the college graduate, teaching for the first time in an elementary school, turns somewhere for help. Naturally he first seeks to recall his own experiences as a pupil. But these experiences have been dimmed by the intervening years since he was a pupil of an elementary school. He finds little to help him there. Then he turns to the course of study; but this, as a rule, is too general to afford him much aid. He is too proud to ask assistance of his associate teachers - graduates, perhaps, of a normal school. Possibly the principal may come to his rescue, but this is not always the case. There are principals who assist drowning teachers and others who do not. It is more than likely that the despairing college graduate will turn to his alma mater and to his more recent, and hence better-remembered, experiences for solace and guidance.

But the lecture system so prevalent in colleges, the method of text-book study and memoriter recitations so generally in vogue, these are bad models for him to follow. The "pouring in" process is now begun, the graduate talks over the heads of his pupils, and the irrepressible conflict goes henceforth unhappily on. It is only after weeks and months, sometimes years, of the most painful experience that the college graduate at last "finds" himself and emerges from this chaos of bewilderment and defeat. He has been getting his normal-school training. How much better to have got it before he started to teach! This is the point I wish especially to make.

The teacher who began teaching without previous technical training is in exactly the same position as the graduate of medicine who begins his practice without any previous clinical experience. In the case of the medical graduate, however, he is not likely to have at the outset many patients to practice on. But the college graduate that becomes an elementary teacher is put at once into full practice, that is to say, into charge of a fullsized class of pupils to discipline and instruct.

But what is the end of all this? In my judgment superintendents should not be asked or expected to take college graduates into the elementary schools until after some preliminary training to fit them for elementary teaching. But where shall this preliminary professional training be got in the college or in the normal school? That is for the colleges themselves to say. Unless the colleges, by postgraduate or other courses, furnish adequate and satisfactory professional training, both theoretical and practical, we must turn, much as I regret it, to the normal schools exclusively for our supply of properly trained elementary teachers.

SUPERINTENDENT EUGENE BOUTON, Pittsfield, Mass.-The plan of requiring college graduates to get practice before they enter the grades is a good one, but where the salaries are small these grades would be deprived of the services of college graduates. It seems to me that the presence of some college graduates in a corps of teachers is desirable, even if their technical training is not altogether perfect at the beginning. In the small town, special training was given to college graduates and normal graduates before they entered the regular work. The superintendent placed them in this special training class until vacancies might occur.

SUPERINTENDENT A. K. WHITCOMB, Lowell, Mass.-The normal school is not the only possible place to get practice for teaching. In our own city we have such an apprentice school; in the present class of that school one-third are college graduates. We pay these young ladies three hundred dollars a year while they are serving the apprenticeship. Under this training they have usually made very satisfactory teachers before the close of the year.

SUPERINTENDENT WILLIAM F. SLATON, of Atlanta. I have heard of no city managing as we manage in Atlanta. I believe we have a good plan. We have there supernumerary teachers. I have been superintendent there twenty-three years, and we have tried various plans. Occasionally we have made failures, but the plan of the last five years has been a success. We elect without pay for this list of supernumeraries. There is a special teacher for the eighth grade; there is also a supernu?

y teacher who

is a graduate of a high school. We have twenty-three grammar schools. The supernumerary is required to teach two years before being eligible to election. If she has had two years' experience elsewhere or has taken two years in a normal school, or one year in a normal and has taken the professional examination, she may be elected. The question is asked why do we not pay her. I answer by asking: "Why do you not pay your students in the normal school?" She is getting an education, as is the case of the college student.

Last year I was in a town school, and one of the teachers said she wanted to come to Atlanta. She said that one of her recommendations was that she never went to a normal school. She said that the normal schools placed their students like cogs in a wheel, and she wanted to go to Atlanta instead and serve as a supernumerary. There she could have training given by twenty-two experienced teachers. Grade meetings are called by us normal schools, and they meet every Saturday for discussions.

STATE SUPERINTENDENT FALL, of Michigan.- We have in our state a law which permits colleges to incorporate into their course a limited normal training course; because of that fact they are authorized to grant a probationary certificate, good for four years, which after successful experience becomes a life certificate. The real reason for my speaking is that I see improvement coming to the teachers in the colleges. I have noticed in the colleges a lack of willingness to discuss pedagogical problems; here in the presence of a large body of students preparing to teach, the college faculty must recognize the importance of training to teach.

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H. R. SANFORD, state institute conductor, New York. I wish to answer for the state superintendent of New York, in his absence. We have sixteen cities in each of which is located a training school, admission to which is on a high-school or a college diploma. We have ninety smaller schools in the villages, where the admission is not so high. We have thirteen colleges whose diplomas lead to state certificates. I should like to hear from Principal Downing.

A. S. DOWNING, principal of New York Training School for Teachers. The sixteen cities mentioned by Dr. Sanford are not supported by the state, but are under the provisions of a state law, which says that no one shall be allowed to teach in a city employing a superintendent unless he shall be a graduate from a high school, and subsequently have had three years' successful experience in teaching, and have graduated from a training school with a course of not less then thirty-eight weeks. No city can employ any primary or grammar-grade teachers not having such qualifications. The state contributes a dollar per week per capita for each pupil during the thirty-eight weeks. The city of Buffalo pays for the support of its training school many times what it receives from the state, and the city of New York supports two training schools, one in Brooklyn and the other in New York, and pays very many times what the state contributes.

The main proposition is one of the very greatest interest to us. The mistake is, it seems to me, in the lack of encouragement from the college men and women to the graduates who go into the elementary-school work; and there has come into the mind of the college graduates the idea that it is discreditable to work in the elementary grades of either city or village schools. It seems to me that it should be pointed out to them that the field in which they can accomplish the most good is in the primary and grammar schools. In New York city a regulation now exists that to teach drawing, for instance, the person must be a college graduate. It is almost impossible to find a candidate for that position, because drawing has been a subject largely taught in the elementary schools, and it is almost impossible to find a woman who has thought it worth while to take her college course to prepare to teach drawing in the grades. When it comes to the question of methods in music, that is also an elementary-school subject, and you will find very few who have devoted their time to methods of teaching music to children. I regretted to hear the statement made that no college graduates could be employed in a certain city

unless certain conditions be complied with. Take the college graduate without examination; select that graduate who appears to have the spirit of a teacher and assign her to a grade as a temporary teacher, or whatever you may please to call her, and require her to do work in the training class, and encourage her to come to that city. Say to her: "We do not expect you to be a good teacher at the beginning, but we will help you to become a good teacher." In a training school in New York city only three years old we have had and are now having graduates taking the full three-years' course. If they are able to do the work in theory in less than a year and a half, we will let them, at the end of a year, have two and a half dollars a day for ladies, three dollars for men, for substitute work. Until they have demonstrated to the satisfaction of the faculty after one and a half years of observation that they are endowed with the spirit of a teacher, and have the ability to maintain discipline while conducting their work, they can never get their names on the eligible list in the city of New York. I believe, on the main question, that it is really time that something be done, not to discourage, but to encourage, college graduates to take up the work of teaching in the elementary schools.

SUPERINTENDENT WILLIAM J. M. Cox, Moline, Ill.-I should like to ask some of the superintendents who have had experience whether, in their judgment, it is wise for a city to support a training school of, say, one or two instructors, into which high-school graduates are taken, and where they have pure methods of teaching during a year or a year and a half, and then fill the places of grade teachers with these students, where college graduates cannot be employed.

E. O. SISSON, Bradley Institute, Peoria, Ill.- A good deal has been said about difficulty in getting practice-teaching. We all got that, and the majority of us here never had normal training. The question is not so much of getting practice-teaching as observation and consultation. The opportunity to look upon a skillful teacher's work as the medical student looks upon the work of a skillful operator is what we need. Then, after the class is over, we need the opportunity to ask the skillful teacher why he did this, and thus come to an understanding of the processes he employed.

PRINCIPAL DOWNING.—The gentleman is right, but the difficulty is that the method to which he refers lacks educational value. By this method the work done by the criticteacher resolves itself into mere criticism of a subject taught by the student-teacher. Students in our training schools are obliged to do systematic work in answering questions, etc., for an interval of one hundred hours during the period for the study of theory and practice. A number of questions are given them touching the construction of the course of study. The course of study is then taken up from the standpoint of the child. Students are led to discover what the child should know upon his entering the recitation. When student-teachers are prepared to answer questions touching the foregoing topics, they have some knowledge of how to proceed in the schoolroom.

DR. E. E. WHITE, Columbus, O.- The questions put by several superintendents regarding the kind of work being done in a number of training schools have caused me to wonder whether or not the work of the real training school is as helpful as it ought to be. The training school should avoid making the teacher a mere follower. I know of some training schools in Ohio that are extremely mechanical-mere machine makers; but I am pleased to note that these are not in the majority. I have in mind a training school in Cincinnati that is not a mechanical school. Here methods are outlined, and teachers are not merely prepared to imitate their instructors, but are grounded in the principles underlying the best methods of school instruction. When a teacher has become thus indoctrinated, she will go into the schoolroom and work out her own views with soul and spirit in her work. I would not, if I could, prescribe a method for a teacher. The teacher must determine the method she can use most successfully.

There is a tendency in some training schools to conform too much to patterns mere copy work. No teacher who follows a pattern can touch a human soul. Teachers

are not always to blame for doing this mechanical work. They are often discredited because the principal happens to be a pattern-man. The teacher who teaches her own ideas under proper limitations will grow and become strong; she will not fail to touch human souls-human lives.

The college gives knowledge and technical principles of teaching. The college can not be a real training school. It may be a help to those who are seeking higher places.

THE PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS OF FUN

WALTER B. HILL, CHANCELLOR, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA, ATHENS, GA.

A German philosopher has said: "Humor is the eudæmonological pessimism which includes within itself a teleological evolutionary optimism, which may cause a realistic, radical, and universal reconciliation to appear as possible."

This quotation, encountered in some piece of fugitive literature, I have not attempted to trace or to identify, but it sounds suspiciously like Hegel. In this connection, and for a purpose which does not immediately appear, but which, I trust, will be made apparent in the sequel, I here reproduce (without implying approval) Schopenhauer's estimate of Hegel:

eyes

In our German philosophy intellectual intuition and absolute thinking have now taken the place of clear perceptions and honest investigations. To impose upon the reader, to bewilder and mystify him, and by all sorts of contrivances throw dust in his - that is our method now; that, and not truth, is the expositor's leading aim. In consequence of this, philosophy, if we are still to call it so, could not but sink into ever lower depths, till at last the lowest stage of degradation was reached by Hegel, who, to stifle again the freedom of thought won by Kant, turned philosophy, the daughter of reason and future mother of truth, into an instrument of obscurantism and protestant Jesuitism, but in order to hide the disgrace, and at the same time stupefy men's brains to the utmost, drew over her a veil of the emptiest verbiage and most senseless hodge-podge ever heard out of Bedlam.

Schopenhauer's account of our subject is more in accordance with the commonly received definitions than the one first above given. In Welt als Wille (I, sec. 13) he says:

Laughter never arises from anything else than a suddenly recognized incongruity between the conception and the real object that in some respect or other has been thought through it, and is in itself simply an expression of this incongruity. The greater, the more unexpected in the apprehension of the laugher this incongruity is, the more violent will be the laugh.

WHY THE SUBJECT IS CHOSEN

The fitness of this topic for the consideration of educators does not require to be vindicated. More trouble comes to those who are in charge of the training of youth, especially to those responsible for discipline, from what is called mischief or fun than from any other source. College presidents, school superintendents, and teachers would sleep sounder and

1

breathe easier if they could take out a policy of insurance against outbreaks of this nature. It is not reassuring to find in the replies to the questionnaire sent out by Dr. G. Stanley Hall and Mr. Arthur Allin that, among the things specified in the highest percentage as amusing, were these a goose placed in a teacher's seat and pins stealthily inserted in teachers' chairs. There is this striking difference between the offenses with which the administrator of discipline has to deal: if they spring from fun, then, no matter how disorderly or troublesome be the case, it is considered by the culprit a complete defense to say that the act was done "just for a joke," while, for an act done otherwise, it would never occur to the offender to plead that the act was done "just for anger" or "just for spite." "Just for fun" seems to rule out of consideration all reference to the moral law. When a noted politician said some years ago that the Ten Commandments and the golden rule had no place in politics, he expressed about politics what is generally accepted as true, especially by the young, about whatever is done in the name or under the plea of mirth or mischief. Charles Lamb has suggested that the leading element. in the enjoyment of certain forms of comedy consists in the fact that they free us from the burden of our habitual moral consciousness. Those whom Kipling calls "grown ups" are, in this respect, but children of larger growth. One purpose of the present paper is to draw attention to this claim of exemption on the part of fun from the moral law, and to point out some of its consequences.

ORIGINS

The topic must first be genetically treated. It is necessary to admit at the outset that the sources of this Nile remain undiscovered. So little is definitely known on the subject that in the ordinary manuals or textbooks on psychology the topic is wholly ignored. Hall and Allin (American Journal of Psychology, Vol. VIII, No. 40) say: "We are persuaded that all current theories [on the subject of the psychosis of laughter] are utterly inadequate and speculative, and that there are few more promising fields for psychological research." Of their own work, the first undertaken in accordance with modern methods, they say: "It is so inadequate to the vast and hitherto unsuspected complexity of the subject that it can hardly claim to be more than notes calling attention to the need for further detailed work." Accepting these statements as coming from high authority, the present paper, whatever may be its faults, will at least be free from that of dogmatism.

Let the mind run over the list of words suggestive of this subject: banter, blithe, burlesque, caricature, chaff, comic, derision, drollery, frolic, fun, glee, grotesque, hilarity, humor, irony, jeer, jest, joke, jovial, ludicrous, merriment, mirth, mockery, quip, quirk, pleasantry, raillery, rally, retort, repartee, ridicule, sarcasm, sardonic, satire, scoff, smile, sneer,