school teacher possesses of these subjects is very often limited to a mere text-book knowledge. To teach United States history as it should be taught, the teacher ought to have had, in the first place, careful training. in the methods of historical study; he ought to have a clear conception. of the social, political, and economic phases of the subject and the relative emphasis that should be placed on each in the instruction in a given grade; and he ought to have carefully read about all that Parkman, Fisk, and MacMaster have written on history, and be able to draw readily and with judgment on these sources in preparing his lessons from day to day. He should be familiar with English history, and should have at least a text-book knowledge of ancient and modern and European history, not only in order that he may have a sense of proportion, but also in order that he may bring to bear upon American history the many sidelights of modern European history.

To teach geography successfully in the upper grammar grades the teacher needs to have a general knowledge of geology, especially that subdivision of it which is commonly called dynamic geology; he must have a knowledge of physics and be trained how to apply its principles in the explanation of the phenomena of nature. He must have an elementary knowledge of chemistry and astronomy, and, indeed, also of botany and geology. In addition to this, he needs to be somewhat familiar with the social and political life of the most important countries of the present time, and to have a general knowledge of the important features of their commerce and trade.

There is a rich, popular scientific literature bearing on geography which is entirely unknown to a large number of teachers in our grammar schools, and which some of them have not even the training to read with ease and with pleasure. Altho most of the material which this literature contains cannot be presented to pupils of the grammar school grade, the teacher should be familiar with it in order that he may have a large reserve of scholarship on which he may draw in his daily class-room instruction. It is only the master that can simplify the elements of a subject and write primers on science; the amateur and the novice fail. Teachers of inferior training live intellectually far too much from hand. to mouth, and it is often difficult to interest them in lines of thought and of study which do not have an obvious and direct relation to their professional daily bread. It is the mark of a liberally trained mind to have many and broad sympathies, and to be interested in truth because it is true and not because it must be taught or can be made to minister to utilitarian ends. In a word, what the teachers in our higher grammar grades need is broader scholarship, broader intellectual interests, more scholarly habits of work, and the power of doing hard intellectual work with ease a power which is partly the result of training and partly belongs to that inherited capital with which we start out in our intellectual

life. Someone has said that "stupidity is not acquired, but is an original endowment of the human mind.” The same may be said of that form of genius which has been defined as the capacity for hard work. It may be said with confidence that much of the overwork on the part of teachers and the breaking down of health is due not to the amount of work required of them so much as to their lack of broad training which would have enabled them to do hard work with comparative ease.

Now, the college graduate among teachers, as a rule to which there are indeed some marked exceptions, is a person of much broader academic training than the graduate of the normal school; he is a person of more scholarly habits and is able to do hard intellectual work with greater ease. He is, moreover, a person of broader interests, and has a clearer and a firmer grasp on what he knows.

There are several other elements of weakness in the teaching in our grammar schools which nothing but broader scholarship on the part of the teacher can remedy. The teacher in these schools is altogether too much at the mercy of his text-book; he is the interpreter of a book rather than the teacher of a subject. This is so forcibly true that few superintendents find it practicable to introduce a new study into the curriculum unless a suitable text-book on the subject can be found, or to make a course of study which does not more or less have in view the textbooks to be used. In many courses of study the text-book is named and the pages to be covered in a given grade indicated. There are, indeed, cities in which the course of study ignores the particular text-books used, but on close examination it will almost invariably be found that the course is quietly ignored and the text-books are the guides.

This lack of intellectual independence on the part of teachers is due to their limited general scholarship and to their limited mastery of the particular matter to be taught.

Some of the teaching in our grammar schools lacks that forcefulness and effectiveness which both stimulate and demand work on the part of the pupil. Pupils in these schools could do considerably more work than they are now doing and accomplish it all within school hours, if the teaching were more forceful and energetic. We hear much complaint on the part of parents about overwork in school, but what is really meant by such complaints is not hard work within school hours, but too long hours of work, too many home tasks over which children must spend hours at home which ought to be given to recreation and sleep. Moreover, from an educational point of view the results would be vastly better. Mental growth is not promoted by long hours of dawdling, but by short periods of intense application followed by brief periods of rest and relaxation. If the teaching were what it should be, we could easily double the time now allowed for intermissions, not including the long noon recess, and still accomplish more than we now do and do a higher quality of work. But such teaching requires both native ability and good training.

Much of the teaching in the average schools is not clear because the teacher has never himself been trained to think clearly; much of it is not consecutive, and points are not clinched, even in cases where they have been made clear; some of the teaching is aimless, and therefore wasteful of time and of power. Archbishop Whately once said: "If you aim at nothing, you will hit it." This is strikingly true of the teacher's work. The remedy for all this is better training, and perhaps in some cases a higher grade of native ability.

The time has long since passed when our normal schools considered themselves the rivals of our colleges; they have their own distinctive work to do. To say that a good normal school cannot give as thoro academic training as a good college is simply to say that the normal school cannot do the impossible. The best normal schools of our country are fully equal to the best normal schools of any other country, but they could be strengthened materially by the appointment on their corps of teachers of a much larger number of men and women who have had a thoro collegiate and, if possible, university education, in addition to professional training. In this matter the normal schools of the West are somewhat in advance of those of the East. If the normal schools wish to fit teachers for the higher grammar grades, they must do a somewhat different kind of academic work from that which they are now doing. Instead of "reviewing" the so-called common branches "with a view to teaching," and then doing what is virtually high-school work, they must require graduation from a high school as a condition of admission, and then lay the emphasis on the group of sciences which contribute directly to a broad knowledge of grammar-school studies. In short, they must give their students a far more thoro mastery of the matter to be taught and of that related material which forms the necessary reserve scholarship.

There is a movement under way in Wales to provide college graduates for all the elementary schools, primary as well as grammar. In the larger cities in this country many college graduates have already found their way into the elementary schools. They have gone into these schools partly from choice and partly from necessity, inasmuch as the number of women graduates from our colleges who wish to teach far exceeds the number of vacant college and high-school positions from year to year.

In

If we wish to demand higher scholarship and broader training of teachers for the grammar schools, especially for the three upper classes, there are a few very practical preliminary steps which we must take. the first place, we must allow teachers of the upper grammar grades to specialize; we must not require each teacher to teach all the studies of the curriculum, but rather assign to each a related group of studies which he is especially well qualified to teach. In short, departmental teaching in the upper grammar grades is a necessary condition of any marked

raising of the standard of teaching in these grades. In the second place, we must increase the salaries of teachers in these grades above those of the lower grammar and primary grades. At this step we shall probably be met by the abstract proposition that the children of the primary schools require as good teaching as those of the grammar schools, and that teachers who do good work in primary grades ought to be paid as much as teachers who do good work in the higher grammar grades. To this it may be replied that such a question cannot be settled on the basis merely of an abstract proposition; that the law of supply and demand must govern teachers' salaries. The fact is that good primary teachers are far more numerous than good grammar-grade teachers, and, therefore, on business principles, the larger salaries ought to be paid where there is the greater demand and the smaller supply. Furthermore, we must devise a way of avoiding the payment of uniform salaries in our schools to the teachers of the same grade, of paying the efficient and inefficient alike. In this way it will be possible to get some exceptionally efficient teachers into every grade with comparatively little additional expense, who will serve as a stimulus to the entire corps. The obvious difficulties of carrying out such a policy need not be pointed out to this audience; suffice it to say that they can be overcome in time, and have already been overcome in some of the smaller cities where schools are comparatively free from politics.

If, however, we wish to appoint college graduates to positions in elementary schools, we shall be disappointed if we do not insist on their taking at least a year of professional training at a good normal school or a course in pedagogy at a university where there are facilities for practiceteaching. A course in theoretical pedagogy alone will not answer. This is a point which it is somewhat difficult to impress on college professors and on fresh college graduates. There prevails still in the colleges the mistaken belief that a knowledge of the subject-matter is all that is required to enable one to teach it. Many college professors do not realize, and others positively deny, that there is or can be a science of education, and the courage with which fresh college graduates undertake to teach a roomful of boys and girls, who often know far better than such a teacher the difference between good teaching and poor, is both heroic and pathetic. A normal-school graduate, with much less scholarship and even with less native ability, but with good professional training, will do far better teaching at first than a college graduate with no such training.

In spite, however, of all that has been said, it is well to bear in mind that a goodly number of the best teachers in our schools have never been either in a college or in a normal school. They are teachers of native ability; they are good students, and gained by practicing for years upon children that knowledge of the art of teaching which we nowadays get by professional study at a normal school.

Moreover, there is a large number of graduates of normal schools who are men and women of exceptional ability, who have been close students, and who rank far above the majority of college graduates, both in point of ability and in point of scholarship. Some of these have adorned other professions besides that of teaching. Scholarship can be gained outside of college walls, and it is not wise to make hard and fast rules in regard to college graduates and those who are not college graduates in the appointment of teachers. In a word, if college has gone thru a man, it is not absolutely essential that the man should go thru college. Franklin and Washington and Jackson and Lincoln were not graduates of college, nor is Herbert Spencer, the prince of living philosophers; and yet all these have achieved greatness, while there are not a few college graduates who have not yet been heard from. Indeed, it is quite possible to take graduation from a college altogether too seriously, especially in the earlier years of one's graduate life, before one has discovered his specific gravity by contact with the world. After all, we must bear in mind that even college graduates belong to that large group of the human race of which the poet sings in plaintive note:

Some men are born for great things,

And some are born for small,

And of some it isn't recorded

Why they were born at all.

DISCUSSION

SUPERINTENDENT A. B. POLAND, Newark, N. J.-I have listened to the paper of Superintendent Balliet with more than usual pleasure and satisfaction. I heartily concur in all the views expressed by him as to the desirableness, nay of the necessity, of having more college graduates in our elementary schools. The subject is one of great interest to me. In the city of Newark we appoint college graduates to elementary-school positions, without experience and without examination, accepting the college diploma as a sufficient guarantee of qualifications. It should be said, however, that under our rules an appointee who is not successful can be dropped at any time by the superintendent without the formality of going to the board of education to have such action confirmed. Many have been dropped from time to time in this way. Despite this safety valve, however, our practice, I must admit, is open to many serious objections. It makes the schools, that should be maintained solely for the good of the children, a field for trial and experiment. Our schools become practice schools without the saving features of a practice school when maintained, as is usually the case, in connection with a normal school. In the latter case the interests of the children are protected by the presence of competent critic teachers. Whatever let-down in discipline or teaching may result from the employment of unskilled teachers is made up by the superior qualifications of the critic-teachers. When college graduates, as with us, are put in charge of classes, and left to work out their own salvation, it happens, alas, that too many fall by the wayside. To say nothing of the discouragement and positive injury done to the college graduates themselves by being left alone to struggle with their environment, the children are the principal sufferers. I am of the opinion, therefore,