Massachusetts spends twenty-five dollars a years developing brain power in each Massachusetts child and he grows up worth $1,800. The South spends three dollars to ten dollars per year on each child and he grows up worth less than $900.

All other questions aside, which of these is the most efficient?

Our first concern beyond every consideration of financial return must be the full and efficient training of our children. They must be so equipped as to be able to match their talents. successfully with their competitors trained in other states and countries. They must be trained to master their environment through the study of agriculture, home economics, manual arts, and they must be given the freedom and time that childhood has the inalienable right to and not kept out of school and bound in slavery of toil either in the factory or the field. The time will come when we shall realize that the most priceless product we manufacture and the most priceless crop we cultivate is the North Carolina child, and that the greatest of all crimes is to strap his youth to machinery and stunt his growth with a man's labors at the time he should be living a child's life.

fection. What was done in early days was done by a few far-sighted leaders, what needs to be done now should be done by the whole body of organized teachers. A high and burning sense of our professional obligations, an unfaltering determination to make every schoolhouse the efficient centre of the community life, a clear purpose to make each school a co-operating part in an efficiently administered unified system, will make the South once more a pioneer not only in educational progress, but in the social and economic progress of our country.

UNEASY AMERICA

BY WALTER LIPPMANN

[In The New Republic.]

Growing discomfort has been manifest in America during the last few months. It has taken different forms, but the net effect of it has been to centre a great amount of criticism on the President. If all the complaints were drawn up in a list we should find that pacifists, militarists, radicals, conservatives, friends of the Allies, German-Americans, "aggressive Americans," nationalists and internationalists were all in varying ways disgruntled. They disagree violently among themselves, to be sure, but they are curiously agreed in not liking the part not liking the part played by America in the war. The sense that we have been found wanting has impressed itself among an increasing number of people. More feel it, I imagine, than are ready to confess it. Many feel it who resent bitterly the self-abasement of those who go to Europe to proclaim the sordid cowardice of Americans at home. Many feel it who detest the snobbery of those Americans who entertain entertain foreign visitors by telling them what a miserable people we are. Yet stripped of its flunkeyism, its colonialism, its piety for the fatherland and its party politics, the feeling persists that we cannot think with any pride of the part we have played in the supreme event of our lives. wonder a little whether we are like the Roman gentleman who seemed to remember vaguely that an agitator had been crucified in Judea.

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This inner dissatisfaction is perhaps the most important political fact of our time, and it may have extraordinary consequences. The spiritual uncertainty in America has its outward sign in a tendency to be forcible-feeble, weak and sharp, forbearing and curt, in a series of violent oscillations. We move in jolts and jerks, now rattling the sabre, now turning the other cheek. And because we are unsteady and distracted, we are liable to panic at one moment and insensibility the next. We are roused by Belgium and forget it, we are roused by the Lusitania and forget it, are roused and forget again, a little like a man reeling down an alley, hitting one wall and then the other.

An explanation of it is to be had, I think, which is at least plausible. We have lived for seventeen months the spectators of events that

have no parallel in our lives. At first we were, stirred as never before, and in the onset of war there was an unprecedented amount of feeling that reached out beyond our daily work. But this feeling has spent itself on nothing. We have had nothing to exercise our emotions upon, and we are choked by feelings unexpressed and movements arrested in mid-air. Nothing is so bad for the soul as feeling that it is dispensed on nothing. We recognize this well enough in the esthete who takes in impressions and gives forth estheticism, in the schoolgirl who weeps. over impossible romances, in the old gentleman afflicted with chronic moral indignation. To feel and feel and feel and never to use that feeling is to grow distracted and worrisome, and to no end. We Americans have been witnessing supreme drama, clenching our fists, talking, yet un-able to fasten any reaction to realities. Ferment without issue, gestation without birth, is making us sullen and self-conscious and ashamed.

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This brooding impotence drains off and wastes the emotion which is needed for thought. Nothing is left to save us from the relaxation in which we retreat to our oldest habits. great purpose is said to "lift men above them-selves," which means that the rush of it sweeps. tribal loyalty and suspicion and petty preoccu pation before it like a great wind through a dusty attic. When the élan is lacking we settle back into our meanest habits, and cover our sense of futility by huddling into them deeper..

The apologists tell us that the contradictory nature of the attack on the President's leader-

ship is a sign that he has taken the middle course of reason. They are, I think, mistaken. The clashing dissatisfactions are the result of no leadership at all, a sign of the disintegration which follows from the withdrawal of a positive ideal. When an army mutinies, different groups. go off on their own, but nobody calls it the result of "reasonable" generalship. When a political party breaks up into its group-interests the meaning is that the party has lost a strong central ideal. When a nation becomes petty and quarrelsome it is because no one has succeeded in holding its attention to a national. purpose.

The source of our trouble may be traced directly to the President's first message to the American people, when we were asked to be neutral in feeling. We were not told to feel about anything positive, we were merely told not to feel too deeply. That negative injunctionwas bound to fail, and the vacillation of America has ever since grown more serious. What President Wilson seems not to understand is that the enunciation of a great purpose which enlists emotion is the only way to avoid that clashing of emotions from which we suffer. When there are a number of conflicting views. the reasonable course does not consist in being negative to them all, it consists in raising a view which gathers them up-into which, as the Germans say, the varied feelings are "aufgehoben." But from the outbreak of the

I'm getting out of patience with these educational high brows who are so determined upon benefiting the rural schools. They are fired by a holy zeal to uplift the rural peoples, whether or not. They say the city schools are now at the apex of sweetness and light, while the country schools are still wallowing in the depth of ignorance and barbarism.

One speaker laid down the law in an address at the National Education Association in my hearing. He actually had lifted himself by his bootstraps until he thought the city children were healthier than the country children. "Alas! the poor country children," he cried. "They have a right to care as good as that given to the pigs and horses of their fathers! But they They suffer more from starvadon't get it! tion and malnutrition than the gamins of the city slums!"

This rot makes me positively ill. There's nothing in it. It isn't true. I have been visiting country schools and city schools widely these thirty years, and country children always appear distinctly larger, browner, tougher, more accustomed to bodily labor than the city children of the same age.

The city children are distinctly whiter, more slender, smaller, quicker than the country children of the same age. The country children have a distinct advantage both physically and mentally, in spite of any differences in their schooling.

The rural schools are not what these painters depict, and a large part of the weeping and mourning over their condition, a good deal of the theoretical platform prattle about uplifting them, is maudlin nonsense built upon an imaginary basis.-Bulletin.

ACCREDITMENT IN NEBRASKA

Schools are accredited by the University of Nebraska. The purpose of such accreditment is to provide such standards as will assure instruction of such strength that the pupils who complete the course of study in these schools are enabled to carry the work of the university, should they seek to do so, with ease and with assurance of proper progress. Pupils who graduate from accredited schools in the state are admitted to the colleges of the state and to the University of Nebraska without examination. For full entrance to the University thirty units or credits (a credit point means one study with five recitation periods a week for half a year) should be required for graduation, science should be taught with adequate laboratory facilities, a well equipped library, and recitation periods of at least forty minutes in length should be provided. In addition to a superintendent (or principal) there should be at least two teachers giving full time to secondary subjects. The minimum academic or professional preparation of teachers should be equivalent to a four-year course in college or university based upon a four-year high school education. There should not be more than six daily recitations assigned to each teacher.

The approval of schools is a function of the State Department of Education. All schools accredited by the University of Nebraska are There approved by the state superintendent. is, however, a large number of schools surrounded by conditions which do not make it practicable to comply with all of the requirements for accreditment. Many of such schools are unable to a carry full program of studies and must be content with nine, ten or eleven grades and with less substantial facilities for executing the program. It is thought best by the department, in justice to the children who live in such districts, to apply such effective standards as may reasonably be met and which may be conducive the educational progress of the youth of the state. Pupils who complete the work of an approved school may receive credit for such work by the university when subsequent work in such studies is carried in accredited schools. For example, if a student carries a year of algebra in a non-accredited but approved school and later carries an advance course in this subject in some accredited school, full credit for the subject is granted upon the completion of the course of study in an accredited school.

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The ultimate purpose of establishing standards for the approval of schools carrying high school courses is to develop a complete system

of education which will connect properly with the courses in higher institutions of learning and afford every ambitious child an open door to the most efficient preparation and to a wellrounded education, while the immediate use is to provide a means of designating schools in compliance with the Free High School Education Act; unless boards of education comply with these standards they are not allowed to collect tuition from other districts for non-resi

dents, nor are they able to escape the provisions of the law which compel districts which do not provide high school education to pay the tuition of those who have completed the eighth grade and seek to pursue their studies in other schools. Merely establishing a ninth and tenth grade and requiring one teacher to perform the impossible will not suffice. There is a further reason for such approval and that is, to enable schools to profit by state aid.

THE OHIO GROUP III

When I came to the Journal of Education Dr. Hinsdale was superintendent of Cleveland and within a few months I was in that city. He was a scholarly man, especially in his historical information, in pedagogical philosophy, and in English. He was an accurate writer, a clear thinker, a strong "safety-first" debater. He was uniformly present at the national gatherings and was much in demand for educational lectures. Few city superintendents were his equal in scholarly reputation.

On my first visit to Cleveland. after coming to the Journal of Education, Dr. Hinsdale gave me my only evening in the home of a Standard Oil magnate. A Mr. Paine of vast wealth gave a reception to Dr. MacCosh, president of Princeton. It was my only opportunity to meet him. From pure luck I had a quiet visit with him late in the evening. The evident esteem in which they all held Dr. Hinsdale was most gratifying.

Imagine my surprise and uncontrollable disgust to see Dr. Hinsdale bounced unceremoniously at the next election and a man unheard of, except locally, chosen to succeed him.

I attributed it to small politics and everything unworthy. Little did I dream that the successor, L. W. Day, was to be one of my closest friends personally, and when he in turn was bounced my grief was deep. Mr. Day was shy, self-forgetful, without much scholarship and wholly without experience in the larger world, but there was no detail of supervision in Cleveland of which he was not master. He was later superintendent of Canton, Ohio. Dr. Hinsdale found congenial professional work in the Department of Education in the University of Michigan, in writing books and in professional lecturing.

E. W. Stevenson, superintendent of Columbus, was highly esteemed in those days. He was always in the game with other Ohioans, but he seems to have made a mistake in accepting a superintendency in Kansas, where he failed to master conditions, and before he rehabilitated himself in Ohio he passed on.

Dr. John B. Peaslee, superintendent of Cincinnati, was in the forefront with high ability

in public address, but he was not in the national arena after leaving the superintendency, though he has always had honors and influence locally in all the years.

John Burns, ex-state superintendent, brilliant in his knowledge of masterpieces in literature, and almost matchless in wit and humor, was in Canton in the days when he attended the national meetings.

Colonel White of Dayton was a prince of good fellows with loyalty to the Ohio boys, but after leaving the superintendency he ceased to attend national meetings.

"Cox of Xenia" was in the game to the last day of life. No man was better known. He was never on the program, never locked horns with anyone in debate, but there never a session, summer or winter, that that voice, that never failed to be heard, did not make some motion, usually unexpected, that warmed things up. There was never a presiding officer who did not recognize "Cox of Xenia, Ohio," and the announcement led everybody to sit up and await results. For near thirty years he was serenely on the job in Xenia and died in office.

Mr. Mertz of Steubenville was for many years one of the ablest progressive leaders of the state. He was a most intelligent master of the thought and spirit of Colonel Francis W. Parker. I think he was the only man to bring to an Ohio city for weeks at a time men like Alexis E. Frye, Thomas M. Bartlett, I. Freeman Hall, and a woman like Mathilda E. Coffin.

J. A. Shawan of Columbus is the only man of those days who has stayed in superintendency until 1916. If he retires, as he has announced his intention of doing at the end of this term, it will end a great dynasty of city superintendents in the state, men all of whom were known nationally, all of whom I knew and enjoyed in the days of their prime.

Dr. Alston Ellis is the one man who was prominent as a city superintendent at Hamilton and Sandusky for many years who has supplemented it with high administration honors, rounding out the longest prominent educational career of any of his associates. Still in the full vigor of leadership, he is at the head of the Ohio