become a sort of composite Moses, to lead the public out of the educational wilderness into that glad Canaan which awaits.

The general public has kindly assisted us in rolling in the following obstacles and hedging them 'round about our public-school system :

Misunderstanding the nature of education, the purpose of education, and the results that should be expected; establishing false and pernicious ideals.

There is a widely different point of view between the public and the teaching world. Neither the general nor the teaching public, as a whole, has a clear idea of what it wants or what should be expected. A clearer comprehension of what education s, or should be, must precede any marked advancement in securing the same. There are too many aims in education on either side, and fusion here has simply aided and emphasized confusion.

The lack of unselfish feeling, partnership, and co-operation between parents and teachers is a great obstacle to educational progress, which in this case had better be expressed as the child's progress and wellbeing. With this should be included the oft-recurring conflict between parental and state authority as to what a child's minimum education should be, what he must study, and the governmental or disciplinary authority relatively of parent and teacher.

Another obstacle is the neglect of physical education that would develop bodily conditions, that would support a vigorous mentality.

Overcrowded courses of study, with scattering fire instead of concentration, prevents substantial

progress.

Last, but not by any means least, among the obstacles to educational progress for which we are all responsible, whether within or without the ranks of the teaching protession, is the unprofessional standing of teachers and their low salaries. I feel that the one who accepts a low salary-an amount far below what his services really are worth is equally guilty for evil results with the one who offers the same.

Now I am going to make a series of bald, perhaps gray, statements of obstacles to educational progress, the removal of which is chiefly in the hands of the public. We must ask them to remove them. Many of them are beyond our power and jurisdiction:

Decentralization. Outside the great cities the school officers outnumber the teachers five to two. The seven thousand schools of Nebraska are managed and controlled by twenty-two thousand school district officers. This is lack of concentration with a vengeance. There is too much divided responsibility. We, superintendents, are willing to assume more. There are too many small schools and smaller classes.

Irregular attendance is a great obstacle.

In many parts of the country there is a lack of sufficient funds properly to conduct the schools. Some states place a limit on the legal amount of school taxation and bonded indebtedness of school districts, and upon nothing else; probably upon the theory that the people in their great interest in the welfare of their children may expend too much upon their education and general welfare, while there is no fear whatever that too large an amount will be expended upon the care of the streets and the improvement of roads, upon a sufficient amount of drinking water and plenty of gas! We ask for a higher appreciation by the public of the importance of school work, and a willingness to contribute more freely to the support of the legitimate work of the public schools.

The public demands specialization before fundamentals are mastered. They demand the teaching of too many subjects. The demand for one specialty is made by one profession, for another subject by another profession or a trade, and so on, and the public does not realize the sum total of our unhappiness in this respect. One of these demands is for short, abbreviated, hotbed business courses, and too many high schools are offering a course that gives little or no training, and affords in six months' time no more information than a young man might acquire in a bank or lumber yard in two weeks.

There is too strong a demand from without to get the children thru school in too brief a time; too much commercialism; too much love of the almighty dollar. A popular notion prevails that an education is an extraneous equipment which may be bartered for a livelihood.

The present social conditions and the demand for society or social life for mere school children interfere greatly with solid, substantial, progressive school work.

One of the greatest obstacles to educational progress, at least in certain portions of the country, is the great lack of professionally trained teachers, and the lack of facilities for training them.

There is a lack of strong men and able women in the ranks, caused by lack of appreciation, of adequate pay, of stable conditions. There must be better pay, and a surer, longer tenure of office to draw and retain men especially of ability and character.

The powers that be must cease to foist upon the schools their dependent and unqualified relatives. The great mass of the people, the great middle c'ass, the practical, progressive people with a good, commonschool education and common-sense ideas and ideals, must awake to the real needs of the schools and show less apathy to school work.

I believe that the addition of school gardens, gymnasiums, and manual-training schools would remove many obstacles to educational progress.

My own experience emphasizes the lack of efficient supervision for rural schools, a cure for which would be the centralization and consolidation under township organization. A county superintendent has written me: Our rural schools have everything the city schools lack, and they lack everything the city schools have." Would that we could make a happy combination of the two!

I wish to indorse and second the request of Professor Hanus for a committee of the National Educational Association, or of this department, on the reformulation of educational doctrine, systematic experimentation, and unification of educational forces, with emphasis upon the last.

THE VALUE OF EXAMINATIONS AS DETERMINING A TEACHER'S FITNESS FOR WORK

EDWIN G. COOLEY, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CHICAGO, ILL. This is a day of examinations. Examinations as a means of selection of public servants are becoming more and more popular. The movement for the reform of the city, state, and national civil service by examinations seems irresistible. We have used them as a means of selecting teachers for many years, and the introduction of this topic as a subject of discussion at the superintendents' meeting seems rather startling, just when people are beginning to accept an examination as a panacea for all sorts of public ills. The subject, however, is a timely one, just because we seem likely to go too far in the advocacy of examinations.

If a man or woman is wanted to do a piece of work, the ideal way to select such a person is to have some disinterested third person, who is well acquainted with the nature of the work to be done, select, after careful observation and examination, the one best fitted to do it. This practice, however, in a large system would inevitably degenerate into a condition of things where the men who made this selection would know very little about the nature of the work to be done, and would care less. They would be, however, intensely interested in the persons who ask for the job; in other words, it would be likely to degenerate into a system of "pull," a sort of bargain and sale affair in which the various positions would be given to people on account of the quid pro quo they or their friends were able to offer. Sooner or later this interest in the person and indifference as to the way the work is done becomes evident to all and leads people to realize the necessity for introducing some machinery that will reduce the personal element involved. Written examinations have been the machinery most commonly employed. As Latham says, "an examination serves to make smoother the personal relations among people employed in a given system of work by shifting the duty of selection from individual shoulders and putting it on a relentless piece of mechanism.” The same principles are called into play when we introduce the mechanism of examinations that are called into play when any bit of machinery is employed to do the work formerly done bare-handed, so to

speak. The man who undertakes to invent or make a machine that will do the work previously done by hand begins by analyzing the work to be done, and he selects machinery that will deal with certain essential and typical parts of the operation, and do this under typical circumstances. He sees the necessity of disregarding the exceptional case. He realizes that his machinery is bound to fail at some point or other; that it can deal only with the average situation. The man using the machine is compelled to pay attention only to the average sort of material with which he works. The machine cannot be adjusted to suit the various sorts of materials with which a hand-worker might do a good piece of work. The machine always spoils good material if it happens to be out of the ordinary. It is spoiled on account of the character of the machine, on account of its inability to adapt itself to exceptional material. The examination is subject to the same sort of limitations as other pieces of machinery. It can really test only a few qualities, the number depending on the character of it.

An examination may test one's accuracy, the fullness of one's memory, and one's power of concentration. As Latham says, in his classical book on Examinations:

Behind these qualities lies something which a mental physiologist would call massiveness or robustness of brain, or which we may call energy of mind. Of this, so far as it is brought out in dealing with books and ideas, we can judge fairly from a written examination. We can see that knowledge has been got and know that brain work has been done to get it, and, in addition, note indications of strength or feebleness of will, and we can find out pretty well from a set of papers whether a man knows his own mind or not.

On the other hand, examinations do comparatively little to test the moral qualities. While they will test the intellectual power, and such moral qualities as diligence and obedience, they cannot test one's sense of duty or interest in the work one is doing. An examination will never test sympathy, or the power of working with and influencing otherspowers that are absolutely essential to a teacher. In other words, an

examination cannot test the whole man.

It is necessary to discriminate between the two uses of this test. Latham says that examinations have two uses: (1) "that in which the object is to select the most suitable person for a certain purpose, or the man of the most general ability;" (2) "that in which the object is purely educational." This separation is, however, ideal rather than real, as the use of examinations as a means of selection necessarily affects the sort of education that will be offered. It is impossible to discuss adequately examinations as a means of selection without considering them to some extent from a purely educational standpoint.

In education intended to fit for an active career, instruction and acquirement are very important, while for fitting for a competitive examination they are everything. The proper education for a boy must include - besides getting knowledge- growth in character, gaining the

power of doing the thing he wills, and in getting on with other human beings in other relations. No examination can aid in bringing this about; in fact, they may check the growth of these qualities on account of the difficulty of obtaining these two elements - knowledge of the work and disinterestedness. So far, however, we seem to be unable to get along without examinations as a means of selection, whatever we may think of them from a purely educational point of view.

In spite of these limitations, however, I feel that many of the protests against the use of examinations are ill-considered, to say the least. They seem to be a protest against all tests. One might think we were about ready to return to the old scheme of substituting individual, capricious judgment for systematic tests. There is a fallacy in the scheme, for judgments—no matter how capricious they may seem to be -- are based upon experience, observation, examination of person, and circumstances. But how is this judgment to be formed; upon what is it to be based, if it is not upon judgment as to what one knows, upon judgment as to what one can do? Can this be ascertained by a knowledge of physiognomy, phrenology, social standing, good clothes, or general personality? To some extent I think it can; but no matter by what names people may call this test, they will always be compelled to make some examination, formal or otherwise, as a basis of selection. They will always be compelled to apply some test. Perhaps some people can judge best by the lines of the face, the size and contour of head and jaw; but for the ordinary man a written examination seems to me to be less objectionable than anything else that has been proposed for general use in selecting teachers and other officials.

Back of any theory of examinations there seems to lie a presupposition that there is some relation between knowledge and power. People unconsciously work on the theory that the man who knows is the man who can do, even if they do deny Bacon's aphorism that "knowledge is power." Dr. Dewey says that on the evolutionary theory of development we cannot explain the selection and preservation of brain power on any other supposition than that it enabled its possessor to do somethingexcept on the theory that it has some value as a means of preservation in the struggle for existence. The animal with the greater intelligence or the greater knowledge has an advantage over his competitors in the struggle for existence. Evolution seems to teach that knowledge is power. It seems natural, then, when it is impossible to submit the applicant for a piece of work to a test of doing, to make him submit to a test of knowledge.

We must admit that an examination in many cases will determine not so much the applicant's ability to do the thing desired as his ability to tell how it should be done. This can sometimes be learned from books. People may learn from books something about how schools should be

taught, but the skillful examiner can, I think, always tell the difference between the applicant who speaks from experience about doing a thing and the one who has merely "crammed" books on pedagogy. One would have to admit the impossibility of picking out a Mark Hopkins by an examination which called for information about pedagogy. Still there must be a certain sort of relation between knowledge and the ability to do some piece of work based on that knowledge. The man who has the knowledge is apt to be interested in doing the thing. This knowledge has usually been acquired in doing the thing. The one who has the best assortment of knowledge about a particular piece of work is, other things being equal, the best prepared to do it.

I believe that there is a closer relation between having the knowledge and doing the thing in the case of the teacher than there is in the case of the policeman or some other public official. Teaching calls for ability to state clearly what one knows. This is part of the equipment of a teacher, while the ability to talk on the part of the policeman may have very little to do with his efficiency. As "Sammy Weller" says, "on the contrary it's quite the reverse. But the teacher who is dumb in the presence of a problem demanding solution, who lacks the power of expressing himself definitely and accurately, must in some degree be unfitted for the work he has undertaken to do.

We hear a good deal about the inability of teachers and others to do themselves justice in an examination. This is given as a reason for abandoning them as a test. To my mind there is very little in this proposition. A successful teacher must have self-possession and selfmastery. He must be able to do, under trying conditions and under time conditions. A teacher who is unmanned by the presence of a difficult thing to do, who loses his self-possession and self-mastery, confesses judgment so far as his ability to be a successful schoolmaster is concerned. No matter how much force we may be inclined to give to this matter of nervousness in an examination of delicate children in a public school, we should not give it any weight in a test of applicants for the position of a teacher. The teacher must have self-control enough to meet this test, or he will be worth little to us in the schoolroom. People use the word cram" as a substitute for thinking, for argument, and it enables them to damn almost any sort of a thing they do not approve of. It is often assumed that almost any preparation for examination is, to some extent, a hasty, crude, and dishonest preparation. It is taken for granted that the power to prepare for an examination in a definite time is not a thing worth testing for; but, to my mind, a man or a woman who has the ability really and thoroly to prepare for an examination has in him the right sort of stuff of which to make a teacher. The teacher as well as the lawyer must possess the power to go to the right place for material, and

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We hear and read a good deal about "cram."