-the observation of how a master works has its compensation not so much in the ability to go elsewhere and do likewise as in the consciousness of the attitude, self-mastery, complacency, tact, skill, and ability of the master by which such work is made possible. The value of such observation is that it reflects the master in the doing, and thus enables each observer to become a master.

I am convinced, however, that the practice and observation in training schools as now established, where the whole organization is based upon the social and educational conditions in cities, have in them very little help for the teacher who gives his time to the rural and village schools. It should be required by the state that model rural schools, accessible to normal-school students, be maintained for purposes of observation in connection with and under the direction of all normal schools.

In addition to this course, continuing thru two years, there should be one extending thru four years, encompassing all in the briefer, and adding the necessary academic and professional courses to equip teachers for high-school instruction, principalships, and superintendencies. The completion of such a course should entitle the holder to a life state license to teach in all grades of schools.

It seems to me that an arrangement as here suggested would hold as many students in the longer courses as we have now, and in addition would encourage hundreds of teachers to take at least the briefer course, with a possibility of creating such a good taste for better training that many would continue thruout the entire course.

RICHARD G. BOONE, superintendent of schools, Cincinnati, O. I am sure I voice the common sentiment of many of my hearers in saying it has given us genuine pleasure to hear again our friend Dr. Payne. His theme is one that has been familiar to him for years. His phrasing of it is all the better for the changing of a word. The maturest, best-considered current notion of the normal-school type has an abiding interest for those who employ or supervise teachers. What are the really vital qualities in the teacher which the normal school must stimulate and cultivate?

I am not sure that limiting the discussion to state normal schools is important. Indeed, it is not quite apparent that the leader has observed the limit. Every qualification mentioned as needed by the ideal teacher would be valid for one trained in a city or private or secondary normal school, not less than in the elementary normal schools supported by the state. Nevertheless, the discussion is made simpler by thinking of the preparation of teachers for elementary schools chiefly.

I think I should agree with the general statement that the great change in the normalschool ideal in a generation has been in working away from wholeness of culture toward specific training. The movement has often led to short courses and pedagogical tables and formal steps and syllabi and manuals and plan books and device inventories. Graduates have carried away with them the coat-of-arms of their school. They have mastered a way of doing things, and arguments to justify the way. They have been trained, but not educated. They are artisans, tho skilled withal. Some things may be done expertly well; but there is often lacking a breadth of view because there there is no breadth of foundation. Scholarship is wanting, and so the rich character results of scholarship. Paucity and provincialism of experience easily pauperize character. To have thought little and narrowly and chiefly of one's own time and region is not conducive to a deep personality nor to the uplift of one's teaching. In the words of the speaker, "it is the net personality of the teacher that educates," not his learning, not his discoveries, not his scientific or linguistic attainments. He reveals his teaching power rather in his large heart, his good sense, his receptive, alert mind, a resourceful interest in his charge, and a masterful grip on the much or little learning he has. Next to being born with these qualities, a course in those subjects that converge upon human interests and fix the human relations, especially upon the planes of the fine and industrial arts, conduct, personal and social responsibility and privilege, man and his institutions, and the

conditions of race and individual improvement, will probably do most for the intending teacher. There is wanting then "not so much scientific analysis as scholarly interpretation" in the fitting of teachers; a fine and liberal appreciation of what is best and most inspiring and wholesome among the incentives to right living and effective doing.

It may well be questioned, however, whether a familiar and sympathetic acquaintance with nature, a knowledge of and interest in growing things as they grow, and forces at work in the material world, will not open doors for as effective teaching as any or all studies of the "culture type." Among these phenomena child experiences begin; among them are the occasions for sense-training and manifold interests and mental alertness. If these qualities of mind and heart are to be secured to the child, they must have been mastered by the teacher. The laboratory and the field will yield some lessons that cannot be derived from books; lessons that are vital in the education of the young. I have great faith in the scientific mind as a factor in the training of teachers.

But here again, as mentioned in a previous paragraph, what is needed perhaps in the preparation of the teacher is interpretation, sympathetic, intelligent appreciation, not criticism and an analytic system; clear insights, a sane and balanced joy in watching and directing the processes of growth, a familiar knowledge of how the mind behaves in learning, and the tools best uses.

I have been quite as much interested, Mr. President and fellow-teachers, in noting what the leader omitted from his discussion as in what he said. No mention was made of conditions of entrance upon the formal preparation, of length of course, of cadet or practice schools, of supplementary and optional courses for teachers of different grades of schools, or of method, except to class it under general scholarship and self-initiative. I fully agree with the paper as to the order of the three aims of the normal school, viz., scholarship, science or doctrine, and method, but believe that more importance should be attached to the mental processes involved in learning and a sound method of procedure as conditioned by that process. The main source of improvement for teachers may be "the study and interpretation of our classical writers on education," from Plato to Horace Mann; but, if so, the improvement will probably be because the study has made them thoughtful of their acts of teaching and learning, and the most effective methods of effecting results. The handling of the elementary branches and school exercises as instruments of education is an art, a fine art, and has its body of principles, expertness in applying which may be cultivated in many persons under favorable conditions; else there is no call for normal schools. There may be very satisfactory scholarship, and a profound knowledge of educational doctrine, and a lack of teaching skill. To have accomplished the first and second aims and to have failed in the last is to have failed in an essential. The normal school is to turn out as its product teachers, not scholars

merely, or doctrinaires.

C. F. CARROLL, superintendent of schools, Worcester, Mass.-It seems to me that one business of the normal school is to eliminate the candidates for the teaching profession who do not have natural ability. Such persons can be worn out in the normal school by requiring them to repeat the work of the course. I want to add that I am in complete accord with Mr. Payne. I have never heard anybody maintain any opinions contrary to those of the paper. The normal schools in Massachusetts formerly gave practice to students by letting them practice upon each other. I had some hesitation in opening up at New Britain the first practice school of another kind. Oswego has been reported as having 500 in the largest practice school in the world. There are 1,500 in the New Britain practice school. That idea has spread, and there are now three normal schools in Connecticut instead of one. I believe that every normal school in New Engand is now shaping its work in the same direction. Let us give to Dr. Sheldon, of Oswego, that grand old hero, credit for what was done. The superintendents of Massachusetts now say to a girl who has graduated from college: "We wish you to go to a normal school and into a practice school before you apply for a position as a teacher."

SUPERINTENDENT GREENWOOD, of Kansas City.—I wish we might have a definition from the speaker as to his meaning in the remark that a specialist in a normal-school faculty is a menace. It does not follow because one is a specialist that he is ignorant of other subjects. Those who believe in the subjects they teach and are well-bred people, good thinkers and good workers, are a help and an inspiration to all the students in a normal school. I stand for that kind of specialist. The great danger is that persons who are teaching in the normal school may lack both scholarship and inspiration. The specialist is worth a great deal if he does not insist on putting his drawing harness on all the children.

MISS M. ELIZABETH FARSON, district superintendent of Chicago. - The normal school is in need of open vision. We believe that the normal-trained school teacher should come to us able to see things from every point of view.

THE DANGER OF USING BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN REASONING ON EDUCATIONAL SUBJECTS

W. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

For many years I have been attracted and afterwards repelled by one theory and another relating to education, which undertook to reason from the body to the mind--from the brain to the soul-from the events of animal life to the events of spiritual life, and to explain the latter thru the The attempt to reform the school in some particular by the light of physiology, or by phrenology, or by the study of prehistoric beginnings of civilization, has often been successful; but quite as often it has been unsuccessful. In the former case some waste of bodily power has been prevented; in the latter case some more important spiritual power has been dwarfed or paralyzed to gain some less valuable advantage for the body.

When one first begins to think on a subject which has hitherto been purely a matter of routine and tradition with him, he falls too readily into a habit of criticism of the established order and condemns with undue haste. As a consequence his corrections and would-be reforms all need readjustment to prevent them from doing more harm than good. For he has seen only one evil out of many, or only one phase of an evil instead of the whole of it. On this account he may, by removing one evil, let in another and worse evil that has been held in check by the choice of the less noxious one.

I must confess, with a degree of sadness, that I have become from year to year more skeptical in regard to reforms advocated in the name of school hygiene. Not that I doubt the importance of hygiene, but rather that I doubt the attainments of those who talk so glibly about it. For I see them unduly securing minor advantages at the expense of great and permanent injuries to health and normal growth.

The schoolhouse, at first, was only a slight modification on the dwelling-house. There was light and ventilation sufficient for two, three, or four persons in the room. The dark parts of the room were light enough for many purposes of housework, and if one wished to read or to sew or perform the work of cleansing or separating such articles of food as had been ground and needed sifting, or as were composed of small grains or kernels and needed picking over, a seat near the window secured the requisite light.

But the school needed a room lighted in all parts as nearly equally as possible, and with a constant supply of fresh air, heated properly. It was gradually discovered that the room of the dwelling-house was poorly adapted for school purposes. Some pupils got too little light and became near-sighted by holding their books too close to their eyes; some came to have weak eyes by having too much light. For the glare of a page on which the sunlight falls is sufficient to produce partial blindness. Even pure sky light, without the direct rays of the sun, will tend to do this. Many have been the so-called improvements which, in correcting the evil of insufficient light, ignored entirely the great injury done to those pupils who sat in the full glare of the sun or of the clear sky, and for hours, each day, tried their eyes on perceiving letters and figures in small print. I need not speak here of the various attempts to light the room from the front of the pupil, forcing him to strain his eyes in order to make out the words of the page when seen in the direction of the source of light; the experiment of lighting from two sides, the left and the right, with its attendant impossibility of getting the light upon the book from either side without at the same time facing the light of the other side. The light was tried from the right side alone, and the pupil had to have the shadow of his hand on the place where he was writing. Light from the left and rear came at last to be adopted with much unanimity by educational experts in this country in 1876. But the tendency to make large buildings has since that time permitted and encouraged the construction of schoolhouses with one-half of the rooms lighted from one side only; this, too, without due consideration of the relation between the height of the tops of the windows and the width of the room. The consequence of this is that most of our cities have schoolrooms in which there is a row of desks where pupils sit in a twilight and acquire the habit of holding their books too near the eyes; and another row of desks where the pupils have the glare of light that I have described, and the effort of nature to adjust the retina to the overplus of light dims the power of vision below the normal standard.

In the schoolroom of a building altered over from a dwelling-house there is also another attendant evil. The pupils in a row of seats placed directly under the windows are exposed in cold weather to chilling currents of air which are constantly flowing down the sides of the wall and

especially down the window surface.

Children not of robust constitution often lay the foundation of much bodily disease in this way. Improper lighting, by reason of the sympathy of the eyes with the stomach, produces in pupils of delicate constitution a tendency to nervous dyspepsia. Indeed, the errors in lighting and in avoiding drafts of cold air seem to me so serious that I cannot listen patiently to those who praise the countless devices which are invented for one and another trifling advantage in the hygiene of the schoolroom. For it were better that they had not been discovered than to distract, as they do, the attention from the far weightier matters of light and temperature and ventilation.

One idea crowds out another in some cases, altho in other cases one idea leads to or brings in another. The general idea suggests its appli

But the particular idea having small scope may get in the way of more fruitful ideas. We have to measure ideas as to their relative value and decide for ourselves which may properly give way to the other. For example, take the unhygienic school as it existed and now exists in the countries that are backward in this matter of school architecture, and we must admit that the great purposes of the school were secured and are secured in the log schoolhouse, in the dark, ill-ventilated tenement building rented for a school in a slum district, or in a mere shanty school in the west of Ireland. The great purpose of learning to know printed language; to become eye-minded instead of ear-minded; to gain besides one's colloquial vocabulary also a vocabulary of science and literature and philosophy; to become able to understand and use technical language— all these things came then and come now to the gifted youth without the improvements in hygiene that we clamor for. Abraham Lincoln read by the firelight of the blazing hearth and fed his mighty mind.

It is true that the average of life in those unhygienic days was far less than now. But the illiterate savage does not reach a life average so great as the unhygienic but civilized man, and, what is more to the point, fifty years of Europe is worth a cycle of Cathay. A rational life, growing in the production of science and art and literature, and in diffusing the blessing of civilization, is better than a savage life, even if the latter were to have an average of eighty years, while the former were to have an average of thirty years. According to the merely biologic point of view, life is life, whether of plant or animal or man, and the more of it the better. But such is not the spiritual point of view.

Some years ago Max Müller wrote up the theory of the sun-myth as found in the beginnings of mythology. The stories of the heathen gods were thinly veiled allegories of the solar year, or of the four seasons, or of the diurnal revolution. The words signifying divine things are originally words describing the phenomena connected with the progress of the sun in the equinox, or thru the hours of the day and night. Later on, the sun-myth theory was used to explain all religion. It is all