the chicken run, the pigeons, the beehives, into which, with many assurances of my safety if I "just minded," I was invited to look when the covers were raised for my edification; nor have I told you of Mary the goat, or Isaac the ram, who, with his fleece sweeping the ground and the chain across his brow beneath the convoluted horns, looks exactly like a scriptural High Priest; of the

four collies, of "Cotton Dolly" and the other innumerable cats and kittens'; of the two pet crows, of the rowboats and the sailboat, and the diving raft, and the springboard, and the flagstaff; of the schoolroom, which soon will be occupied morning and afternoon; of the apple orchard, of the curiously contorted tree that "the Indians bent to mark a camp."-New Thought, October, 1906.

The White House, Washington.

To School Officers:

The war is bringing to the minds of our people a new appreciation of the problems of national life and a deeper understanding of the meaning and aims of democracy. Matters which heretofore have seemed commonplace and trivial are seen in a truer light. The urgent demand for the production and proper distribution of food and other national resources has made us aware of the close dependence of individual on individual and nation on nation. The effort to keep up social and industrial organizations in spite of the withdrawal of men for the army has revealed the extent to which modern life has become complex and specialized.

These and other lessons of the war must be learned quickly if we are intelligently and successfully to defend our institutions. When the war is over we must apply the wisdom which we have acquired in purging and ennobling the life of the world.

In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view of human possibilities the common school must have a large part. I urge that teachers and other

school officers increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly on the problems of community and national life.

Such a plea is in no way foreign to the spirit of American public education or of existing practices. Nor is it a plea for a temporary enlargement of the school program appropriate merely to the period of the war. It is a plea for a realization in public education of the new emphasis which the war has given to the ideals of democracy and to the broader conceptions of national life.

In order that there may be definite material at hand with which the schools may at once expand their teaching I have asked Mr. Hoover and Commissioner Claxton to organize the proper agencies for the preparation and distribution of suitable lessons for the elementary grades and for the high school classes. Lessons thus suggested will serve the double purpose of illustrating in a concrete way what can be undertaken in the schools and of stimulating teachers in all parts of the country to formulate new and appropriate materials drawn directly from the communities in which they live. Sincerely yours,

Woodrow Wilson.

SOME BOGIES OF EDUCATION

BY JOHN D. BARRY

When William Dean Howells was editor of the Atlantic Monthly he lived in Cambridge. Naturally, he was thrown into association with the college people. One day, while walking through the college grounds with James Russell Lowell, he expressed regret that he had not gone to college Lowell said he believed the regret was unnecessary. If Howells had gone to college, he explained, he might have lost his originality, his fresh outlook on life. He might have been made. academic, imitative.

I imagine that the conversation gave Howells some comfort.

At any rate, Howells is a fine example of the man who, without going to college, may become one of the most highly educated and most broadly cultivated men in the world.

Colleges are not the only avenue to education.

With some people they may not be the best avenue. There are many other avenues. Best of all is the avenue of life.

And the best that a college education can do is to prepare a man to take full advantage of the education provided in the avenue of life.

Some people do not need this preparation. They are often those who lament that they have not gone to college.

I have known men to be ruined for life by going to college. And among them I don't include those weak boys who fall into vicious habits. I include that most remarkable class of human beings, those who become infected with intellectual pride, whose minds are closed to the education provided by life.

There are many such. One sees them on all sides. Usually they are finely dressed. They live in a world of sham created by their own prejudices.

I once heard a conversation between two thoughtful seniors in a great college. They were

talking about what the college had done for them, and asking if they could conscientiously consider themselves educated men.

They frankly decided that they could not consider themselves educated men. They were clever enough to recognize what all college men of mature years must recognize, that college is the primary school of life.

Those college men who accept college as what, in the language of young girls' seminaries, is called "a finishing school," can never claim to be educated at all.

And yet, I know college men, well advanced in life, who remain, intellectually speaking, at the very point where they were on the day of gradu

ation.

And I know other men who have never seen the inside of a college and yet, in the true sense of the word, are far better educated than most of the college men in the world.-Chicago Herald.

THE GARY PLAN OF RELIGIOUS EDUCA

TION

BY HARRY WEBB FARRINGTON

The plan is not a fad, but is the expression of deep and long thought-out motives brought into action by the request of local pastors for them to teach church loyalty and receive credit for the study of the Hebrew of the Old Testament.

Pupils are permitted to go to church upon request of parents.

Instruction is in church property and by teachers employed by the church.

There is no compulsion upon attendance on the part of the teachers. The responsibility rests upon the home.

Only such absences are reported back to the school where there is suspicion of truancy. The schedule is arranged so as to take the children coming from, or going to school.

Apart from the local pastors, five denominational boards, at their own expense, sent directors of education to organize and develop the work. All of the denominations have given week-day instruction, from one to five days a week, one hour each day. They have had various types of schedules, and various grouping of the grades. They have had various curricula as the basis of their studies. Apart from the interdenominational work at the Neighborhood House, there has been no relation established among the various churches. There has been no supervision of the church work by the public schools.

The children will attend. In my own Methodist school the first year the attendance was from 90 to 94 per cent. of the enrollment. Tardiness was the exception. The first year the hours were taken from auditorium and application periods, while this year it is from play, where competition is greater, and yet the attendance has been a little higher.

Aside from a list of memory work much greater than the best of the Sunday school and the oral reaction by story form of the work of the lower grades, the fifth to the eighth grades were sub

ject to a most severe and comprehensive examination in church history and life and Bible study. The results were amazing and gratifying, much of it being equal to the best high school work and some really good college examinations of the day.

The parents are likely to be skeptical and indifferent, and the pastors will be easily discouraged unless the pastor is enthusiastic in seeing the plan as a new hope for his church, and the parents as a more efficient means of training the children for the work of the world and the work in the church.

Every school in trying to fit its pupils for this modern world, and ever keeping in mind the moral, which is the highest aim of education, must sooner or later face the task which Mr. Wirt faced, and from observation and correspondence, and knowledge of the situation elsewhere, the main lines of the Wirt system must be accepted.-The Advance.

TRAINING STEERS TO THE YOKE

[Boston Transcript.]

Down on the river meadow below the house where we have been holidaying, a curious piece of symbolism, an allegory of human life, has been enacting by a couple of beasts. The thing has been going on for three or four weeks. It is only this a couple of two-year-old red steers have been yoked together and turned out on the meadow to graze. It is a part of the process of the training of these young cattle to be oxen. They are being broken in the yoke, and accustomed to "going together." And here is where the symbolism of the process comes in. You would understand it all at once if you had observed the movements of these steers from the start. At first they did not move or think together at all. One steer pulled one way and the other pulled the other, but there was the yoke, holding both necks in its firm grasp, the strong beam over their necks forcing the steers to stay and to move together.

It was tragical at first. The steers tried to stand with their heads together. No go-they must stand side by side. One tried to lie down while the other stood up. Impossible; the yoke dragged on the recumbent animal's neck so hard that he had to get up. One had an impulse to lie down in the shade when the other wanted to graze. Madness-they were yoked together, and a difference of impulses meant that neither one grazed and neither one rested. The only peace for those two steers lay in the impulse in common.

That

After a while it was possible to see the beginnings of an entente between the steers, and it was reached through the medium of a common hunger. The meadow had been hayed over, and the second crop of grass had sprung up luxuriantly. meant that the grazing was very good-clover, and young herd's grass, and red-top. It was all a carpet of delicious feed, more than ankle-high to the steers. Of course they were eager to get it and as they reached for it, little by little they attained to the discovery that if they walked along contentedly side by side, and both cropped the grass in front of them in the same way, they were able to get a great deal more of it than if they pulled and hauled contrariwise. So they began

to move and act together. Difficulties arose when one reached the point of repletion before the other and had a resulting impulse to go and lie down in the shade and ruminate, and think about it. But the nearer they came to grazing exactly together, the more likely it became that they would reach the point of repletion at the same time, and would consequently have a practically simultaneous impulse to go and lie down.

At all events, little by little they got the machinery of their impulses to working together. After two weeks of the yoke, the steers no longer pulled away from each other. Now, after three or four weeks, you will see them moving together quietly, drifting by a completely common impulse from one side of the field to the other, lying down together, getting up together. One might say that they switch their tails at the flies together. So much of their business of being oxen they have learned -and learned it through their stomachs. By this habit of common movement, their training as draught animals will be greatly furthered. Ac

customed to move together in the field, they will easily learn to pull together, to start and stop together, to pull backward together, to "whoa-hush" and "whoa-haw" together.

It is habit that makes the united twofold existence-two organisms with but a single direction -completely successful at last. Habit, and the realization that the yoke is there to stay. By and by habit replaces the yoke. In the case of welltrained oxen, the yoke is no longer necessary as a bond of union-only as a means of drawing the load. They move together, by habit. Take the yoke off the necks of two old oxen and turn them out in the pasture. They will remain close together, often grazing side by side. You will see them at the trough drinking together, and lying under a tree together chewing the cud. The burdens of their life are divided between them. Nothing is insupportably hard for them. A great part of their life is passed in immeasurable contentment. What a wretched ox it would be that would have to work alone!

THE UNNECESSARY DUST OF SCHOOL

ROOMS

BY JACQUES W. REDWAY, F. R. G. S.
Mount Vernon, N. Y.

Dust and insects-flies, fleas, and mosquitoes are responsible for the spread of many of the most deadly infectious diseases. Dust has been found to communicate poliomyelitis; the fleas parasitic on rats and squirrels spread the bubonic plague; mosquito species communicate yellow fever and virulent malarial fevers; flies infect human beings with anthrax, typhoid fever, and sleeping sickness. Humanity is learning to guard itself against mosquitoes, flies, and fleas, and also against animals that are carriers of infected insects. Humanity, however, has not yet awakened to the fact that dust which is infected may be quite as deadly as the insects named. The insects, per se, are harmless if they are not infected. Unfortunately, one whose skin is pierced by an insect cannot be sure that the insect is harmless; and one cannot be sure that dust-laden air drawn into the lungs is free from that which produces disease. Even the dust which, mixed with perspiration, forms a thin plaster upon the skin, has been known to produce infection.

School buildings probably accumulate more dust than any other class of buildings. Dust is not only brought into them from external sources, but dust is created within them. Moreover, the constant tramping of feet tends to keep constantly in the air dust that otherwise would gradually settle. Uprising or flying dust is disseminated partly by air currents and partly by electrification. The movement of the body, when pupils are marching into a room, or through the corridors, will raise not a little dust from the floors. The tramping of

many feet sends it upward; the scuffing of dry shoe soles on dry boards electrifies the dust and keeps it in the air until its electricity is discharged. Fine dust projected into the air does not settle quickly unless the air is very moist; if electrified it may remain floating in the air for hours. The dust content of moist air does not retain its charge of electricity.

The dust that is created within the classrooms consists mainly of crayon substance from the blackboards. The prevention of this has long occupied the attention of sanitary engineers and the discussion of the problem is not necessary here. Suffice it to say that, with intelligent care, the presence of crayon dust may be overcome.

The heating plant also yields a considerable amount of very fine dust. This consists mainly of anhydrous alkaline oxides, clay, and unconsumed carbon compounds. It is not necessary to discuss the effects of such dust particles when they are drawn into the lungs; the discussion belongs to medical science and not to meteorology.

A third source of dust is the body of the pupil. In examining dust particles collected in schoolrooms, one sort defied detection for some months. It proved, however, to be epidermis, or "scarf skin" -not very much of it, but enough to concentrate the attention in many microscopic analyses. The fine dust, finer than flour, which collects on mattresses consists almost wholly of epidermis. The prevention of dust of this character is practically impossible. The discussion of the possible dangers arising from the presence of such dust is the business of the physician.

The dust that is brought into the school building from the outside comes mainly from a single source-unsodded ground. It is brought into the building in various ways, however.

The wind picks up the dust from loose, unsodded ground-playgrounds, fields, and streets. In cities and villages the streets are the chief reservoir of wind-blown dust. A breeze having twice a given velocity will pick up and carry sixtyfour times as much loose material; or it will carry particles nearly sixty-four times as great. The actual value differs but little from the theoretical value. Particles of wind-blown dust are carried through the crevices of windows, doors, and roofs. The finer dust readily penetrates crevices through which rain and snow will not pass under wind pressure.

The wind-blown dust consists mainly of earthy matter and organic matter. The greater part of the organic matter is horse dung. In the fall fall finely-ground leaf-dust forms a considerable part. The horse dung content of wind-blown dust is the lightest part of it and is the most widely distributed. It is rarely absent in the dust that enters buildings of every sort, and pretty nearly every article of uncartoned food purveyed in open provision stores is plentifully sprinkled with it. An examination of the dust of schoolrooms rarely fails to reveal it.

The intake ducts of buildings which are mechanically ventilated are passage ways through which a great deal of dust is carried. The prevention is simple and easy. Screens of cheesecloth between the vent and the tempering coils will separate most of the dust from the air; the humidification of the air will precipitate most of the remaining particles. It is well to note the fact that the dust within the ducts becomes highly electrified unless moistened.

Most of the dust that gets into a building is "tracked" in. If one walks a few rods on an unwashed sidewalk and steps on a piece of black cloth, the imprint of the shoe is left in dust on the cloth. A microscope counter with a one-half inch objective shows anywhere from one thousand to five thousand dust particles adhering to each square inch of surface. Just about as many adhere to the floor of the corridor as one enters the building. In the course of the day the tracking of many feet distributes it pretty well over the building, and this takes place day in and day out.

The tracking of dust into a building cannot be prevented, but the amount of dust tracked into the building can be kept to a minimum. A washed concrete or flagstone walk has but very little dust to be tracked into the building. Sweeping a concrete or flagstone walk helps matters a little, but not very much; the broom will not remove the finest dust. A twelve-foot strip of rubber matting helps very materially provided that the matting be cleaned twice a day-or oftener.

Dust cannot be kept out of a building, no matter how great the degree of cleanliness. The next best plan is a method of taking care of it, so that it may be kept out of the air. The dust that is tracked into a room may be kept on the floor, and all flying dust that falls to the floor may be kept there.

Oiled dust cannot be easily electrified, and if projected into the air it will quickly settle. Oiling the floor therefore is a most excellent method whereby the flying of dust may be prevented. But

the oiling must be done with intelligence. The oil may be applied with a "slusher" during the summer vacation and, if properly applied, one slushing will suffice for a year, corridor floors possibly excepted. Whenever bare spots occur they should be rubbed over with a felt rubber,-not with a slusher.

A floor should be cleaned before oiling and the black spots, which are incrusted dirt, should be removed with a scraper. An old floor whose surface has become furred because of continued sprinkling with water should be scraped and the surface made clean and smooth.

A comb-grained pine, properly treated with oil, in time takes the lustre and color of mahogany. A maple floor does not take oil well unless first filled and then shellacked or finished with floor varnish. A floor brush and not an ordinary broom. should be used in keeping a well-finished floor clean. With such precautions, the flying dust in a classroom is hardly discernible.

It is quite true that dust in the air of a room may be projected to the floor by opposite electrification. Such a method is a very interesting scientific experiment; but it is impractical as a method and wholly unnecessary. The problem is not to get the dust out of the air; it is to prevent it from getting into the air of the classroom. Most of the dust is driven from the floor into the air. The problem of keeping it on the floor, and out of the air, is easily solved by intelligent oiling.

MOVING PICTURES IN SCHOOLS
BY HENRY S. CURTIS

The moving picture is being installed very generally in our new high schools and many of our new grammar schools throughout the country. The moving picture is the solution of the problem of attendance at the social centre, and it may in the future be the solution of many of our other social problems as well. The moving picture as found in the commercial theatre presents mostly dramatized dime novels. The seriousness of the moral risk through moving pictures has been generally realized, and boards of censors have been established in many states and cities, despite the fact that there is also a National Board of Censors. However, the seriousness of the moving picture as a means of giving a distorted and false idea of life has not been generally realized. At the present time the moving picture is almost comparable with the public schools as a means of education, as it is estimated that there are in attendance some seven millions people during nearly three hundred days in every year, whereas the public school reaches some fourteen millions for one hundred and fifty days. It must be realized, too, that the impressions that are made through the moving picture are much more lasting than the impressions derived through the printed page, and the moving picture is constantly undoing the work of the school.

Even the better grade films are giving false conceptions of history, geography, literature, and life itself. It is quite time that moving pictures came to be recognized as an educational influence and came under the regulation, or better, the direction

of educational authorities. It seems to me that the moving picture business should be a national monopoly, and that films should be produced under the direction of a special commission of the state universities, state educational departments, or any other approved educational institutions.

The great difficulty which all schools encounter which are now trying to give moving picture entertainments at the schools is that it is almost impossible to get films that are suitable. The moving picture is indicated as a suitable government monopoly both by the fact that films at present are very unsuitable and that they are unduly costly. There has been no other business in the country, probably, that has returned so large an interest on the investment as has the moving picture business. We should not allow a man to teach history in our schools or colleges who is entirely ignorant of it, and it seems to me that the teaching of the moving picture is on much the same plan as that of the classroom, and that the public is primarily interested in getting a better product both for the sake of its morals, its habits, and its education.

The University of Wisconsin and the University

of California have now established exchanges of educational moving pictures and are sending these to schools and institutions within the state which desire and are willing to pay for films of this character. An educational exchange has recently been established also by the high schools and churches in the city of Pasadena. Mr. Edison is preparing for his own kinetescope a series of films which cover all the school subjects.

Perhaps there would be no one way in which a philanthropist might do more for the public than by endowing a "Universal City" or some other sort of an institution which should have on its staff capable professors to represent all our chief intellectual and social interests, that might prepare and furnish at reasonable rates films for the use of schools and churches.

Whether any of these forms of improvement which have been suggested work themselves out in practice, it is certain that the moving picture is coming more and more into the social centre and into the public school, and that through the investigations of our state department of education or through other sources we are to have better films to supply the educational and social demand.

Study the sayings and the biographies of the world's great men of sterling character. "Character is power-is influence; it makes friends, creates funds, draws patronage and support, and opens a sure and easy way to wealth, honor and happiness."-J. Howe. "When all have done their utmost, surely he hath given the best who gives a character erect and constant."-Lowell.

"I'm called away by particular business, but I leave my character behind me."-Sheridan. "As there is nothing in the world great but man, there is nothing truly great in man but character."-W. M. Evarts.

"Character must stand behind and back up everything—the sermon, the poem, the picture, the play. None of them is worth a straw without it."-Holland.

"Character is the diamond that scratches every other stone."-Bartol.

III. Kindness.

(a) To playmates—

helping in daily duties;

no tale-bearing;

sharing games;

sharing candy, etc.

(b) To animals

gentleness;

proper care;

avoid hurting or frightening.

(c) Good manners.

1.

Home

interrupting;

best seat;

"Please," "I thank you";

sulking;

passing behind.

2. School

"Good morning";

staring at visitors, etc.