up. The Congressional Directory gives a bit of biography of some four hundred men. An overwhelming proportion, as boys, had only common. country school privileges, but carried studious habits into mature life, either with or without collegiate opportunity.

Maine, a State still quite homogeneous, with diversified rural occupations, perhaps best preserves the conditions general when Daniel Webster and his compeers had their early training in winter schools. Even the town high schools barely exceed an average of six months in the year, and the young people are busy on the farm and in the shops, and teaching the yet humbler schools in the intervals; yet Maine does not take an inferior rank in comparison of her men and women.

Within a few years industrial training has received much attention, but its popular development has been irregular and almost wholly in the line of manufactures. The rural schools of Central Europe and Scandinavia have gardens and orchards for instruction; the schoolhouse is the teacher's home, and his tenure is permanent. We omit these features in our imitation of the great European teachers, and attempt to copy Pestalozzi's and Froebel's kindergartens without the gardens.

Where the heterogeneous city element dominates, the father leaves home for his daily occupation before his family is together in the morning, and in families of independent incomes the mother too often turns off the children to nurses or teachers, whose service in guarding them from bodily harm and restraining them from troublesome freedom at play is valued above their moral and intellectual work. If life demands all the wage-earning force of the family, the mother, like the father, may be away all the busy hours, and home influence be at a minimum.

The waste of time in the elementary schools is enormous, except when viewed as houses of detention. Children in families, abundantly supplied with books and current literature, will spontaneously read early enough, and not one day need be spent in mere learning to name printed words of one's customary vocabulary. Even a Cherokee or a Hudson's Bay Indian can learn to read in his own language within one week.

As the children grow, severity of grading repels those who are a little out of line with a course of study. There is great irregularity of employment throughout the country, and there ought to be opportunity for boys and girls that have been at work or otherwise detained to go into school at any time of year without being put in classes of much younger children, organized only in the fall or spring. Here lies a strength of the ungraded country school, but seriously changed recently. In cities it is quite possible that part of the labor now bestowed on night schools might be far more effective if ungraded rooms were conveniently open, and there were hearty welcome of the day attendance of those who cannot now find any school-door open when unemployed. Age and maturity are as much to be considered in grading as knowledge of books, and the young person

who looks back wistfully at the rigidly graded school he left has three conditions of humiliation to face one, his class has left him; two, his physical growth makes him conspicuous among younger children; three, he does not expect any credit for relative progress in any prescribed subject so long as he is backward in any other. It is by no means certain that Hugh Miller and Abraham Lincoln would have been welcome in our model schools. Rigid grading would have been likely to check the freedom of the scholarly Bryant and the exuberant eloquence of Brooklyn's pulpit orator.

Some American States employ more than nine times as many women as men as teachers. European schools, held up to us as models, employ very few women, especially as teachers of boys.

The external forces in city conditions sometimes overwhelm the most careful and conscientious fidelity of parents. On the other hand, in the very worst cases of bad parental management, the stranger who tries to point the child to a higher life is apt to find him incapable of accepting anything higher than his parent as an ideal. An education that leads children to look down on their parents has to contend against nature. The parent who belittles his experience and knowledge before his child, because the latter has picked up a petty detail of text-books or of manual training that is new to him, endangers the character of his child and the happiness of society.

One of the most important promises of university extension is aid for working men and women to keep in advance of their children.

The city system rests upon the enforced inability of the parent to let the child grow into occupation under his own eye, the crowded condition of living so that a child has no place for wholesome animal activity. The cities and the districts that imitate them have stretched their school terms from two motives: one, giving a semi-police character to the school as a place where children will be safely kept; the other, a feeling that, as salaried servants, teachers have too much vacation. The well-to-do still relieve their children from the barrenness of city confinement by taking them to the seaside, or the mountains, or the woods for the summer, but the teachers begin to hear a demand that they stay behind to keep vacation schools for the children who cannot leave.

It is often of more consequence to find other wholesome occupation for the child than to keep him at school.

We must keep the two types of school clearly before our minds, as the conditions are essentially opposite.

In the typical coöperative school of a community of parents who could keep their children judiciously occupied under their own guidance, the school terms are shortened and their advantages are more highly prized, entering more completely into the home life than in the typical city 'school, where authority increases at the expense of coöperation, and the

natural tiresomeness of a child under long-drawn monotony takes on a degree of antagonism to the operation of the machine. The teacher who boards around in a poor district of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania can do more for the individual child to remember gratefully than a teacher in a great city.

The scholastic requirements for admission to West Point are the simplest used in any institution of high repute, and would form a suitable standard for the minimum aim of every boy and girl. There is hardly a corner of the land where an earnest boy could not get help enough to conquer them by the time he was seventeen, the minimum age, certainly by twenty-two the maximum, even if he worked on a farm or in a shop much of the time. The standards required by any other institution whose influence bears upon the vicinity could profitably be kept before all pupils who could appreciate them. The examples of noble men and women, standard works, and broadening opportunities are to be constantly exalted.

The country school does most for the nation in proportion to population and resources. It needs checking, rather than urging, in adopting city methods. The city type of school has done great harm by its certificates of studies completed. The country boy has left school knowing that he was ignorant, and therefore more accessible to the lessons of after life.

E. O. VAILE, of Chicago, said that superintendents and principals owe more attention and sympathy than they now give to boys and girls who in size have grown beyond their mates in the grammar school, and who, in conscquence, feel so awkward and out of place in their proper grade, that they are very ready or even eager to leave school and what they consider its humiliation. The ordinary school-mistress is unable to maintain discipline without requiring these big ones to "toe the mark" in every petty detail, no matter how mortifying it may be to them, just as she does the smaller ones. It is for the superintendent or principal by personal acquaintance, watchfulness, and stimulus to counteract the natural effect of these conditions and exactions, and to hold these boys and girls in school. If they are thus retained, a large proportion of those who leave school prematurely will be disposed of.

He did not indorse the statement that average pupils can master the ordinary course at an earlier age than is now usual; that is, the various departments in arithmetic now come at about the proper time. At a much earlier age the ordinary pupil lacks sufficient maturity and grip to labor to advantage in, say, percentage or ratio. However, he was decidedly of the opinion that new subjects could be most wisely and profitably substituted for the profitless and burdensome work now done in all the subjects taught in the grammar grades. He instanced the prolix and mechanical work done in the long drill in fractions, using large numbers and purely hypothetical problems; the senseless multiplying of "cases"*

and topics in percentage and its applications; the irksome and fruitless grind in grammar and so-called language lessons, where language is so generally made an end and not a means; the half hour or more spent daily from the first grade to the eighth in copy-book writing, which is an absolute waste after the fourth or fifth year; requiring pupils to copy problems and questions from the blackboard although the text-book contains enough of such material and in better form.

THE INFLUENCE OF MANUAL TRAINING ON HABITS OF THOUGHT.

BY SUPT. JOHN E. BRADLEY, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.

IT is difficult to trace formative influences. The forces which mold a character are manifold and often obscure. Blending with native aptitudes and hereditary tendencies, they yield widely different results under conditions apparently similar. Tastes and interests which seem permanent to-day may prove ephemeral to-morrow. Stimulating and ennobling influences are lost upon one, while a chance word or trifling incident rouses another to grand achievement. Time alone can determine what product the fair promise of youth shall yield.

In attempting, therefore, to estimate the relative value of various parts of our educational work, we have need, in the first place, of caution lest our predilections lead us to unwarrantable inferences; and, in the second place, we need that openness of mind which will enable us to recognize the excellences of any system of training. We unconsciously magnify that which is familiar, and we are slow to accept new truths and new methods of work.

I have therefore relied largely, in the preparation of this paper, upon the observations of those who are engaged in the work of manual training. I wish to report results rather than urge my own opinions. I have had before me the notes of eleven teachers engaged in various branches of manual training. Before I conclude, I shall quote some of their own words. I shall endeavor to reflect their views throughout this paper. Let me first quote from one who is not a teacher.

A recognized leader, who has had large experience in the business world, said a few days ago : "Education in books is only one-third of an education; education in the ways of the world and a knowledge of human nature is another third, and education or training of the will is the other third. To a large extent, it is only the first third which is given in the schools. Book education alone is too deficient and one-sided to accomplish anything in this world. Here is a man whosc schooling was neglected or confined to a few months; yet he is very successful in business and a man of great influence. There is a college graduate whose life is a failure; yet he is said to be a man of considerable ability and has no very bad habits.

"You ask why is it that the man of so little education gets along so much better than the man with so much. You are simply mistaken as to which has the most education. The man who is almost illiterate has trained his