from an unfailing spring illustrations to clarify and clinch his arguments. Parables, stories from Bible, history and life seemed to fall into place in public and private address without the least effort and almost unconsciously to himself. Fortunate in spending his early life in the country, and forming his tastes and his style in communion with nature and with a few good books, and with a few earnest, sincere people, he was equally fortunate in being driven by a love of learning into the schoolroom, from which he graduated into a public life wholly suited to his capacities. Thus, in all his public platform work, he became a benefactor whose genius consecrated the woods, fields, brooks, the country schoolhouses in a way intelligible to plainer minds, and yet above criticism of the most fastidious and cultivated. But, however alert and keen his mental powers, it was not these qualities which gave him such a masterful control over mankind. His moral traits were pre-eminent. The power of a sincere, sensitive sympathy was a characteristic moral quality. He lived close to the people. He knew their burdens and sorrows, especially the underpaid and overworked teachers, and students struggling for an education against the odds of poverty and penury. He bore their sorrows and burdens on his own great heart. Here is a quality which is the sine qua non of greatness. Sympathy was one of the magic qualities of the life of Mr. Houck. When one of his fellowmen was pained, he felt the pang; when one was oppressed, he felt the burden; when one was outcast, he felt the reclaiming love; when one wandered, he yearned with a fatherly love, whosesoever son it might be. His sympathies were as broad as his far-reaching journeys, embracing Jew and Greek, bond and free, and his generosities could not withstand the call of human need. His heart was so responsive and forgiving that no severe and cruel word did he ever speak or write. This man, who was in the public service of his state for more than half a century, came through without the smell of fire on his garments and maintaining a heart as tender and sympathetic as a mother's. Vic His optimism was a feature of his times. He saw light in the deepest gloom. His was the poet's vision. Optimism is consciousness of hidden resources. Pessimism is poverty of resource. tory is with him who has the last fact in the case. He believed that God is in the earth, leavening society like yeast; that God makes vices virtues, pains to be medicine, and tears to be joys; that ignorance, and sin, and lying and uncleanness shall become extinct like ancient sea monsters. He was a poet leading men to see the best that glimmers in the worst, to taste the fruit before the blossom falls, to hear the lark within the songless egg. He was never the knight of the doleful countenance, or the rueful face. He could hear the song of the robin before the winter snow had melted away. He could discern the first red streaks of breaking dawn while others groped in the darkness. To him "God is in His heaven and all's right on the earth." CHICAGO'S SCHOOLS, A REVIEW BY ELLA FLAGG YOUNG [In Chicago Herald] en Unlike books based largely on legislative actments and statistics, the book "Truancy and Nonattendance in the Chicago Schools," by Abbott and Breckinridge, the University of Chicago Press, is interesting from cover to cover. It offers admirable material for every school faculty interested in the perplexing problems arising out of conditions surrounding children coming from the homes of those immigrants or of shiftless parents who are devoid of any conception of the value of education. A school may not have the former class of children, but what school is without the latter? The title indicates a limitation of the study to Chicago, but no one need be deterred by that from beginning to examine the laws, the statistics, the conclusions presented; the contents are the results of wide reading and familiarity with methods not only in other cities besides Chicago, and other states besides Illinois, but in foreign lands. The history of legislation for compulsory attendance at school and for the restriction of child labor brings into the foreground state legislators, state superintendents of schools and women's clubs as active in wrestling with the drafting and adoption of laws for the control of these movements. It leaves the board of education and the teaching corps in isolation from the efforts to increase the number of children in the schools, which condition is easily understood when one reads that in the year 1855 there were forty-two teachers and 6,286 pupils. Though by 1860 Superintendent Wells had succeeded in having the number reduced to sixty-three pupils to a teacher, no further advance was made by the board of education in the direction of reducing the membership of rooms assigned to teachers until a quarter of a century later. The greatest advance ever made was in a resolution presented by a member of the board of education, Modie J. Spiegel, and adopted by the board, authorizing a reduction to forty pupils to a teacher as rapidly as possible. Alas! the reduction to forty has not been made, and methods of instruction in the Chicago schools still, necessarily, partake of teaching children en bloc instead of teaching them as individuals grouped in classes. Some day the number will be reduced to thirty-five, but Chicago must wait, in the words of John de Matha, "How long, O Lord, how long!" The inability of the school board to cope with the demand for seats is touched upon in comment on the reduction by the city council of the school appropriations by $2,000,000 for 1896-97. "The school board had brought this rebuke upon itself by complaining the year before that it found enough to do in making provision for children who were willing to come to school." Less than a quarter of a century later the finance committee of the board sent word to the finance committee of the city council that it did not need all the money to which it was entitled under the Juul law. This was sent while the Spiegel resolution was still in abeyance, because there were not seats to accommodate all the children if the maximum number in the classes was reduced to forty. The method, or lack of method, in keeping records so that they shall show actual attendance and nonattendance is presented fully under "Extent of Truancy in Chicago," chapter 6. If every school had a competent clerk, giving all or part time to the routine work on the records for each teacher and for the school, there might be the sort of intelligence in school statistics that has been. developed in commercial and banking statistics in quite recent times. Modern economic conditions have a vocabulary vocabulary consisting of "efficiency,' "standardize," "units"; when it is proposed to organize school conditions to conform to the advances in business methods, so that information may be accurate and also at ready command, there is devised a new method for increasing officials at the top and for surveying the teachers at the bottom. Now that the board of education has installed a statistician the suggestions in chapter 6 may have been published at an opportune time. Different superintendents of Chicago schools have tried to have the statistics of the education department in their charge. The business department most courteously furnishes the superintendent with statistics about the education department, but keeps a firm grasp on the clerical work, and naturally keeps the method of the records a quarter of a century behind the times. The superintendent has in hand the transfer of the stress of attention, and the origin of new points of view in the educational field; the method of compiling statistics should be in the same hand. Statistics should not come by the graciousness of the business department, but by the planning and adjustments devised by a genuine head of educational affairs. Every chapter furnishes food for instruction and thought, but it is not the province of a review to analyze every piece of the author's work. In the portrayal of the visiting teacher and her work the situation is gathered up in one sentence that explains much of the failure of the school in dealing with truancy: "While nonattendance and truancy are school problems, they are of a social rather than of an educational character." It is impossible to convey to one who has not read this book any conception of the searching analysis of conditions gripping immigrant children from southern Italy and eastern and southeastern Europe. The constructive treatment that would be remedial of such conditions is a mine of educational and social wealth. The teachers of Chicago, alive to civic conditions as no other body of teachers, will find a fund of information to guide them in their endeavors to make the public school a harbor from which will go forth, happy and steadfast for the right, children from every social station in America. ANOTHER EXCHANGE OF PROFESSORS [Editorial in Vanderbilt Alumnus.] We take pleasure in welcoming a leading editorial that has appeared in the columns of that monument of highclass journalism, the Boston Transcript. Under the title, "An Exchange with the South," the Transcript says in part: "The next logical development of the exchange professorship idea in our colleges should be the establishment of an exchange between institutions of the North and the South. Harvard has already its exchanges with Europe and with a group of four western colleges. It is time that we should give like recognition to a great section of our own country which has several institutions that are the peers of many in the North. It is all too little recognized here what merit such institutions as the University of Virginia, Tulane, and Vanderbilt represent. They can receive professors from the North in all respects on a plane of equality, which, if tipped at all, is likely to move in the South's favor, by the grace of that refinement of culture for which Southerners of position have ever been famous. "There would be then the evenly balanced values of contact with institutions of high rank, to be gleaned from an exchange with the South, and also for our professors the great value of contact with students, in some of the South's institutions, far more eager to learn than are those northern students who scarcely know why they are in college. The authorities would be found busy with the enduringly important first principles of education in such institutions, and not obsessed with administrative detail and petty refinements of method. This would be an experience of value to some of our northern professors. And if they themselves taught, and taught finely, in their southern chairs, they would have a large opportunity for correcting some of the notions that have grown up about New England, to the detriment of our relations with many another section of the country. We might hope to achieve a new rating also in the eyes of those southern professors who would come to the North in exchange. Their gracious courtesy has ever been open to fresh conviction. If exchange professorships can be arranged with the South we shall have much reason for mutual congratulation." We attach a good deal of importance to this idea of exchange professorships, coming as it does from a journal that is by sympathy and geography so closely linked with Harvard University. The Transcript very gracefully sketches the ways in which professors from their New England and the South alike might have minds improved by these lectureships in foreign fields. We are inclined to emphasize still more strongly perhaps the stimulus that such a visitation from a distant section might mean to the intellectual interests of the students themselves. But if either benefit were the only benefit, the scheme seems to us an excellent one. We are grateful to the Transcript for suggesting a good thing, and hopeful that something may come of it. AN AMERICAN What is it to be an American? Putting aside all the outer shows of dress and manners, social customs and physical peculiarities, is it not to believe in America, and in the American people? Is it not to have an abiding and moving faith in the future and in the destiny of America? -something above and beyond the patriotism and love which every man whose soul is not dead within him feels towards the land of his birth? Is it not to be national, and not sectional; independent and not colonial? Is it not to have a high conception of what this great, new country should be, and to follow out that ideal with loyalty and truth?-Henry Cabot Lodge. A deep and fervid feeling upon the part of the people is essential if we are to succeed in the present great undertaking. It requires rational judgment to plan a campaign, but an active determination based upon deep and abiding emotion is needed to press the battle to success. -E. R. Snyder, Sacramento. PRACTICAL DISCUSSION OF PRACTICAL PROBLEMS The Journal of Education has at various times commented upon the valuable services of Tristram W. Metcalfe, one of the editors of the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser, which, under Mr. Metcalfe's management, runs a full page of school news and comment in every issue. The Journal has also paid its and respects at various times to foolish traditional examination usages. A column in a late issue of the Globe, giving an account of the opinions of principals and teachers, who constitute the Division of Duplicate Schools, voices opinions which are so general throughout the country that the article is reproduced for the benefit of Journal readers : "Principals, meeting at the Department of Education, discussed criticisms of those who have been asserting that the American common school graduate cannot write, spell, or cipher. They agreed that the demands of business men were not excessive, that the schools could easily meet them by directing their efforts along such lines, that it would be desirable to define the minimum essentials of an elementary education, and require 100 per cent. accomplishment. "The discussion of examinations as tests of school efficiency was started by Principal Simon Hirsdansky, who declared that outside examinations set by anyone not intimately cognizant of the work of the particular teacher might test the fitness of a pupil for promotion, or it might not. None of the multitudious studies of examinations have established any relation between excellence of teaching and high ability to pass written tests. There is no relation even between ability to pass different examinations. Preparation to pass a superintendent's examination is not of much value in taking a Buckingham test. The way to get a high record in regents' The examinations is to practise regents' examinations. means a approach of any examination period always warping of the purposes of education into a narrowing mechanical repetition of questions and answers. "Henry E. Hein added that there are as many ideas of what abilities a graduate should excel in as there are people giving thought to the problem. If schools were the simple propositions of a generation ago the accomplishments called for by a written examination might closely coincide with the duties expected of the school. But all current literature of school management insists upon the cultivation of originality and initiative in teachers and children. This spreads the school endeavor over a field infinitely wider than it ever was expected cover in the days when written examinations were the No final examination tests of school accomplishment. to set by superintendents can be fair to the school system unless there precede such examinations ample time to prepare and definite statements as to what the examination is going to stress. "Principal Oswald Schlockow of the supervisory staff of the duplicate school division suggested that four committees of five teachers and principals for each of the subjects of mathematics, English, geography, and history should select from the course of study such details as should be stressed, and that these constitute a table of minimum essentials, mastery of which should be the standard for a graduate from a duplicate school in so far as these subjects are concerned. Similar standards could be formulated later for the special activities of these schools. Volunteers for service on the committees were obtained at the meeting. "William McAndrew, division superintendent, directed attention to the fact that the abilities called for by employers and by the experiences of everyday life are not alien to the purpose that teachers profess, and that the tests described by Mr. Friedsam and other critics are much simpler than any of the examinations set by Courtis or by superintendents or by principals. What the critics maintain is that the graduates cannot do what they have been taught. He distributed business men's tests in addition, percentage, writing, and spelling, and asked if there were anyone present who deemed that the abilities called for were outside of any purpose or ideal of the common schools. "The meeting agreed that the demands are not unusual nor unfair. Mr. McAndrew then showed that the pupils' habit of examining and certificating one's own work is not sufficiently emphasized, and that any addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division which is not 100 per cent. right is not only useless, but detrimental to the person who is allowed to turn to some other computation before he corrects the error. "He advocated the adoption of practices in computation which would regard an unproved sum as an operation only half done and of no account in school as it is of no account in the world. The practice of giving the same number of computations to all the children in a class had never been successful and probably never would be. It made it easier for the slow-minded boy to copy than to work his mind. The copying habit in American schools is stunting the powers of an appalling number of future citizens. The addition of six little quantities running from 49 cents to $10.97 is done by some graduating classes in the city with no error whatever; by some it is done with 49 per cent. of errors. Any normal child can be trained to a habitual 100 per cent. in computations, not thinking problems, but fundamental operations. "Other speakers suggested that the school system itself is the greatest deterrent factor in preventing the schools from teaching what the principals and teachers know ought to be taught and know how to teach. The organization of schools tempts every inventor of an idea, patriotic, social, financial, terpsichorean, or agricultural, Continued on page 17. Editor Entered at the Post-Office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter PAGE 2 5 7 whether a government, a corporation or an individual, has a direct financial interest in the establishment of some pension system which shall enable old or disabled employees to retire under satisfactory conditions. The obligation of the employer to co-operate in sustaining a pension system is primarily a financial one, and in the second place a moral one. "A pension system designed for any group of industrial or vocational workers should rest upon the co-operation of employees and employer. "Teachers' pensions should be stipendiary in character, amounting to a fair proportion of the active pay. 6 "In actuarial terms a pension is a deferred annuity upon the life of one or more individuals, payable upon the fulfilment of certain conditions. 9 9 10 11 12 13 13 14 14 15 15 15 16 16 16 16 It has been well known for some years that the Carnegie pension scheme was undertaken without any adequate knowledge of what it was to require. When sane business men and intelligent professional men called attention to the folly of thinking it would or could continue they were abused as prejudiced against the management. At last it is universally acknowledged as the merest pipe dream which has led to a nightmare with many who have built hopes on a comfortable old age. It is some satisfaction to know that the critics of that mirage were the wise men East or West. This is no time to criticise past blunders, but rather to listen to any and all wise men. A joint commission has had the matter under advisement. It represents the Carnegie Foundation, the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities, the Association of American Colleges, and the National Association of State Universities. The commission recommends to the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation, as the fundamental principles of a sound pension system for teachers, the following: "The function of a pension system is to secure to the individual who participates in it protection against the risk of dependence due to old age or to disability. "The obligation to secure this protection for himself and for his family rests first upon the individual. "Men either on salary or on wages are, in the economic sense, employees. The employer, "In order that an individual participating in a pension system may be assured of his annuity when due, one condition is indispensable: There inust be set aside, year by year, the reserve necessary, with its accumulated interest, to provide the annuity at the age agreed upon. "A pension system conducted upon the actuarial basis of setting aside, year by year, the necessary reserve is the only pension system whose cost can be accurately estimated in ad vance. "A method by which a pension is paid for in advance in annual or monthly instalments is the most practical plan which can be devised for purchasing a deferred annuity, provided that the contributions begin early in the employee's career. "A pension system should apply to a group whose members live under comparable financial and economic conditions. To attain its full purpose, participation in the pension system to the extent of an agreed minimum should form a condition of entering the service or employment, the members of which are co-operating in the pension system. "With regard to the present pensions of the Carnegie Foundation the commission expresses opinion that the extension to all teachers now in the associated institutions of the privilege of continuing in the present system will completely meet their expectations. The commission has no information whether the great sum necessary to do this can be obtained." IS LATIN DOOMED? This is as absurd as to ask if music, painting, sculpture or architecture is doomed. Yale students say that Dr. Abraham Flexner recently advised them not to prepare themselves to teach Latin since in ten years they may find themselves without an occupation. We have too much respect for Dr. Flexner's sanity to think that he ever said it, but if he did he should also have advised against preparing to teach music, painting, sculpture, or architecture. There is a dooming of those who have viciously insisted that no one could be a "scholar," could be liberally educated, could have culture, who was not classically educated. There is no more reason why a high school or college should insist upon a course in Latin for first-class rank than to insist upon every one's qualifying in music, art, or sculpture. The fool has said in his heart, "There is no culture without the classics." Latin is indispensable for a critical appreciation of English, so is a knowledge of harmony indispensable for a critical appreciation of masterpieces in music, but the multitude gets great joy out of music, out of the masterpieces in music, without a knowledge of harmony. We would send a man to a sanitarium who should insist upon making a course in harmony indispensable in high school or college because without it he cannot get the full value of masterpieces in music. We give the rhythm of music to all children, the melody of music to most children, the harmony of music to the few who have a taste for it or a use for it. There is a rhythm of Latin, so to speak, in English that every child should have, and a melody of Latin which many should have, but the harmony or science of Latin will always be for those who love it and have use for it. ALLEN'S HIGH SPEED In the issue of May 24 we used extracts from Dr. W. H. Allen's talk at the Rural School Conference in Pennsylvania, in which was the following paragraph: "Traveling exhibits of best practices are needed. Instead of paralyzing initiative and individualization by over-standardizing rural courses of study, we must again adopt Connecticut's plan of com partments or standards through which every pupil can go lickety brindle as fast as he does the work; in other words, there should be no grading except of each pupil's work to his capacity to go forward." This led to much discussion at the time, and Principal P. M. Harbold of the Millersville, Pennsylvania, State Normal School, has secured from Dr. Allen the following "regrets": "I am sorry now that I put that sentence in my Philadelphia talk. While I meant what it said, still I realize that in very few localities is it possible to provide the quality of supervision which is necessary to qualify under my major premises. There are many social and economic reasons for a consolidated school, more important perhaps than any educational reasons.” We are glad that Dr. Allen exceeded the speed limit, as is his habit, because it may lead to the kind of cussing to which he is accustomed, and some real discussing may result to the glory of the rural schools. We regret that we do not know adequately of the Connecticut ideal to which Dr. Allen refers, but we do know that two states have undertaken some rural school reforms which promise some demonstrations, by and by, which will really do something worth while for rural life. One thing is certain, the present attempts to citify country schools are proving a gigantic failure in many cases. If the reader of this editorial has not sent a postal card to P. G. Holden, Harvester Building, Chicago, for "How to Vitalize the Teaching of Agriculture in Rural Schools," he should do so at once. ANTHROPOMETRY* Experimenters have not been in agreement as to the relation of mental alertness and vigor and anthropometric measurements. Most of the studies have either been with few children or superficial. So far as we know, this study by Mr. Doll is the most exhaustive and the most dependable of any that has been made. Some of the conclusions reached by Mr. Doll as to diagnostic values are worthy of general attention. In the typical feeble-minded subject there is significance in the relation of the individual measurements to each other and to the normal. Sitting height is more subnormal than standing height. Weight is closer to normal than either sitting or standing height. Right grip is more subnormal than either height or weight. The typical feeble-minded person is relatively stronger in left than in right grip. Vital capacity shows the most marked subnormality of all measurements. The excess of the physical over psychophysical is characteristic of all feeble-minded. In individual diagnosis considerations of race, nationality, heredity, environment, physiological development, health, exercise, physical defects, and special personal history must never be omitted. Anthropometric measurements are of value in detecting varieties of feeble-mindedness such as insanity, epilepsy, and Mongolianism. The study is an important contribution to the entire range of studies of the feeble-minded. "Anthropometry as an Aid to Mental Diagnosis." A simple method for the examination of sub-normals. By E. A. Doll. Published by the Training School, Vineland, N. J. OHIO ACTIVITIES If Ohio was late in appreciating the possibilities of county supervision she is making fine headway in appropriating the advantages thereof. A sample of the benefits is shown in the Annual Report of W. S. Fogarty, superintendent of Preble County, wherein he reports specific and significant improvement in every school in the county which may be summed up in this paragraph:— "Aside from the routine work of school visitation and conferences with teachers the year has been one of marked activity in a large majority of the schools of the district, and this has resulted in a greater interest among patrons, teachers, and pupils. This has been brought about largely by a greater attention to community work which took the form of parents' clubs, social centre organizations, literary programs, and old-time spellingbees and ciphering matches. Closely associated with the success of the schools is the attitude of the boards of education toward the schools." Salaries were almost uniformly increased. Every schoolhouse was specially improved. The |