the past. That debt we will now pay, but you must no longer prescribe our work or define our field any more than your own is prescribed. It may be a hard lesson at first, as was yours to us, but it will be no less wholesome; both in numbers and stimulus, your work will improve.

Finally, I am more and more persuaded that in its highest sense teaching ought to be a universal vocation. Guyau says that it should be the only education for women. I would add, and for men as well. Statesmanship, religion, and science all become precious according as they tend to the ever higher development of man. Education involves all other topics, and is that in which the education of all should culminate. The greatest of all reforms are educational reforms, and none others are complete without it. It is the best measure of progress. The philosophy of education is the highest and only philosophy. It is our chief obligation to the future. Its work consists in making an ideal environment for the development of the super-man that is to be; and, while we must train the intellect, the will is far larger and the heart larger yet. Aristotle defined education as teaching men to fear aright; for Jesus it was to teach them to love aright, to fix the affections on the highest and wean them from the lowest. Some have conceived it as teaching men to be angry aright; not to fret at trifles, but to generate torrents of consuming wrath at great abuses; or to pity aright and shape the charity of the heart toward fit objects. In a single word, it is human evolution, and its goal is so to construct experience and knowledge as to advance growth. An age of growth like the present lays upon us new and larger opportunities and duties, and history waits to see if we can develop the wisdom and the vigor which our age demands. It wants not talk, but deeds; not theories, but practical and in some respects radical reconstructions.

DISCUSSION

IRWEN LEVISTON, superintendent of schools, St. Paul, Minn.-We who are thoroly acquainted with the present status of the modern high school are more than pleased by having such men as Dr. Hall turn their attention to this subject. And we are more or less pleased with what he has said upon this subject today- at times less, at most times The question whether we have degenerated since the time of Cicero, or, for that matter, since Adam, does not concern us; but has the high school degenerated since Dr. Hall attended it?

more.

The high school has not only needed, but deserves, more consideration than it has received in the past from our educators of national reputation. Of late the universities have been receiving endowments, heretofore unheard of, and thereby commanding the talent, experience, and genius of the great scholars and educators; while the high schools have received only niggardly and grudging support from a protesting public, resulting in poor equipment in the matter of apparatus, libraries, and quantity if not quality of teachers.

Again, the high schools have for years occupied a difficult position in the educational

system; for, on the one hand, they have been compelled to accept pupils whose preparation and qualifications have been determined without their consent, and, on the other hand, have been obliged to furnish pupils fitted for fixed and undebatable requirements on the part of the universities; and the high school must give what the university demands or be rated as second-class. At the same time they have taken the teachers that the university sends to them, trained in special lines, but not in simplification of knowledge.

Along with all this comes the demand for practical teaching in business courses, with commercial geography, industrial history, modern language speaking, domestic science, economics, etc., etc., until it is little to be wondered at that the mind attempting to formulate a course of study becomes befuddled and bewildered.

Again, not a few parents are attempting to make the schools entirely responsible for the moral status of our pupils, compelling us seriously to consider what sort of a course in ethics applied thru the few school hours of the day will safely carry the boys and girls of the high-school age thru the dangers that surround them outside of school hours.

Notwithstanding its difficult position and the demands made upon it, I believe the high school of today is a success, and worthy of the name which is applied to it in our subject; that it is proving a rapid developer of intellect and teaching its pupils the enjoyment of mental excitement beyond all material pleasures; that in character-building it today outranks every other department of education, not excepting our old wellmannered colleges and those fitting schools making special claims to high moral training; that in its associations there is the most and best of preparation for any kind of future living.

If I am right in these assumptions, the only true plan to pursue in merging the high school more completely into the people's college is to strengthen, adapt, and perfect what we already have. A hastily planned structure on poor foundation furnishes an excuse for pulling down to build better; but a steady natural growth cannot be treated in this manner. No variety of the tree of knowledge will be made to bear better fruit by tearing up its roots.

Gradually and steadily the high school has been widening its field of work, to adapt itself to universal needs. Those who wish to assist it must help to popularize it, and feed it funds, direct into it teachers of capacity, give it sympathetic suggestion rather than violent criticism.

To show the worthiness of the high school, I should like to take time for details concerning the development that all the lines of study have undergone during the last decade, but that would be too great an abuse of your patience. Will you bear with me while I briefly outline some changes that have taken place and are being considered in one course? I select the business course, because it is, perhaps, below the middle stage of development in most schools. It was at first, as you all know, forced into the curriculum to satisfy demands wholly and materially practical. It was then generally a short course, furnishing two years of so-called commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping, stenography, and an early graduation.

Those engaged to carry on the work had no claims as educators, and seldom any knowledge of the methods of teaching. This course invariably became a sort of wastebasket into which was conveniently dumped all the poor and unwilling pupils of the school, and it became simply unendurable and wholly incompatible with the good oldfashioned work that was being done in other departments. It was too bad to stand, and many schools rejected it entirely. Others combined with it the so-called regular studies thru four years. This plan was better, in that the pupil employed a smaller portion of his ime upon these subjects, but the commercial course itself was very little improved. It was, however, a right beginning, in that it insisted upon some education. A little later some dignity was added to the course by including at least one modern language as one of its regular studies. Commercial law was added, and now commercial geography and industrial history have a place, and the first benefit that the school as a whole is deriving

from it is shown in a better teaching of civics. A few steps more and we shall have a fine course of correlated subjects, the graduate from which will not be fitted merely for clerkship, but will find himself introduced to the whole wide field of business effort in the world of today, and at least ready to make a decent bow to the authorities in it. He will be able to distinguish the controlling influence from the loud-toned wishes to control; the solid from the speculative; true economy from miserly scrimping; capable, masterly handling of large productive powers from schemes for grasping what is already produced. He will have been made thoroly acquainted with a few important materials of commerce, the manner of their production, distribution, and consumption, not only in a historic way, but with an intimate knowledge that will discover the faults as well as the fashions of trade.

With competent teaching he will be led, not only to an understanding of natural economic laws, but also to discern how the human factor enters into and disturbs every department of commerce; how personal interest may, and does at times, interfere with all the laws of political economy. When we have brought our business course to this point, is there not opportunity for the application of psychology? Cannot the idealist and materialism both find common cause for quarrel in this as well as any other course? I do not know that I have been able to make this one line of development in the high school toward the general college clear. It in itself would furnish a subject that is worthy of much time and consideration. And in other courses the development has been just as evident to those in the work.

I hope to show only good cause for continuing and perfecting the present plans in high-school work, and for strengthening the hands of those laying out these plans, and to head off any radical changes that might be proposed by those outside of the actual high school work. In short, I do not wish to be asked to stand over the tomb of the high school while attending the christening of the people's college.

WM. T. HARRIS, United States Commissioner of Education.-I have listened many times, and always with the greatest pleasure and interest, to Dr. Hall's speeches. I read every line he writes. I do not always agree with him, but I find him always suggestive. I have never read a paper of his with which I find myself so thoroly in agreement as with the general thought of the address just delivered. I will, however, call attention to a few points in the paper from which I must dissent.

The first point concerns the tendency toward the study of less Latin in Germany. I do not agree that this calls for change in America, because we give to the subject much less time than is given in Germany. I believe in the study of Latin. Yet we can have too much of a good thing, and it is not good to study Latin eight years. The movement in Germany means that they will give to this subject but five years, and I think that is almost too much.

In his emphatic way Dr. Hall demands content, not form. We are taught by the highest philosophers of art that the content should make its form. If what he says, and what other earnest people with him say, can free us from namby-pamby composition, I will rejoice. would not have the study of a masterpiece of literature carried on by parsing it, taking it to pieces, studying the allusions. What he said on that point is a splendid utterance, and what he said about drama is a magnificent utterance. Drama goes over into thought, and then becomes action, and therefore furnishes the greatest essons in life, whether gained in college or in lower school. I always remember with great pleasure that, in the earlier years of my life, we had in St. Louis a teacher who taught Shakespeare. It was taught there by a man who made some of the best Shakespearean students in the world.

I agree with the portion of the address which refers to the study of physics. I would have the pupils study physics in the high school, but not the kind of physics which requires calculus in order to appreciate it. I read Dr. Hall's debate in Massachusetts on that question, and I agreed with him in his position that, if you demand more accuracy in

the high school, you may go too far in that direction; you may dry up the soul by putting it at things too remote. I would have pupils begin to study the phenomena of physics in the third grade.

I was sorry to note that Dr. Hall omitted any allusion to history. It is one of the great fundamental branches, that should be begun early and carried on thru the high school. Instead of saying, as he does, that we do not want to fasten to the past, I would say: "Fasten our chains to the past in order to bring under tribute the good things of all time." The school is that institution which says: "I will show you how to get the great things from the past." One of the great branches, showing the human race acting as a whole, is history, and nothing else can be a substitute.

The past reaches back even to the lower animals. God did not begin with man, but back with lower animals, plants, and the inorganic world. In this matter of history, therefore, certain things have been contributed to the race that are so far below the horizon of the past that we have no record of them, but we know that the effects have impressed themselves on the human brain; but when it begins to be unfolded in science, when this science yields its fruition, we can tell whether its history roots in the Greeks or in Siberia or in the isles of the sea. The great struggle of the Romans extended thru a thousand years, and they struggled to find out just how the individual acts could reinforce the whole people. After some eleven hundred years, in the time of Justinian, these acts were formulated into the common law, because the Roman was gifted in seeing how the deed fitted into the social whole, just as the Greek religion saw how freedom could fit into the pose of the body.

Now, that is the reason why Latin has made for itself so great a place in the schools of modern times. It will not be pushed aside. I have always regretted that Dr. Hall in his grasp of modern science does not seem to see it in its true perspective with modern history. He should have said that Latin keeps this place because of its importance. The Roman invented a way so that the social whole should not crush the individual. The northern tribes, when they had been Romans two hundred years, recognized the importance of Latin.

Dr. Hall's technical terms are Latin. Sixteen thousand words sum up the Saxon in our vocabulary; seventy-five thousand in common use are from the Latin, storing up the fine distinctions in the minds of the people. If you can study Latin only one week, you will have new thoughts that you can never get rid of; you will have new environment; preaching from the pulpit will mean more. Therefore I do not agree that we must keep Latin for those only who can study it thoroly. I suppose Dr. Hall has in mind some old person who has taught for thirty years and can tell all the exceptions of Latin syntax. The word "recapitulation" is an important word; it is a whole book in itself, in this active period of recapitulation in anthropology. This is the battle-ax with which Dr. Hall wins victories. I always wish to give three cheers for Dr. G. Stanley Hall. May he help us to think and to see once in a while how absurd some of his views are! He puts these things in a way to arouse us; he does not wish us to become his disciples -- he wishes to arouse us by saying something absurd.

DR. HALL.—It was somewhat of a surprise to me that when Dr. Harris entered this arena he grasped my hand, as pugilists shake hands before beginning a contest. My surprise was continued when he said that he in the main agreed with me. To kick at nothing gives one a feeling of a wrench. I thought I had attacked some things Dr. Harris has defended for years. I now feel as if I was wrenched.

Dr. Harris and I have inherited every feature of our faces, every muscle, and every organ from the anthropoid apes. Must all therefore study monkeys? Of course, we use Latin phraseology. When Dr. Harris says we all should study Latin a week, I agree.

In regard to the study of Latin in Germany, I think Dr. Harris did not understand what I said. I am aware that Latin and Greek are more firmly intrenched there. The emperor said he wanted no more Gymnasia, no more Latin teachers, but instead a great

many Realschulen. When we come to that, I believe it may be said that a larger proportion of time in the preparatory schools is given to Latin in this country than in Germany, but I have not the statistics. The proportion is decreasing there and is increasing here. Dr. Harris thinks that absurd things must be said to arouse us. Perhaps under the direction and guidance of such a mentor, who has been for so many years such a correct pruner of my sentences, I may have become lax, because I knew Dr. Harris was on hand and all would be set right.

I am, however, inclined to think men reach an age when the new seems absurd. When roots are so wrapped about ancient things that the past begins to loom up and the future to seem smaller, there is danger that we shall worship the past and live for it alone. I prefer the future, because all the best things are in the future, and I believe that the past should be subordinated to it.

I had only one word in my paper about history. I said that the first of these subordinate topics should be history. I agree with what Dr. Harris says on history, and I am glad to close this discussion with the acknowledgment of agreement with him.

COLLEGE GRADUATES IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS THOMAS M. BALLIET, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. If a visitor from western continental Europe, after inspecting our American educational system from the primary school to the university, were asked to compare it with that of his own country, he would in all probability express an opinion as to the relative merits of the various grades of schools which would in many respects be the direct opposite of that which is held among ourselves. He would no doubt say that the best American primary schools are not excelled, and are rarely equaled, in any other country in the world. He would note the absence of the dead formalism and mechanical routine which still prevail in his own country to a large extent in schools of similar grade, and he would especially note the sympathetic relations existing between teacher and pupils, the mildness of the methods of discipline, and the superior skill of the teacher in arousing the interest of his pupils and in stimulating thought and mental growth. He would probably say that the best American grammar schools compare on the whole not unfavorably with similar schools in his own country, but that they have certain defects which at first sight are not apparent, but which on closer inspection cannot escape the trained observer. He would probably say that the American high school excels in its superior equipments for the teaching of the sciences and in the flexibility of its courses of study, but that in other respects it does not compare favorably with similar schools in his own country. He would note the inferior training, both academic and professional, of the average American high-school teacher, and he would be impressed with the lack of forcefulness, clearness, and definiteness of much of the teaching. He would be surprised to find that between the secondary school and the