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the city schools. Teachers are less isolated; their work is lighter and more pleasant; buildings are better, more sanitary and modern, and the home dife becomes more congenial.

Rural community betterment can only be permanently realized through proper education. This education must be directed by trained teachers who must be retained in the country.

NEW NATIONAL HYMN-AMERICA AND HER ALLIES

[Tune: Materna.]

BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN

Land of lands, my Fatherland, the beautiful, the free, All lands and shores to freedom dear are ever dear to thee;

All sons of Freedom hail thy name, and wait thy word of might,

While round the world the lists are joined for liberty and light.

Hail, sons of France, old comrades dear! Hail Britons brave and true!

Hail, Belgian martyrs, ringed with flame! Slavs fired with visions new!

Italian lovers mailed with light! Dark brothers from Japan!

From East to West all lands are kin who live for God

and man.

Here endeth war! Our bands are sworn! Now dawns the better hour

When lust of blood shall cease to rule, when Peace shall come with power;

We front the fiend that rends our race and fills our homes with gloom;

We break his sceptre, spurn his crown, and nail him in his tomb!

Now, hands all round, our troth we plight to rid the world of lies,

To fill all hearts with truth and trust and willing sacrifice; To free all lands from hate and spite and fear from strand to strand;

To make all Nations neighbors and the world one Fatherland!

-New York Evening Post.

IN WASHINGTON

LOOKING ABOUT

BY A. E. WINSHIP, EDITOR

The last legislative session of Washington was of great educational significance. The "Survey” was up for action. The reaction against it was complete, and the educational satisfaction seems to have been well nigh unanimous.

It is too bad that it seems impossible to attempt a good piece of work educationally and not spoil it all by false theorizing, or at least by entirely misjudging the temper of the school people as has been done in Iowa, in North Dakota, and in Washington.

Superintendent Elmer L. Cave of Bellingham is the hero of educational Washington for the way he stood by the state superintendent and by the teachers of the state. As chairman of the legislative committee of the State Association he was the real leader of the legislature. Mrs. Preston and Mr. Cave kept their heads and kept their hands on legislation. There have been few such demonstrations in the entire country.

It is needless to say that Seattle is as serene as ever. Will America ever have another city superintendent with the record for leadership that Frank B. Cooper has?

No other city has been as freaky politically as has Seattle. This is literally true in all the years that Mr. Cooper has been in office.

And Mr. Cooper has never sidestepped any responsibility, has never played safe. I recall the spring of 1912 at the Inland Empire meeting in Spokane, when Mrs. Preston was a candidate for state superintendent. The opposition to a woman was great, to Mrs. Preston was great. Fearing

Mr. Cooper's influence for her the opposition selected the superintendent of King County-the Seattle County-as their candidate.

Practically no leaders had been outspoken for Mrs. Preston, as it was seven months to the election and several months to the primaries.

The

On the first day of the session of the Association the Spokesman-Review said: "It is rumored that Mr. Cooper is liable to favor Mrs. Preston." next edition had a signed communication saying: She "It is not a rumor, I am for Mrs. Preston." was practically nominated and elected that minute. It is always a joy to visit Seattle, to see the way the schools have grown. Mr. Cooper took the schools when Seattle was little other than a good sized village in school affairs.

Today there is no city in America that all in all has a better system of schools, a better spirit, greater harmony, more pedagogical "punch" as the saying goes, and no one can deny Mt. Cooper the sole credit for the leadership that is doing it.

Tacoma, that knew no real enduring peace from earliest times, times, has known only peace and plenty since W. F. Geiger took the reins. Of course he had the advantage of having studied the situation as high school principal and of being a man of affairs as well as a practical and theoretical school man, and Tacoma needed Geiger and has appreciated him.

Everett is a city of many attractions socially, commercially, industrially, and locationally. It has always had good schools and good school men. It has never been freaky politically or educationally,

and it has given C. R. Frazier all the opportunity any man could desire for the development of an excellent school system. Everett is just large enough for opportunity for everything and yet small enough for a man to keep his hand on every detail and impress his personality upon everybody, and Mr. Frazier has improved every opportunity.

The new factor in city superintendency has been O. C. Pratt at Spokane. It has been some time, as they reckon time in Washington, since a real new man had come into city school leadership, when in 1916 Mr. Pratt came to Spokane.

He is a man of the latest educational equipment, of the most pronounced professional convictions, with intense devotion to the theory and practice of education. He was a new force, one quite liable to try to go up grade "on high."

The fears of the timid seem to have been groundless, the hopes of the reformers are being realized. With all his professionalism Mr. Pratt has a lot of the human element, an abundance of common sense.

The normal school situation in Washington is of greatest interest. No other state has struck the same pace as has Washington in several particulars.

The Cheney Normal School, N. D. Showalter, president, has a remarkable plant and equipment.

Fortunately, as it now appears, the entire plant burned three years ago and nearly $500,000 has been expended upon three buildings.

Most fortunately Mr. Showalter is a master builder in conception, in vision, and in detail. We have never seen a school building of any kind that seems to us to be as perfect in every detail as is

October 18, 1917

each of these buildings. The normal building itself, costing $325,000, is the height of perfection.

Mr. Showalter is a man of details professionally as well as architecturally, and he is building up a great institution. In three years the attendance has more than doubled, and the character of the work and the previous equipment of the students is equally pronounced.

At Ellensburg one finds the latest thought and word in professional training. President George H. Black, who attracted national attention while at Lewiston, Idaho, has been given an opportunity that has rarely come to a professional educator.

His views of teacher training are the broadest and keenest. He has the latest word in teacher preparation. He ignores tradition, he defies conventionalities, he aims to prepare young men and women for community leadership in school and out, but this is no place to present his views as he is embodying them in a most evolutionary way.

At Bellingham Dr. George W. Nash has had no bed of roses, but under the most trying conditions of any one we know he has won at every turn and the State Board of Regents is sure to continue to give him a free hand. He was a great success as a city superintendent, as a state superintendent, and the greatest success at the Aberknows how to manage a first-class normal school, deen, South Dakota, State Normal School. He and he is sure to be given an opportunity to achieve all desired success at Bellingham.

We appreciate more and more the privilege we mal schools under each administration from the have enjoyed of knowing each of these state norfirst.

SOME LEAKS AND HOW TO STOP THEM

BY J. P. WOMACK

Superintendent of Schools, Jonesboro, Arkansas

Leaks? Plenty of them. Leaks everywhere and of all kinds. Leaks that cost time and money and energy and patronage and community appreciation and support. Leaks that defeat the aims and purposes of the community in founding and maintaining the schools, and condemn millions of boys and girls to lifelong inefficiency and all that inefficiency means to the individual and to the state. Let us note some of them.

First, there is the leak due to poor lesson assignment. Startled by the period bell, the methodless teacher dismisses her class saying, as she nervously thumbs the leaves of the textbook: "Get to page

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Now, that assignment may be poor in various ways. It may cover subjects for which the class has had no preparation and which the average member of the class cannot grasp. It may have little in it that lends itself to classroom work. Or, it may comprehend enough to hold the class two or three days. Finally, it may contain matter which the teacher will later decide to omit.

Pardon a personal reference. While I was in college my professor assigned one day about three times the usual amount of Horace for next day's

new

preparing that lesson, for I did not want to report
lesson. That night I spent double the usual time
short. Needless to say, my other work suffered.
Next day the professor explained that the error
was due to his turning two leaves instead of one.
To be sure I was one lesson ahead, but my nerves
were unstrung and my whole day was at discount.
Another day the professor of economics assigned
me individually 120 pages from a big-paged con-
gressional record. The very same day the Ger-
man professor directed his class to buy a
book, "Dichtung und Wahrheit," and read the first
three pages. I got the book. The first few pages
were in the nature of an introduction, but as they
were written in German I supposed the assignment
was meant to apply to them. Between the as-
signed reading and that introduction I spent the
whole of Saturday. When the class met I found I
had prepared the wrong German lesson. But my
spare day was gone. At still another time my
pedagogy teacher made individual assignments for
the next meeting of the class. Mine was: “Mr.
Womack, you will read and report on Darwin's
'Origin of the Species.'" One professor would as-
sign twenty to forty pages of heavy work, then at

recitation time would go off at a tangent and discuss some phase of the lesson that appealed to him, oftentimes omitting entire chapters from the recitation. Another would have the classes copy into our notebooks pages and pages of tables, analyses, etc., for which I have never had the slightest use. I have made the reference not to expose anybody's weaknesses, but to make clear what I have been trying to get before you.

Another leak grows out of the teacher's failure to provide himself with a lesson plan. Face to face with his class he gropes for an opening. Sometimes he finds it and gets good results from the recitation. Oftener he just flounders, wasting the time of the class, disappointing the eager ones, disgusting the more or less indifferent ones, and dissipating the interest of the entire class. Sometimes he branches off on some phase of the work bearing little or no relation to the assignment, thus sidetracking the attention of the class from the heart of the lesson. Or, he omits parts of the lesson on which the pupils have spent time and energy, not only discounting the pupil's preparation, but also preparing the way for less careful preparation in future. In many ways he may fail to connect with his assignment and the pupils' preparation and the class suffer loss.

Another common leak results from the senseless habit of repeating. For example: A class comes up and reports all work done. The teacher has no ground for doubting the statement, and yet he goes right on as if the class had failed to do the work, keeping them at the blackboard the whole period doing over the work already well done in their rooms. Or again, a pupil may ask for an explanation to some particular step in solution of a long, perhaps complicated, example in, let us say, simultaneous quadratics. Wishing to oblige, he has the example worked out in detail, the class sitting passive meanwhile. Ten, fifteen, or even twenty minutes go by and no benefit to anybody perhaps, for in all probability the request was made to cover a lack of preparation or to kill time. For it is nothing unusual to find pupils who deliberately bring up questions to throw the teacher off the program.

A fourth leak grows out of the misplacing of emphasis. Rules, theorems, tables, of genealogies, dates, analyses and all sorts of odds and ends are crammed into the lesson and emphasized as if they were important. The pupil cannot grasp and retain it all, and would scarcely be the better for it if he could. It would be about as profitable to him as a perfectly remembered list of all the stations passed on a transcontinental trip. One lesson we teachers need very much to learn is that we cannot teach all the good things there are to be taught and the pupils could not learn them if we could teach them. The worst feature of this case of misplaced emphasis is that while the teacher is emphasizing so much he really emphasizes nothing and the work is relatively worthless. Sometimes we find teachers really emphasizing some phase of the lesson effectively when the matter emphasized is of no moment. I knew a teacher who emphasized parsing until his pupils were artists in this line and yet they knew absolutely nothing about constructive grammar.

Another wasteful leak is due to the lockstep system of promotion in many of our schools. Once a class is organized, its members are held to uniform progress. All must move together or halt together. There may be in the class those who could do twice as much as the others, but they are held to the regulation assignment. When they get ahead they must simply mark time until the class catches up. Here is where we lose thousands of our best pupils. And many that we manage to retain grow troublesome for lack of employment, and many more fail to develop properly for lack of properly proportioned work. The best returns come from a proper adjustment of work to the the pupil's capacity. No horse trainer would expect to develop record breaking speed if he were not allowed to put the horse to his best efforts.

Still another leak is sprung when teachers or pupils are given too much to do. A pupil who could carry four subjects is loaded down with six or eight. The result is that he does nothing well. He may get a smattering of the subject matter, but he will get nothing thoroughly. He does not even learn to work. He develops into a mere skimmer and crammer. As for the teacher, I need not make any argument to make out a strong case. We all know the pernicious effects of overcrowding teachers. And yet we go on cramming more and more into our courses of study with a view to enrichment. We have yet to learn that it is as foolish to try to teach everything that is good as to eat everything that is good. Our digestive organs, mental as well as physical, have pretty well defined limits.

One other leak-and a bad one, too-is due to the mediaeval conception which we have of culture. We seem bound to the century-old idea that some subjects are to be taught for their cultural value, while others are retained for the sake of utility. Hence we continue to insist that all pupils take Latin, Geometry, Rhetoric, etc., regardless of tastes, aptitudes and life purposes, and the pupils continue to insist that they do not want these things-that they do not care for them or that they prefer something else. But we say: "Take it or go," and thousands go every year. And we will add, as an aside, that of those who stay and endure the grind, many would be traveling a more direct road to culture taking other courses we might name. For culture does not exist until its tools are handled automatically. When Latin becomes easy and natural to me, when playing the piano ceases to be an exercise and becomes a delightful pastime, when I read Gibbon and Browning and Carlyle and Ruskin from choice, and when I choose to spend my chance leisure hour in an art gallery instead of in the park, then I may justly lay claim to culture within the meaning of modern scholasticism.

One of the very worst leaks is caused by insane notion that we must follow copy. The Carnegie Foundation says a model school should do so and so, and we all but break our necks trying to measure up to the standard. Or a Mr. Wirt solves his problem for the children at a huge mill plant, and we forthwith establish miniature Gary's all over the country. Or we read of Madame Montessori's success in the slums of Rome, and we

turn our system upside down to transform our well regulated primary room into a House of Childhood. Or, to come closer home, some ipse dixit is passed down the line that we must do this or that or the other that we must read a given number of pages of a given author in a given time under given conditions or down goes our rating in the big blue book, and like dumb, driven cattle we pass meekly under the rod. O College Entrance Requirements, how many crimes are committed in thy name! Many a poor fellow, now fighting the unequal fight of the inefficient, would have remained in school and fitted himself had he been permitted to substitute the Scientific American for Spenser's "Faerie Queene," or to study soils and seed corn instead of simultaneous quadratics or the meters of Horace.

And there is a leak in many of our schools due to a lack of co-ordination among the department teachers. To illustrate: The English teacher calls for a theme written with special reference to, let us say, coherence or emphasis. On the same day the history teacher calls for a summary of a period, say the French Revolution. The pupils go home and write two themes-one for its English and one for its history. We are reminded in this connection of the man who cut two holes in his kitchen door to accommodate the cats about the premises-a big hole for the big cats and a little hole for the little ones! We wonder how often the department teachers counsel together to consider whether they are working to one another's and the pupils' advantage.

worst of all

The last leak I shall notice is the the leak due to inefficient teachers. Some are inSome are inefficient because they do not know thoroughly the subjects they pretend to teach. The loss occasioned by them is incalculable. Others know their subject but are not really teachers. They do not know how, and seem to be unable or unwilling to learn. They are more destructive than the first class, because a poorly equipped teacher may make up in

enthusiasm and inventiveness much of what she lacks in technical knowledge. A third class have all the training our schools can give, but they lack the one thing needful-a proper conception of education and the means of obtaining it. The man who does not know where he is going is not apt to know it even if by chance he got there. But on this point I need not dwell. We all know the inefficient teacher and what he means to the cause of education.

TEACHING FORWARD

many

BY HERBERT PATTERSON Dakota Wesleyan University

Too teachers teach backward. Their mind is more occupied with thinking about yesterday than about tomorrow.

"I must spend the entire evening correcting those papers," says the backward teacher. The following morning she enters the school building with her bundle of papers all read and very carefully corrected. A sense of faithfulness to duty, since she has examined scrupulously all the papers that were handed in, tends to obscure the thought that she has slighted her preparation for today's teaching. "Today I must trust to luck and the inspiration of the moment, for I have not planned exactly what I want to do in each class." With this half-smothered self-accusation the day's work is begun.

The forward teacher, in contrast, always gives tomorrow preference over yesterday. "I must be prepared to teach well every class," is her motto. Planning precisely for each lesson, studying not only the material to be presented but also the beşt methods of presentation, thinking about desirable supplementary work for the brighter members of each class, taking care that she enters her schoolroom with an abundance of physical vigor and enthusiasm instead of with tired nerves and uncertainty, these are the ideas that possess the mind. of the one who is teaching forward.

The "discipline" of the backward teacher and that of the forward teacher stand in similar contrast. The backward teacher is ever troubled with thoughts of yesterday's pranks. What already has happened is for her more important than what is going to happen. The forward teacher, in contrast, is constantly searching for the causes of misdemeanors, trying to remove these causes, be they general or specific, and thus prevent their recurrence. Her punishments are not merely punitive, inspired by revenge, but rather reformative in their nature. Just as in the field of medicine there is a growing emphasis upon preventive measures in place of those which are merely curative, so in education more and more stress is being laid upon preventive "discipline."

The general philosophy of the forward teacher is sound, for is not the future more important than the past? There are far too few who are teaching forward, and the significant question for each of us is: "Am I one of them?"

The profit to be derived from the system of education cannot be assessed by arithmetic or proved by geometry. Educational advance cannot be measured by the things which are taught, but only by the things which are learnt, and the things which are learnt are often quite imponderable and not to be measured by the standard of any definite intellectual acquisition. It is easy for any observer of our social phenomena to pick out a black patch here and there, and to paint a dismal picture of the progress of our civilization. But on a comprehensive view, no one can pretend to doubt the very real effect which our system of popular education has had in the improvement of morals, in the refinement of taste, and in the development of the skill, knowledge, and intelligence of our working population.

-Herbert Fisher, Minister of Education of Great Britain.

AUTHORS WHO ARE A PRESENT DELIGHT (XIV.)

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

BY A. E. WINSHIP

No man in the literary world has a more definite personality, a more wholesome influence, a more sensitive conscience, less self-consciousness, less class consciousness, a more dominant sub-consciousness than has William Allen White of Emporia, Kansas.

He was an eight-dollar-a-week reporter on the Eldorado Republican, when he entered the office of the proprietor to inquire as to the financial responsibility of one of the leading papers in the

state.

Upon being assured that it was a star of the first magnitude financially he said they had offered him $20.00 a week and he did not wish to take any chances with as reckless a concern as that until he made inquiries.

From that day to this he has always been surprised at public appreciation and has stayed by the Emporia Gazette these many years, glorifying the country press as no other man has ever glorified it.

A New York daily paper telegraphed him to go to "The Knife and Fork Club" of Kansas City and telegraph a report of the speeches of Ridgeway, Jerome, Folk, and Tom Lawson.

He replied that he did not care to go. They wired back: "Two dollars a word and the more words the better." He went. His dispatch was the event of the times. Not even the Kansas City Star had as good a report, and no paper out of Kansas City had any report of the most sensational banquet episode of a decade.

The first the world at large knew of William Allen White was in 1896, when he returned the state to the Republican party. In response to the question: "What's the matter with Kansas?" he wrote: "Kansas needs to raise more corn and less Hell."

President McKinley wanted to reward Mr. White by some notable political appointment, but Mr. White replied that he had no political aspiration. The only office he ever desires is to have a blanket order, like that which Herbert C. Hoover has, over all benevolences, philanthropies and reforms.

He won literary fame in 1900 when he had a series of magazine articles beginning with one on Richard Croker, an article which practically retired that political chieftain to private life.

He once took a place in the "Seats of the Mighty" by having first place in the Atlantic Monthly, which Oliver Wendell Holmes said was so named because of "a notion" of the publisher and editor.

He has done much admirable book writing of late. His best seller has been "A Certain Rich Man," but his masterpiece, to our thinking, is "In Our Town." Unless we are a poorer guesser than we think we are, his greatest story will soon be announced by the Macmillans, a story in which will be all the glow of the reply to "What's the matter with Kansas?" the report of Jerome's roasting of Tom Lawson, and his own frying of

Richard Croker to a grease spot in the style that the Atlantic Monthly magnified.

But we can do no better service to our readers and to the man for whom we have keen and prideful affection than by reprinting a recent article in his own paper, the Emporia Gazette.

In the Topeka Capital, Colonel J. E. House, recalling the time when J. F. Todd snook up behind him and hit him with a loaded cane, rises gently to the serene and philosophic mood that comes when one views the days that were. From that vantage point he calls upon the Emporia Gazette to reprint the story of the lady who chased its editor with a horsewhip. The suggestion is not a bad one. We should follow it but for a plan we have been maturing for years, to print our recollections of the perilous time of the Kansas press.

These pallid days upon which we have fallen do not recall the blithe gay years when reporting was combined with foot racing, mayhem, ground and lofty tumbling, buck and wing dancing and assault with intent to kill. Thirty-two years ago this summer we began to kick the heavy Colt jobber, rustle personals at the trains and drop watermelon rinds on prominent citizens passing below as we moulded public opinion in the forms, hot and often rebellious, for the columns of the Butler County Dem

ocrat.

Our first essay at reform was upon a gambler who had a little stud game four doors down the hallway from the office, and who used to like to take out a girl we fancied in a red wheeled buggy. That red wheeled buggy gave us a realizing sense of the wickedness of the gambler's life.

So, while the editor was out of town, we slipped an item in the paper about the stud game which the city marshal could not well overlook. The item was a mistake. That gambler sat up out of hours four long days trying to get a chance to kick our base of supplies into our subconsciousness, and only a fleet and earnest pair of young feet kept the gambler from achieving his end. Incidentally, he got the girl. Which taught us a lesson about the gratitude of republics.

The year following while riding the hook and ladder trucks to fires and drawing $8 a week as runaway reporter and train chaser for Bent Murdock on the Eldorado Republican, we were persuaded by a local advertiser to make a few sensible remarks about a lady peddling corsets in the town who was taking business from the merchant prince. The lady went to the harness shop, bought a keen rawhide and walked Main Street and Sixth Avenue for two days and haunted the Eldorado Republican office at all hours for the reporter. The boss and the foreman expressed virtuous indignation to her at the shameless attitude of the reporter, and he made his beat from the alleys, meekly peering into a store from the back room to see if she was there, before entering it, and never getting far from the alley door. We wrote our copy on the back stairs and sent it in by the devil, who once, being eager for a foot race or something equally good, told the waiting and obdurate woman where we were perched.

Then that episode passed, and we roasted a circus that didn't advertise enough to suit our nice taste in those matters, and if the circus had sent a sober man to do its fighting he might have caught us. In those Eldorado years we attempted to paralyze the Farmers' Alliance, and were ridden in effigy through the streets of town; a boycott was declared on the paper, and the candidate for county attorney on the alliance ticket bought a gun to answer our charges,

Then we moved to Lawrence, where we have winged

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