Report of the Committee of Fifteen / Read at the Cleveland Meeting of the Department of Superintendence, February 19-21, 1884, with the Debate

by William Torrey Harris; A. S. Draper; H. S. Tarbell

II. THE COURSE OF STUDY—EDUCATIONAL VALUES.

Your Committee would report that it has discussed in detail the several branches of study that have found a place in the curriculum of the elementary school, with a view to discover their educational value for developing and training the faculties of the mind, and more especially for correlating the pupil with his spiritual and natural environment in the world in which he lives.

A. Language studies.

There is first to be noted the prominent place of language study that takes the form of reading, penmanship, and grammar in the first eight years’ work of the school. It is claimed for the partiality shown to these studies that it is justified by the fact that language is the instrument that makes possible human social organization. It enables each person to communicate his individual experience to his fellows and thus permits each to profit by the experience of all. The written and printed forms of speech preserve human knowledge and make progress in civilization possible. The conclusion is reached that learning to read and write should be the leading study of the pupil in his first four years of school. Reading and writing are not so much ends in themselves as means for the acquirement of all other human learning. This consideration alone would be sufficient to justify their actual place in the work of the elementary school. But these branches require of the learner a difficult process of analysis. The pupil must identify the separate words in the sentence he uses, and in the next place must recognize the separate sounds in each word. It requires a considerable effort for the child or the savage to analyze his sentence into its constituent words, and a still greater effort to discriminate its elementary sounds. Reading, writing, and spelling in their most elementary form, therefore, constitute a severe training in mental analysis for the child of six to ten years of age. We are told that it is far more disciplinary to the mind than any species of observation of differences among material things, because of the fact that the word has a twofold character—addressed to external sense as spoken sound to the ear, or as written and printed words to the eye—but containing a meaning or sense addressed to the understanding and only to be seized by introspection. The pupil must call up the corresponding idea by thought, memory, and imagination, or else the word will cease to be a word and remain only a sound or character.

On the other hand, observation of things and movements does not necessarily involve this twofold act of analysis, introspective and objective, but only the latter—the objective analysis. It is granted that we all have frequent occasion to condemn poor methods of instruction as teaching words rather than things. But we admit that we mean empty sounds or characters rather than true words. Our suggestions for the correct method of teaching amount in this case simply to laying stress on the meaning of the word, and to setting the teaching process on the road of analysis of content rather than form. In the case of words used to store up external observation the teacher is told to repeat and make alive again the act of observation by which the word obtained its original meaning. In the case of a word expressing a relation between facts or events, the pupil is to be taken step by step through the process of reflection by which the idea was built up. Since the word, spoken and written, is the sole instrument by which reason can fix, preserve, and communicate both the data of sense and the relations discovered between them by reflection, no new method in education has been able to supplant in the school the branches, reading and penmanship. But the real improvements in method have led teachers to lay greater and greater stress on the internal factor of the word, on its meaning, and have in manifold ways shown how to repeat the original experiences that gave the meaning to concrete words, and the original comparisons and logical deductions by which the ideas of relations and causal processes arose in the mind and required abstract words to preserve and communicate them.

It has been claimed that it would be better to have first a basis of knowledge of things, and secondarily and subsequently a knowledge of words. But it has been replied to this, that the progress of the child in learning to talk indicates his ascent out of mere impressions into the possession of true knowledge. For he names objects only after he has made some synthesis of his impressions and has formed general ideas. He recognizes the same object under different circumstances of time and place, and also recognizes other objects belonging to the same class by and with names. Hence the use of the word indicates a higher degree of self-activity—the stage of mere impressions without words or signs being a comparatively passive state of mind. What we mean by things first and words afterward, is, therefore, not the apprehension of objects by passive impressions so much as the active investigation and experimenting which come after words are used, and the higher forms of analysis are called into being by that invention of reason known as language, which, as before said, is a synthesis of thing and thought, of outward sign and inward signification.

Rational investigation cannot precede the invention of language any more than blacksmithing can precede the invention of hammers, anvils, and pincers. For language is the necessary tool of thought used in the conduct of the analysis and synthesis of investigation.

Your Committee would sum up these considerations by saying that language rightfully forms the centre of instruction in the elementary school, but that progress in methods of teaching is to be made, as hitherto, chiefly by laying more stress on the internal side of the word, its meaning; using better graded steps to build up the chain of experience or the train of thought that the word expresses.

The first three years’ work of the child is occupied mainly with the mastery of the printed and written forms of the words of his colloquial vocabulary; words that he is already familiar enough with as sounds addressed to the ear. He has to become familiar with the new forms addressed to the eye, and it would be an unwise method to require him to learn many new words at the same time that he is learning to recognize his old words in their new shape. But as soon as he has acquired some facility in reading what is printed in the colloquial style, he may go on to selections from standard authors. The literary selections should be graded, and are graded in almost all series of readers used in our elementary schools, in such a way as to bring those containing the fewest words outside of the colloquial vocabulary into the lower books of the series, and increasing the difficulties, step by step, as the pupil grows in maturity. The selections are literary works of art possessing the required organic unity and a proper reflection of this unity in the details, as good works of art must do. But they portray situations of the soul, or scenes of life, or elaborated reflections, of which the child can obtain some grasp through his capacity to feel and think, although in scope and compass they far surpass his range. They are adapted, therefore, to lead him out of and beyond himself, as spiritual guides.

Literary style employs, besides words common to the colloquial vocabulary, words used in a semi-technical sense expressive of fine shades of thought and emotion. The literary work of art furnishes a happy expression for some situation of the soul, or some train of reflection hitherto unutterable in an adequate manner. If the pupil learns this literary production, he finds himself powerfully helped to understand both himself and his fellow-men. The most practical knowledge of all, it will be admitted, is a knowledge of human nature—a knowledge that enables one to combine with his fellow-men, and to share with them the physical and spiritual wealth of the race. Of this high character as humanizing or civilizing, are the favorite works of literature found in the school readers, about one hundred and fifty English and American writers being drawn upon for the material. Such are Shakespeare’s speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony, Hamlet’s and Macbeth’s soliloquies, Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, Gray’s Elegy, Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, Byron’s Waterloo, Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Webster’s Reply to Hayne, The Trial of Knapp, and Bunker Hill oration, Scott’s Lochinvar, Marmion, and Roderick Dhu, Bryant’s Thanatopsis, Longfellow’s Psalm of Life, Paul Revere, and the Bridge, O’Hara’s Bivouac of the Dead, Campbell’s Hohenlinden, Collins’ How Sleep the Brave, Wolfe’s Burial of Sir John Moore, and other fine prose and poetry from Addison, Emerson, Franklin, The Bible, Hawthorne, Walter Scott, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Swift, Milton, Cooper, Whittier, Lowell, and the rest. The reading and study of fine selections in prose and verse furnish the chief æsthetic training of the elementary school. But this should be re-enforced by some study of photographic or other reproductions of the world’s great masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting. The frequent sight of these reproductions is good; the attempt to copy or sketch them with the pencil is better; best of all is an æsthetic lesson on their composition, attempting to describe in words the idea of the whole that gives the work its organic unity, and the devices adopted by the artist to reflect this idea in the details and re-enforce its strength. The æsthetic taste of teacher and pupil can be cultivated by such exercises, and once set on the road of development, this taste may improve through life.

A third phase of language study in the elementary school is formal grammar. The works of literary art in the readers, re-enforced as they ought to be by supplementary reading at home of the whole works from which the selections for the school readers are made, will educate the child in the use of a higher and better English style. Technical grammar never can do this. Only familiarity with fine English works will insure one a good and correct style. But grammar is the science of language, and as the first of the seven liberal arts it has long held sway in school as the disciplinary study par excellence. A survey of its educational value, subjective and objective, usually produces the conviction that it is to retain the first place in the future. Its chief objective advantage is, that it shows the structure of language, and the logical forms of subject, predicate, and modifier, thus revealing the essential nature of thought itself, the most important of all objects, because it is self-object. On the subjective or psychological side, grammar demonstrates its title to the first place by its use as a discipline in subtle analysis, in logical division and classification, in the art of questioning, and in the mental accomplishment of making exact definitions. Nor is this an empty, formal discipline, for its subject-matter, language, is a product of the reason of a people, not as individuals, but as a social whole, and the vocabulary holds in its store of words the generalized experience of that people, including sensuous observation and reflection, feeling and emotion, instinct and volition.

No formal labor on a great objective field is ever lost wholly, since at the very least it has the merit of familiarizing the pupil with the contents of some one extensive province that borders on his life, and with which he must come into correlation; but it is easy for any special formal discipline, when continued too long, to paralyze or arrest growth at that stage. The overcultivation of the verbal memory tends to arrest the growth of critical attention and reflection. Memory of accessory details too, so much prized in the school, is also cultivated often at the expense of an insight into the organizing principle of the whole and the casual nexus that binds the parts. So, too, the study of quantity, if carried to excess, may warp the mind into a habit of neglecting quality in its observation and reflection. As there is no subsumption in the quantitative judgment, but only dead equality or inequality (A is equal to or greater or less than B), there is a tendency to atrophy in the faculty of concrete syllogistic reasoning on the part of the person devoted exclusively to mathematics. For the normal syllogism uses judgments wherein the subject is subsumed under the predicate (This is a rose—the individual rose is subsumed under the class rose; Socrates is a man, etc.). Such reasoning concerns individuals in two aspects, first as concrete wholes and secondly as members of higher totalities or classes—species and genera. Thus, too, grammar, rich as it is in its contents, is only a formal discipline as respects the scientific, historic, or literary contents of language, and is indifferent to them. A training for four or five years in parsing and grammatical analysis practiced on literary works of art (Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Scott) is a training of the pupil into habits of indifference toward and neglect of the genius displayed in the literary work of art, and into habits of impertinent and trifling attention to elements employed as material or texture, and a corresponding neglect of the structural form, which alone is the work of the artist. A parallel to this would be the mason’s habit of noticing only the brick and mortar, or the stone and cement, in his inspection of the architecture, say of Sir Christopher Wren. A child overtrained to analyze and classify shades of color—examples of this one finds occasionally in a primary school whose specialty is “objective teaching”—might in later life visit an art gallery and make an inventory of colors without getting even a glimpse of a painting as a work of art. Such overstudy and misuse of grammar as one finds in the elementary school, it is feared, exists to some extent in secondary schools and even in colleges, in the work of mastering the classic authors.

Your Committee is unanimous in the conviction that formal grammar should not be allowed to usurp the place of a study of the literary work of art in accordance with literary method. The child can be gradually trained to see the technical “motives” of a poem or prose work of art and to enjoy the æsthetic inventions of the artist. The analysis of a work of art should discover the idea that gives it organic unity; the collision and the complication resulting; the solution and dénouement. Of course these things must be reached in the elementary school without even a mention of their technical terms. The subject of the piece is brought out; its reflection in the conditions of the time and place to heighten interest by showing its importance; its second and stronger reflection in the several details of its conflict and struggle; its reflection in the dénouement wherein its struggle ends in victory or defeat and the ethical or rational interests are vindicated,—and the results move outward, returning to the environment again in ever-widening circles,—something resembling this is to be found in every work of art, and there are salient features which can be briefly but profitably made subject of comment in familiar language with even the youngest pupils. There is an ethical and an æsthetical content to each work of art. It is profitable to point out both of these in the interest of the child’s growing insight into human nature. The ethical should, however, be kept in subordination to the æsthetical, but for the sake of the supreme interests of the ethical itself. Otherwise the study of a work of art degenerates into a goody goody performance, and its effects on the child are to cause a reaction against the moral. The child protects his inner individuality against effacement through external authority by taking an attitude of rebellion against stories with an appended moral. Herein the superiority of the æsthetical in literary art is to be seen. For the ethical motive is concealed by the poet, and the hero is painted with all his brittle individualism and self-seeking. His passions and his selfishness, gilded by fine traits of bravery and noble manners, interest the youth, interest us all. The established social and moral order seems to the ambitious hero to be an obstacle to the unfolding of the charms of individuality. The deed of violence gets done, and the Nemesis is aroused. Now his deed comes back on the individual doer, and our sympathy turns against him and we rejoice in his fall. Thus the æsthetical unity contains within it the ethical unity. The lesson of the great poet or novelist is taken to heart, whereas the ethical announcement by itself might have failed, especially with the most self-active and aspiring of the pupils. Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics this advantage of the æsthetic unity, which Plato in his Republic seems to have missed. Tragedy purges us of our passions, to use Aristotle’s expression, because we identify our own wrong inclinations with those of the hero, and by sympathy we suffer with him and see our intended deed returned upon us with tragic effect, and are thereby cured.

Your Committee has dwelt upon the æsthetic side of literature in this explicit manner because they believe that the general tendency in elementary schools is to neglect the literary art for the literary formalities which concern the mechanical material rather than the spiritual form. Those formal studies should not be discontinued, but subordinated to the higher study of literature.

Your Committee reserves the subject of language lessons, composition writing, and what relates to the child’s expression of ideas in writing, for consideration under Part 3 of this Report, treating of programme.

B. Arithmetic.

Side by side with language study is the study of mathematics in the schools, claiming the second place in importance of all studies. It has been pointed out that mathematics concerns the laws of time and space—their structural form, so to speak—and hence that it formulates the logical conditions of all matter both in rest and in motion. Be this as it may, the high position of mathematics as the science of all quantity is universally acknowledged. The elementary branch of mathematics is arithmetic, and this is studied in the primary and grammar schools from six to eight years, or even longer. The relation of arithmetic to the whole field of mathematics has been stated (by Comte, Howison, and others) to be that of the final step in a process of calculation, in which results are stated numerically. There are branches that develop or derive quantitative functions: say geometry for spatial forms, and mechanics for movement and rest and the forces producing them. Other branches transform these quantitative functions into such forms as may be calculated in actual numbers; namely, algebra in its common or lower form, and in its higher form as the differential and integral calculus, and the calculus of variations. Arithmetic evaluates or finds the numerical value for the functions thus deduced and transformed. The educational value of arithmetic is thus indicated both as concerns its psychological side and its objective practical uses in correlating man with the world of nature. In this latter respect as furnishing the key to the outer world in so far as the objects of the latter are a matter of direct enumeration,—capable of being counted,—it is the first great step in the conquest of nature. It is the first tool of thought that man invents in the work of emancipating himself from thraldom to external forces. For by the command of number he learns to divide and conquer. He can proportion one force to another, and concentrate against an obstacle precisely what is needed to overcome it. Number also makes possible all the other sciences of nature which depend on exact measurement and exact record of phenomena as to the following items: order of succession, date, duration, locality, environment, extent of sphere of influence, number of manifestations, number of cases of intermittence. All these can be defined accurately only by means of number. The educational value of a branch of study that furnishes the indispensable first step toward all science of nature is obvious. But psychologically its importance further appears in this, that it begins with an important step in analysis; namely, the detachment of the idea of quantity from the concrete whole, which includes quality as well as quantity. To count, one drops the qualitative and considers only the quantitative aspect. So long as the individual differences (which are qualitative in so far as they distinguish one object from another) are considered, the objects cannot be counted together. When counted, the distinctions are dropped out of sight as indifferent. As counting is the fundamental operation of arithmetic, and all other arithmetical operations are simply devices for speed by using remembered countings instead of going through the detailed work again each time, the hint is furnished the teacher for the first lessons in arithmetic. This hint has been generally followed out and the child set at work at first upon the counting of objects so much alike that the qualitative difference is not suggested to him. He constructs gradually his tables of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, and fixes them in his memory. Then he takes his next higher step; namely, the apprehension of the fraction. This is an expressed ratio of two numbers, and therefore a much more complex thought than he has met with in dealing with the simple numbers. In thinking five-sixths, he first thinks five and then six, and holding these two in mind thinks the result of the first modified by the second. Here are three steps instead of one, and the result is not a simple number, but an inference resting on an unperformed operation. This psychological analysis shows the reason for the embarrassment of the child on his entrance upon the study of fractions and the other operations that imply ratio. The teacher finds all his resources in the way of method drawn upon to invent steps and half steps, to aid the pupil to make continuous progress here. All these devices of method consist in steps by which the pupil descends to the simple number and returns to the complex. He turns one of the terms into a qualitative unit, and thus is enabled to use the other as a simple number. The pupil takes the denominator, for example, and makes clear his conception of one-sixth as his qualitative unit, then five-sixths is as clear to him as five oxen. But he has to repeat this return from ratio to simple numbers in each of the elementary operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and in the reduction of fractions—and finds the road long and tedious at best. In the case of decimal fractions the psychological process is more complex still; for the pupil has given him one of the terms, the numerator, from which he must mentally deduce the denominator from the position of the decimal point. This doubles the work of reading and recognizing the fractional number. But it makes addition and subtraction of fractions nearly as easy as that of simple numbers and assists also in multiplication of fractions. But division of decimals is a much more complex operation than that of common fractions.

The want of a psychological analysis of these processes has led many good teachers to attempt decimal fractions with their pupils before taking up common fractions. In the end they have been forced to make introductory steps to aid the pupil, and in these steps to introduce the theory of the common fraction. They have by this refuted their own theory.

Besides (a) simple numbers and the four operations with them, (b) fractions common and decimal, there is (c) a third step in number; namely, the theory of powers and roots. It is a further step in ratio; namely, the relation of a simple number to itself as power and root. The mass of material which fills the arithmetic used in the elementary school consists of two kinds of examples: first, those wherein there is a direct application of simple numbers, fractions, and powers; and secondly, the class of examples involving operations in reaching numerical solutions through indirect data and consequently involving more or less transformation of functions. Of this character is most of the so-called higher arithmetic and such problems in the text-book used in the elementary schools as have, not inappropriately, been called (by General Francis A. Walker in his criticism on common-school arithmetic) numerical “conundrums.” Their difficulty is not found in the strictly arithmetical part of the process of the solution (the third phase above described), but rather in the transformation of the quantitative function given into the function that can readily be calculated numerically. The transformation of functions belongs strictly to algebra. Teachers who love arithmetic, and who have themselves success in working out the so-called numerical conundrums, defend with much earnestness the current practice which uses so much time for arithmetic. They see in it a valuable training for ingenuity and logical analysis, and believe that the industry which discovers arithmetical ways of transforming the functions given in such problems into plain numerical operations of adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing is well bestowed. On the other hand, the critics of this practice contend that there should be no merely formal drill in school for its own sake, and that there should be, always, a substantial content to be gained. They contend that the work of the pupil in transforming quantitative functions by arithmetical methods is wasted, because the pupil needs a more adequate expression than number for this purpose; that this has been discovered in algebra, which enables him to perform with ease such quantitative transformations as puzzle the pupil in arithmetic. They hold, therefore, that arithmetic pure and simple should be abridged and elementary algebra introduced after the numerical operations in powers, fractions, and simple numbers have been mastered, together with their applications to the tables of weights and measures and to percentage and interest. In the seventh year of the elementary course there would be taught equations of the first degree and the solution of arithmetical problems that fall under proportion, or the so-called “rule of three,” together with other problems containing complicated conditions—those in partnership, for example. In the eighth year quadratic equations could be learned, and other problems of higher arithmetic solved in a more satisfactory manner than by numerical methods. It is contended that this earlier introduction of algebra, with a sparing use of letters for known quantities, would secure far more mathematical progress than is obtained at present on the part of all pupils, and that it would enable many pupils to go on into secondary and higher education who are now kept back on the plea of lack of preparation in arithmetic, the real difficulty in many cases being a lack of ability to solve algebraic problems by an inferior method.

Your Committee would report that the practice of teaching two lessons daily in arithmetic, one styled “mental,” or “intellectual,” and the other “written” arithmetic (because its exercises are written out with pencil or pen), is still continued in many schools. By this device the pupil is made to give twice as much time to arithmetic as to any other branch. It is contended by the opponents of this practice, with some show of reason, that two lessons a day in the study of quantity have a tendency to give the mind a bent or set in the direction of thinking quantitatively, with a corresponding neglect of the power to observe, and to reflect upon, qualitative and causal aspects. For mathematics does not take account of causes, but only of equality and difference in magnitude. It is further objected that the attempt to secure what is called thoroughness in the branches taught in the elementary schools is often carried too far; in fact, to such an extent as to produce arrested development (a sort of mental paralysis) in the mechanical and formal stages of growth. The mind, in that case, loses its appetite for higher methods and wider generalizations. The law of apperception, we are told, proves that temporary methods of solving problems should not be so thoroughly mastered as to be used involuntarily, or as a matter of unconscious habit, for the reason that a higher and more adequate method of solution will then be found more difficult to acquire. The more thoroughly a method is learned, the more it becomes part of the mind, and the greater the repugnance of the mind toward a new method. For this reason, parents and teachers discourage young children from the practice of counting on the fingers, believing that it will cause much trouble later to root out this vicious habit and replace it by purely mental processes. Teachers should be careful, especially with precocious children, not to continue too long in the use of a process that is becoming mechanical; for it is already growing into a second nature, and becoming a part of the unconscious apperceptive process by which the mind reacts against the environment, recognizes its presence, and explains it to itself. The child that has been overtrained in arithmetic reacts apperceptively against his environment chiefly by noticing its numerical relations—he counts and adds; his other apperceptive reactions being feeble, he neglects qualities and causal relations. Another child who has been drilled in recognizing colors apperceives the shades of color to the neglect of all else. A third child, excessively trained in form studies by the constant use of geometric solids, and much practice in looking for the fundamental geometric forms lying at the basis of the multifarious objects that exist in the world, will, as a matter of course, apperceive geometric forms, ignoring the other phases of objects.

It is, certainly, an advance on immediate sense-perception to be able to separate or analyze the concrete, whole impression, and consider the quantity apart by itself. But if arrested mental growth takes place here, the result is deplorable. That such arrest may be caused by too exclusive training in recognizing numerical relations is beyond a doubt.

Your Committee believes that, with the right methods, and a wise use of time in preparing the arithmetic lesson in and out of school, five years are sufficient for the study of mere arithmetic—the five years beginning with the second school year and ending with the close of the sixth year; and that the seventh and eighth years should be given to the algebraic method of dealing with those problems that involve difficulties in the transformation of quantitative indirect functions into numerical or direct quantitative data.

Your Committee, however, does not wish to be understood as recommending the transfer of algebra, as it is understood and taught in most secondary schools, to the seventh year, or even to the eighth year of the elementary school. The algebra course in the secondary school, as taught to the pupils in their fifteenth year of age, very properly begins with severe exercises, with a view to discipline the pupil in analyzing complex literate expressions at sight, and to make him able to recognize at once the factors that are contained in such combinations of quantities. The proposed seventh-grade algebra must use letters for the unknown quantities and retain the numerical form of the known quantities, using letters for these very rarely, except to exhibit the general form of solution, or what, if stated in words, becomes a so-called “rule” in arithmetic. This species of algebra has the character of an introduction or transitional step to algebra proper. The latter should be taught thoroughly in the secondary school. Formerly it was a common practice to teach elementary algebra of this sort in the preparatory schools, and reserve for the college a study of algebra proper. But in this case there was often a neglect of sufficient practice in factoring literate quantities, and, as a consequence, the pupil suffered embarrassment in his more advanced mathematics; for example, in analytical geometry, the differential calculus, and mechanics. The proposition of your Committee is intended to remedy the two evils already named: first, to aid the pupils in the elementary school to solve, by a higher method, the more difficult problems that now find place in advanced arithmetic; and secondly, to prepare the pupil for a thorough course in pure algebra in the secondary school.

Your Committee is of the opinion that the so-called mental arithmetic should be made to alternate with written arithmetic for two years, and that there should not be two daily lessons in this subject.

C. Geography.

The leading branch of the seven liberal arts was grammar, being the first of the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic). Arithmetic, however, led the second division, the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). We have glanced at the reasons for the place of grammar as leading the humane studies, as well as for the place of arithmetic as leading the nature studies. Following arithmetic, as the second study in importance among the branches that correlate man to nature, is geography. It is interesting to note that the old quadrivium of the Middle Ages included geography, under the title of geometry, as the branch following arithmetic in the enumeration; the subject-matter of their so-called “geometry” being chiefly an abridgment of Pliny’s geography, to which were added a few definitions of geometric forms, something like the primary course in geometric solids in our elementary schools. So long as there has been elementary education there has been something of geography included. The Greek education laid stress on teaching the second book of Homer, containing the Catalogue of the Ships and a brief mention of the geography and history of all the Greek tribes that took part in the Trojan War. History remains unseparated from geography and geometry in the Middle Ages. Geography has preserved this comprehensiveness of meaning as a branch of the study in the elementary schools down to the present day. After arithmetic, which treats of the abstract or general conditions of material existence, comes geography with a practical study of man’s material habitat, and its relations to him. It is not a simple science by itself, like botany, or geology, or astronomy, but a collection of sciences levied upon to describe the earth as the dwelling-place of man and to explain something of its more prominent features. About one-fourth of the material relates strictly to the geography, about one-half to the inhabitants, their manners, customs, institutions, industries, productions, and the remaining one-fourth to items drawn from the sciences of mineralogy, meteorology, botany, zoölogy, and astronomy. This predominance of the human feature in a study ostensibly relating to physical nature, your Committee considers necessary and entirely justifiable. The child commences with what is nearest to his interests, and proceeds gradually toward what is remote and to be studied for its own sake. It is, therefore, a mistake to suppose that the first phase of geography presented to the child should be the process of continent formation. He must begin with the natural difference of climate, and lands, and waters, and obstacles that separate peoples, and study the methods by which man strives to equalize or overcome these differences by industry and commerce, to unite all places and all people, and make it possible for each to share in the productions of all. The industrial and commercial idea is, therefore, the first central idea in the study of geography in the elementary schools. It leads directly to the natural elements of difference in climate, soil, and productions, and also to those in race, religion, political status, and occupations of the inhabitants, with a view to explain the grounds and reasons for this counter-process of civilization which struggles to overcome the differences. Next comes the deeper inquiry into the process of continent formation, the physical struggle between the process of upheaving or upbuilding of continents and that of their obliteration by air and water; the explanation of the mountains, valleys, and plains, the islands, volcanic action, the winds, the rain-distribution. But the study of cities, their location, the purposes they serve as collecting, manufacturing, and distributing centres, leads most directly to the immediate purpose of geography in the elementary school. From this beginning, and holding to it as a permanent interest, the inquiry into causes and conditions proceeds concentrically to the sources of the raw materials, the methods of their production, and the climatic, geologic, and other reasons that explain their location and their growth.

In recent years, especially through the scientific study of physical geography, the processes that go to the formation of climate, soil, and general configuration of land masses have been accurately determined, and the methods of teaching so simplified that it is possible to lead out from the central idea mentioned to the physical explanations of the elements of geographical difference quite early in the course of study. Setting out from the idea of the use made of the earth by civilization, the pupil in the fifth and sixth years of his schooling (at the age of eleven or twelve) may extend his inquiries quite profitably as far as the physical explanations of land-shapes and climates. In the seventh and eighth year of school much more may be done in this direction. But it is believed that the distinctively human interest connected with geography in the first years of its study should not yield to the purely scientific one of physical processes until the pupil has taken up the study of history.

The educational value of geography, as it is and has been in elementary schools, is obviously very great. It makes possible something like accuracy in the picturing of distant places and events, and removes a large tract of mere superstition from the mind. In the days of newspaper reading one’s stock of geographical information is in constant requisition. A war on the opposite side of the globe is followed with more interest in this year than a war near our own borders before the era of the telegraph. The general knowledge of the locations and boundaries of nations, of their status in civilization, and their natural advantages for contributing to the world market, is of great use to the citizen in forming correct ideas from his daily reading.

The educational value of geography is even more apparent if we admit the claims of those who argue that the present epoch is the beginning of an era in which public opinion is organized into a ruling force by the agency of periodicals and books. Certainly neither the newspaper nor the book can influence an illiterate people; they can do little to form opinions where the readers have no knowledge of geography.

As to the psychological value of geography little need be said. It exercises in manifold ways the memory of forms and the imagination; it brings into exercise the thinking power, in tracing back toward unity the various series of causes. What educative value there is in geology, meteorology, zoölogy, ethnology, economics, history, and politics is to be found in the more profound study of geography, and, to a proportionate extent, in the study of its merest elements.

Your Committee is of the opinion that there has been a vast improvement in the methods of instruction in this branch in recent years, due, in large measure, to the geographical societies of this and other countries. At first there prevailed what might be named sailor geography. The pupil was compelled to memorize all the capes and headlands, bays and harbors, mouths of rivers, islands, sounds, and straits around the world. He enlivened this, to some extent, by brief mention of the curiosities and oddities in the way of cataracts, water-gaps, caves, strange animals, public buildings, picturesque costumes, national exaggerations, and such matters as would furnish good themes for sailors’ yarns. Little or nothing was taught to give unity to the isolated details furnished in endless number. It was an improvement on this when the method of memorizing capital cities and political boundaries succeeded. With this came the era of map drawing. The study of watersheds and commercial routes, of industrial productions and centres of manufacture and commerce, has been adopted in the better class of schools. Instruction in geography is growing better by the constant introduction of new devices to make plain and intelligible the determining influence of physical causes in producing the elements of difference and the counter-process of industry and commerce by which each difference is rendered of use to the whole world, and each locality made a participator in the productions of all.

D. History.

The next study, ranked in order of value, for the elementary school is history. But, as will be seen, the value of history, both practically and psychologically, is less in the beginning and greater at the end than geography. For it relates to the institutions of men, and especially to the political state and its evolution. While biography narrates the career of the individual, civil history records the careers of nations. The nation has been compared to the individual by persons interested in the educational value of history. Man has two selves, they say, the individual self, and the collective self of the organized state or nation. The study of history is, then, the study of this larger, corporate, social and civil self. The importance of this idea is thus brought out more clearly in its educational significance. For to learn this civil self is to learn the substantial condition which makes possible the existence of civilized man in all his other social combinations—the family, the Church, and the manifold associated activities of civil society. For the state protects these combinations from destruction by violence. It defines the limits of individual and associated effort, within which each endeavor re-enforces the endeavors of all, and it uses the strength of the whole nation to prevent such actions as pass beyond these safe limits and tend to collision with the normal action of the other individuals and social units. Hobbes called the state a Leviathan, to emphasize its stupendous individuality and organized self-activity. Without this, he said, man lives in a state of “constant war, fear, poverty, filth, ignorance, and wretchedness; within the state dwell peace, security, riches, science, and happiness.” The state is the collective man who “makes possible the rational development of the individual man, like a mortal God, subduing his caprice and passion and compelling obedience to law, developing the ideas of justice, virtue, and religion, creating property and ownership, nurture and education.” The education of the child into a knowledge of this higher self begins early within the nurture of the family. The child sees a policeman or some town officer, some public building, a court house or a jail; he sees or hears of an act of violence, a case of robbery or murder followed by arrest of the guilty. The omnipresent higher self, which has been invisible hitherto, now becomes visible to him in its symbols and still more in its acts.

History in school, it is contended, should be the special branch for education in the duties of citizenship. There is ground for this claim. History gives a sense of belonging to a higher social unity which possesses the right of absolute control over person and property in the interest of the safety of the whole. This, of course, is the basis of citizenship; the individual must feel this or see this solidarity of the state and recognize its supreme authority. But history shows the collisions of nations, and the victory of one political ideal accompanied by the defeat of another. History reveals an evolution of forms of government that are better and better adapted to permit individual freedom, and the participation of all citizens in the administration of the government itself.

People who make their own government have a special interest in the spectacle of political evolution as exhibited in history. But it must be admitted that this evolution has not been well presented by popular historians. Take, for instance, the familiar example of old-time pedagogy, wherein the Roman republic was conceived as a freer government than the Roman empire that followed it, by persons apparently misled by the ideas of representative self-government associated with the word republic. It was the beginning of a new epoch when this illusion was dispelled, and the college student became aware of the true Roman meaning of republic, namely, the supremacy of an oligarchy on the Tiber that ruled distant provinces in Spain, Gaul, Asia Minor, Germany, and Africa, for its selfish ends and with an ever-increasing arrogance. The people at home in Rome, not having a share in the campaigns on the borderland, did not appreciate the qualities of the great leaders who, like Cæsar, subdued the nations by forbearance, magnanimity, trust, and the recognition of a sphere of freedom secured to the conquered by the Roman civil laws, which were rigidly enforced by the conqueror, as much as by the violence of arms. The change from republic to empire meant the final subordination of this tyrannical Roman oligarchy, and the recognition of the rights of the provinces to Roman freedom. This illustration shows how easily a poor teaching of history may pervert its good influence or purpose into a bad one. For the Roman monarchy under the empire secured a degree of freedom never before attained under the republic, in spite of the election of such tyrants as Nero and Caligula to the imperial purple. The civil service went on as usual administering the affairs of distant countries, educating them in Roman jurisprudence, and cultivating a love for accumulating private property. Those countries had before lived communistically after the style of the tribe or at best of the village community. Roman private property in land gave an impulse to the development of free individuality such as had always been impossible under the social stage of development known as the village community.

To teach history properly is to dispel this shallow illusion which flatters individualism, and to open the eyes of the pupil to the true nature of freedom, namely, the freedom through obedience to just laws enforced by a strong government.

Your Committee has made this apparent digression for the sake of a more explicit statement of its conviction of the importance of teaching history in a different spirit from that of abstract freedom, which sometimes means anarchy, although they admit the possibility of an opposite extreme, the danger of too little stress on the progressive element in the growth of nations, and its manifestation in new and better political devices for representing all citizens without weakening the central power.

That the history of one’s own nation is to be taught in the elementary school seems fixed by common consent. United States history includes first a sketch of the epoch of discoveries and next of the epoch of colonization. This, fortunately, suits the pedagogic requirements. For the child loves to approach the stern realities of a firmly established civilization through its stages of growth by means of individual enterprise. Here is the use of biography as introduction to history. It treats of exceptional individuals whose lives bring them in one way or another into national or even world-historical relations. They throw light on the nature and necessity of governments, and are in turn illuminated by the light thrown back on them by the institutions which they promote or hinder. The era of semi-private adventure with which American history begins is admirably adapted for study by the pupil in the elementary stage of his education. So, too, the next epoch, that of colonization. The pioneer is a degree nearer to civilization than is the explorer and discoverer. In the colonial history the pupil interests himself in the enterprise of aspiring individualities, in their conquest over obstacles of climate and soil; their conflicts with the aboriginal population; their choice of land for settlement; the growth of their cities; above all, their several attempts and final success in forming a constitution securing local self-government. An epoch of growing interrelation of the colonies succeeds, a tendency to union on a large scale due to the effect of European wars which involved England, France, and other countries, and affected the relations of their colonies in America. This epoch, too, abounds in heroic personalities, like Wolfe, Montcalm, and Washington, and perilous adventures, especially in the Indian warfare.

The fourth epoch is the Revolution, by which the colonies through joint effort secured their independence and afterward their union as a nation. The subject grows rapidly more complex, and tasks severely the powers of the pupils in the eighth year of the elementary school. The formation of the Constitution, and a brief study of the salient features of the Constitution itself, conclude the study of the portion of the history of the United States that is sufficiently remote to be treated after the manner of an educational classic. Everything up to this point stands out in strong individual outlines, and is admirably fitted for that elementary course of study. Beyond this point, the War of 1812 and the War of the Rebellion, together with the political events that led to it, are matters of memory with the present generation of parents and grandparents, and are, consequently, not so well fitted for intensive study in school as the already classic period of our history. But these later and latest epochs may be, and will be, read at home not only in the text-book on history used in the schools, but also in the numerous sketches that appear in newspapers, magazines, and in more pretentious shapes. In the intensive study which should be undertaken of the classic period of our history, the pupil may be taught the method appropriate to historical investigation, the many points of view from which each event ought to be considered. He should learn to discriminate between the theatrical show of events and the solid influences that move underneath as ethical causes. Although he is too immature for very far-reaching reflections, he must be helped to see the causal processes of history. Armed with this discipline in historic methods, the pupil will do all of his miscellaneous reading and thinking in this province with more adequate intellectual reaction than was possible before the intensive study carried on in school.

The study of the outlines of the Constitution, for ten or fifteen weeks in the final year of the elementary school, has been found of great educational value. Properly taught, it fixes the idea of the essential three-foldness of the constitution of a free government and the necessary independence of each constituent power, whether legislative, judicial, or executive. This and some idea of the manner and mode of filling the official places in these three departments, and of the character of the duties with which each department is charged, lay foundations for an intelligent citizenship.

Besides this intensive study of the history of the United States in the seventh and eighth years, your Committee would recommend oral lessons on the salient points of general history, taking a full hour of sixty minutes weekly—and preferably all at one time—for the sake of the more systematic treatment of the subject of the lesson and the deeper impression made on the mind of the pupil.

E. Other branches.

Your Committee has reviewed the staple branches of the elementary course of study in the light of their educational scope and significance. Grammar, literature, arithmetic, geography, and history are the five branches upon which the disciplinary work of the elementary school is concentrated. Inasmuch as reading is the first of the scholastic arts, it is interesting to note that the whole elementary course may be described as an extension of the process of learning the art of reading. First comes the mastering of the colloquial vocabulary in printed and script forms. Next come five incursions into the special vocabularies required (a) in literature to express the fine shades of emotion and the more subtle distinctions of thought, (b) the technique of arithmetic, (c) of geography, (d) of grammar, (e) of history.

In the serious work of mastering these several technical vocabularies the pupil is assigned daily tasks that he must prepare by independent study. The class exercise or recitation is taken up with examining and criticising the pupil’s oral statements of what he has learned, especial care being taken to secure the pupil’s explanation of it in his own words. This requires paraphrases and definitions of the new words and phrases used in technical and literary senses, with a view to insure the addition to the mind of the new ideas corresponding to the new words. The misunderstandings are corrected and the pupil set on the way to use more critical alertness in the preparation of his succeeding lessons. The pupil learns as much by the recitations of his fellow-pupils as he learns from the teacher, but not the same things. He sees in the imperfect statements of his classmates that they apprehended the lesson with different presuppositions and consequently have seen some phases of the subject that escaped his observation, while they in turn have missed points which he had noticed quite readily. These different points of view become more or less his own, and he may be said to grow by adding to his own mind the minds of others.

It is clear that there are other branches of instruction that may lay claim to a place in the course of study in the elementary school; for example, the various branches of natural science, vocal music, manual training, physical culture, drawing, etc.

Here the question of another method of instruction is suggested. There are lessons that require previous preparation by the pupil himself—there are also lessons that may be taken up without such preparation and conducted by the teacher, who leads the exercise and furnishes a large part of the information to be learned, enlisting the aid of members of the class for the purpose of bringing home the new material to their actual experience. Besides these, there are mechanical exercises for purposes of training, such as drawing, penmanship, and calisthenics.

In the first place, there is industrial and æsthetic drawing, which should have a place in all elementary school work. By it is secured the training of the hand and eye. Then, too, drawing helps in all the other branches that require illustration. Moreover, if used in the study of the great works of art in the way hereinbefore mentioned, it helps to cultivate the taste and prepares the future workman for a more useful and lucrative career, inasmuch as superior taste commands higher wages in the finishing of all goods.

Natural science claims a place in the elementary school not so much as a disciplinary study side by side with grammar, arithmetic, and history, as a training in habits of observation and in the use of the technique by which such sciences are expounded. With a knowledge of the technical terms and some training in the methods of original investigation employed in the sciences, the pupil broadens his views of the world and greatly increases his capacity to acquire new knowledge. For the pupil who is unacquainted with the technique of science has to pass without mental profit the numerous scientific allusions and items of information which more and more abound in all our literature, whether of an ephemeral or a permanent character. In an age whose proudest boast is the progress of science in all domains, there should be in the elementary school, from the first, a course in the elements of the sciences. And this is quite possible; for each science possesses some phases that lie very near to the child’s life. These familiar topics furnish the doors through which the child enters the various special departments. Science, it is claimed, is nothing if not systematic. Indeed, science itself may be defined as the interpretation of each fact through all other facts of a kindred nature. Admitting that this is so, it is no less true that pedagogic method begins with the fragmentary knowledge possessed by the pupil and proceeds to organize it and build it out systematically in all directions. Hence any science may be taken up best on the side nearest the experience of the pupil and the investigation continued until the other parts are reached. Thus the pedagogical order is not always the logical or scientific order. In this respect it agrees with the order of discovery, which is usually something quite different from the logical order; for that is the last thing discovered. The natural sciences have two general divisions: one relating to inorganic matter, as physics and chemistry, and one relating to organic, as botany and zoölogy. There should be a spiral course in natural science, commencing each branch with the most interesting phases to the child. A first course should be given in botany, zoölogy, and physics, so as to treat of the structure and uses of familiar plants and animals, and the explanation of physical phenomena as seen in the child’s playthings, domestic machines, etc. A second course, covering the same subjects, but laying more stress on classification and functions, will build on to the knowledge already acquired from the former lessons and from his recently acquired experience. A third course of weekly lessons, conducted by the teacher as before in a conversational style, with experiments and with a comparison of the facts of observation already in the possession of the children, will go far to helping them to an acquisition of the results of natural science. Those of the children specially gifted for observation in some one or more departments of nature will be stimulated and encouraged to make the most of their gifts.

In the opinion of your committee, there should be set apart a full hour each week for drawing and the same amount for oral lessons in natural science.

The oral lessons in history have already been mentioned. The spiral course, found useful in natural science because of the rapid change in capacity of comprehension by the pupil from his sixth to his fourteenth year, will also be best for the history course, which will begin with biographical adventures of interest to the child, and possessing an important historical bearing. These will proceed from the native land first to England, the parent country, and then to the classic civilizations (Greece and Rome being, so to speak, the grandparent countries of the American colonies). These successive courses of oral lessons adapted respectively to the child’s capacity will do much to make the child well informed on this topic. Oral lessons should never be mere lectures, but more like Socratic dialogues, building up a systematic knowledge partly from what is already known, partly by new investigations, and partly by comparison of authorities.

The best argument in favor of weekly oral lessons in natural science and general history is the actual experiences of teachers who have for some time used the plan. It has been found that the lessons in botany, zoölogy, and physics give the pupil much aid in learning his geography, and other lessons relating to nature, while the history lessons assist very much his comprehension of literature, and add interest to geography.

It is understood by your Committee that the lessons in physiology and hygiene (with special reference to the effects of stimulants and narcotics) required by State laws should be included in this oral course in natural science. Manual training, so far as the theory and use of the tools for working in wood and iron are concerned, has just claims on the elementary school for a reason similar to that which admits natural science. From science have proceeded useful inventions for the aid of all manner of manufactures and transportation. The child of to-day lives in a world where machinery is constantly at his hand. A course of training in wood- and iron-work, together with experimental knowledge of physics or natural philosophy, makes it easy for him to learn the management of such machines. Sewing and cookery have not the same, but stronger claims for a place in school. One-half day in each week for one-half a year each in the seventh and eighth grades will suffice for manual training, the sewing and cookery being studied by the girls, and the wood- and iron-work by the boys. It should be mentioned, however, that the advocates of manual training in iron- and wood-work recommend these branches for secondary schools, because of the greater maturity of body, and the less likelihood to acquire wrong habits of manipulation, in the third period of four years of school.

Vocal music has long since obtained a well-established place in all elementary schools. The labors of two generations of special teachers have reduced the steps of instruction to such simplicity that whole classes may make as regular progress in reading music as in reading literature.

In regard to physical culture your Committee is agreed that there should be some form of special daily exercises amounting in the aggregate to one hour each week, the same to include the main features of calisthenics, and German, Swedish, or American systems of physical training, but not to be regarded as a substitute for the old-fashioned recess, established to permit the free exercise of the pupils in the open air. Systematic physical training has for its object rather the will training than recreation, and this must not be forgotten. To go from a hard lesson to a series of calisthenic exercises is to go from one kind of will training to another. Exhaustion of the will should be followed by the caprice and wild freedom of the recess. But systematic physical exercise has its sufficient reason in its aid to a graceful use of the limbs, its development of muscles that are left unused or rudimentary unless called forth by special training, and for the help it gives to the teacher in the way of school discipline.

Your Committee would mention in this connection instruction in morals and manners, which ought to be given in a brief series of lessons each year with a view to build up in the mind a theory of the conventionalities of polite and pure-minded society. If these lessons are made too long or too numerous, they are apt to become offensive to the child’s mind. It is of course understood by your Committee that the substantial moral training of the school is performed by the discipline rather than by the instruction in ethical theory. The child is trained to be regular and punctual, and to restrain his desire to talk and whisper—in these things gaining self-control day by day. The essence of moral behavior is self-control. The school teaches good behavior. The intercourse of a pupil with his fellows without evil words or violent actions is insisted on and secured. The higher moral qualities of truth-telling and sincerity are taught in every class exercise that lays stress on accuracy of statement.

Your Committee has already discussed the importance of teaching something of algebraic processes in the seventh and eighth grades with the view to obtaining better methods of solving problems in advanced arithmetic; a majority of your Committee are of the opinion that formal English grammar should be discontinued in the eighth year, and the study of some foreign language, preferably that of Latin, substituted. The educational effect on an English-speaking pupil of taking up a language which, like Latin, uses inflections instead of prepositions, and which further differs from English by the order in which its words are arranged in the sentence, is quite marked, and a year of Latin places a pupil by a wide interval out of the range of the pupil who has continued English grammar without taking up Latin. But the effect of the year’s study of Latin increases the youth’s power of apperception in very many directions by reason of the fact that so much of the English vocabulary used in technical vocabularies, like those of geography, grammar, history, and literature, is from a Latin source, and besides there are so many traces in the form and substance of human learning of the hundreds of years when Latin was the only tongue in which observation and reflection could be expressed.

Your Committee refers to the programme given later in this report for the details of co-ordinating these several branches already recommended.

The difference between elementary and secondary studies.

In recommending the introduction of algebraic processes in the seventh and eighth years—as well as in the recommendation just now made to introduce Latin in the eighth year of the elementary course—your Committee has come face to face with the question of the intrinsic difference between elementary and secondary studies.

Custom has placed algebra, geometry, the history of English literature, and Latin in the rank of secondary studies; also general history, physical geography, and the elements of physics and chemistry. In a secondary course of four years trigonometry may be added to the mathematics; some of the sciences whose elements are used in physical geography may be taken up separately in special treatises, as geology, botany, and physiology. There may be also a study of whole works of English authors, as Shakespeare, Milton, and Scott. Greek is also begun in the second or third year of the secondary course. This is the custom in most public high schools. But in private secondary schools Latin is begun earlier, and so, too, Greek, algebra, and geometry. Sometimes geometry is taken up before algebra, as is the custom in German schools. These arrangements are based partly on tradition, partly on the requirements of higher institutions for admission, and partly on the ground that the intrinsic difficulties in these studies have fixed their places in the course of study. Of those who claim that there is an intrinsic reason for the selection and order of these studies, some base their conclusions on experience in conducting pupils through them, others on psychological grounds. The latter contend, for example, that algebra deals with general forms of calculation, while arithmetic deals with the particular instances of calculation. Whatever deals with the particular instance is relatively elementary, whatever deals with the general form is relatively secondary. In the expression a + b = c algebra indicates the form of all addition. This arithmetic cannot do, except in the form of a verbal rule describing the steps of the operation: its examples are all special instances falling under the general form given in algebra. If, therefore, arithmetic is an elementary branch, algebra is relatively to it a secondary branch. So, too, geometry, though not directly based on arithmetic, has to presuppose an acquaintance with it when it reduces spatial functions into numerical forms, as, for example, in the measurement of surfaces and solids, and in ascertaining the ratio of the circumference to the radius, and of the hypothenuse to the two other sides of the right-angled triangle. Geometry, moreover, deals with necessary relations; its demonstrations reach universal and necessary conclusions, holding good not merely in such material shapes as we have met with in actual experience, but with all examples possible, past, present, or future. Such knowledge transcending experience is intrinsically secondary as compared with the first acquaintance with geometric shapes in concrete examples.

In the case of geometry it is claimed by some that what is called “inventional geometry” may be properly introduced into the elementary grades. By this some mean the practice with blocks in the shape of geometric solids, and the construction of different figures from the same; others mean the rediscovery by the pupil for himself of the necessary relations demonstrated by Euclid. The former—exercises of construction with blocks—are well enough in the kindergarten, where they assist in learning number, as well as in the analysis of material forms. But its educational value is small for pupils advanced into the use of books. The original discovery of Euclid’s demonstrations, on the other hand, belongs more properly to higher education than to elementary. In the geometrical text-books, recently introduced into secondary schools, there is so much of original demonstration required that the teacher is greatly embarrassed on account of the differences in native capacity for mathematics that develop among the pupils of the same class in solving the problems of invention. A few gifted pupils delight in the inventions, and develop rapidly in power, while the majority of the class use too much time over them, and thus rob the other branches of the course of study, or else fall into the bad practice of getting help from others in the preparation of their lessons. A few in every class fall hopelessly behind and are discouraged. The result is an attempt on the part of the teacher to correct the evil by requiring a more thorough training in the mathematical studies preceding, and the consequent delay of secondary pupils in the lower grades of the course in order to bring up their “inventional geometry.” Many, discouraged, fail to go on; many more fail to reach higher studies because unable to get over the barrier unnecessarily placed before them by teachers who desire that no pupils except natural geometricians shall enter into higher studies.

Physical geography in its scientific form is very properly made a part of the secondary course of study. The pupil in his ninth year of work can profitably acquire the scientific technique of geology, botany, zoölogy, meteorology, and ethnology, and in the following years take up those sciences separately and push them further, using the method of actual investigation. The subject-matter of physical geography is of very high interest to the pupil who has studied geography in the elementary grades after an approved method. It takes up the proximate grounds and causes for the elements of difference on the earth’s surface, already become familiar to him through his elementary studies, and pushes them back into deeper, simpler, and more satisfactory principles. This study performs the work also of correlating the sciences that relate to organic nature by showing their respective uses to man. From the glimpses which the pupil gets of mineralogy, geology, botany, zoölogy, ethnology, and meteorology in their necessary connection as geographic conditions he sees the scope and grand significance of those separate inquiries. A thirst is aroused in him to pursue his researches into their domains. He sees, too, the borderlands in which new discoveries may be made by the enterprising explorer.

Physics, including what was called until recently “natural philosophy,” after Newton’s Principia (Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica), implies more knowledge of mathematics for its thorough discussion than the secondary pupil is likely to possess. In fact, the study of this branch in college thirty years ago was crippled by the same cause. It should follow the completion of analytical geometry. Notwithstanding this, a very profitable study of this subject may be made in the second year of the high school or preparatory school, although the formulas can then be understood in so far as they imply elementary algebra only. The pupil does not get the most exact notions of the quantitative laws that rule matter in its states of motion and equilibrium, but he does see the action of forces as qualitative elements of phenomena, and understand quite well the mechanical inventions by which men subdue them for his use and safety. Even in the elementary grades the pupil can seize very many of these qualitative aspects and learn the explanation of the mechanical phenomena of nature, and other applications of the same principles in invention, as, for example, gravitation in falling bodies: its measurement by the scales; the part it plays in the pump, the barometer, the pendulum; cohesion in mud, clay, glue, paste, mortar, cement, etc.; capillary attraction in lamp-wicks, sponges, sugar, the sap in plants; the applications of lifting by the lever, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw; heat in the sun, combustion, friction, steam, thermometer, conduction, clothing, cooking, etc.; the phenomena of light, electricity, magnetism, and the explanation of such mechanical devices as spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, prisms, photographic cameras, electric tension in bodies, lightning, mariner’s compass, horseshoe magnet, the telegraph, the dynamo. This partially qualitative study of forces and mechanical inventions has the educational effect of enlightening the pupil, and emancipating him from the network of superstition that surrounds him in the child world, partly of necessity and partly by reason of the illiterate adults that he sometimes meets with in the persons of nurses, servants, and tradespeople, whose occupations have more attraction for him than those of cultured people. The fairy world is a world of magic, of immediate interventions of supernatural spiritual beings, and while this is proper enough for the child up to the time of the school, and in a lessening degree for some time after, it is only negative and harmful in adult manhood and womanhood. It produces arrested development of powers of observation and reflection in reference to phenomena, and stops the growth of the soul at the infantine stage of development. Neither is this infantine stage of wonder and magic more religious than the stage of disillusion through the study of mathematics and physics. It is the arrest of religious development, also, at the stage of fetichism. The highest religion, that of pure Christianity, sees in the world infinite mediations, all for the purpose of developing independent individuality; the perfection of human souls not only in one kind of piety, namely, that of the heart, but in the piety of the intellect that beholds truth, the piety of the will that does good deeds wisely, the piety of the senses that sees the beautiful and realizes it in works of art. This is the Christian idea of divine Providence as contrasted with the heathen idea of that Providence, and the study of natural philosophy is an essential educational requisite in its attainment, although a negative means. Of course there is danger of replacing the spiritual idea of the divine by the dynamical or mechanical idea, and thus arresting the mind at the stage of pantheism instead of fetichism. But this danger can be avoided by further education through secondary into higher education, whose entire spirit and method are comparative and philosophical in the best sense of the term. For higher education seems to have as its province the correlation of the several branches of human learning in the unity of the spiritual view furnished by religion to our civilization. By it one learns to see each branch, each science or art or discipline, in the light of all the others. This higher or comparative view is essential to any completeness of education, for it alone prevents the one-sidedness of hobbies, or “fads,” as they are called in the slang of the day. It prevents also the bad effects that flow from the influence of what are termed “self-educated men,” who for the most part carry up with them elementary methods of study, or at best, secondary methods, which accentuate the facts and relations of natural and spiritual phenomena, but do not deal with their higher correlations. The comparative method cannot, in fact, be well introduced until the student is somewhat advanced, and has already completed his elementary course of study dealing with the immediate aspects of the world, and his secondary course dealing with the separate formal and dynamical aspects that lie next in order behind the facts of first observation. Higher education in a measure unifies these separate formal and dynamic aspects, corrects their one-sidedness, and prevents the danger of what is so often noted in the self-educated men who unduly exaggerate some one of the subordinate aspects of the world and make it a sort of first principle.

Here your Committee finds in its way the question of the use of the full scientific method in the teaching of science in the elementary school. The true method has been called the method of investigation, but that method as used by the child is only a sad caricature of the method used by the mature scientific man, who has long since passed through the fragmentary observation and reflection that prevail in the period of childhood, as well as the tendencies to exaggeration of the importance of one or another branch of knowledge at the expense of the higher unity that correlates all; an exaggeration that manifests itself in the possession and use of a hobby. The ideal scientific man has freed himself from obstacles of this kind, whether psychological or objective. What astronomical observers call the subjective coefficient must be ascertained and eliminated from the record that shows beginnings, endings, and rates. There is a possibility of perfect specialization in a scientific observer only after the elementary and secondary attitudes of mind have been outgrown. An attempt to force the child into the full scientific method by specialization would cause an arrest of his development in the other branches of human learning outside of his specialty. He could not properly inventory the data of his own special sphere unless he knew how to recognize the defining limits or boundaries that separate his province from its neighbors. The early days of science abounded in examples of confusion of provinces in the inventories of their data. It is difficult, even now, to decide where physics and chemistry leave off, and biology begins.

Your Committee does not attempt to state the exact proportion in which the child, at his various degrees of advancement, may be able to dispense with the guiding influence of teacher and text-book in his investigations, but they protest strongly against the illusion under which certain zealous advocates of the early introduction of scientific method seem to labor. They ignore in their zeal the deduction that is to be made for the guiding hand of the teacher, who silently furnishes to the child the experience that he lacks, and quietly directs his special attention to this or to that phase, and prevents him from hasty or false generalization as well as from undue exaggeration of single facts or principles. Here the teacher adds the needed scientific outlook which the child lacks, but which the mature scientist possesses for himself.

It is contended by some that the scientific frame of mind is adapted only to science, but not to art, literature, and religion, which have something essential that science does not reach; not because of the incompleteness of the sciences themselves, but because of the attitude of the mind assumed in the observation of nature. In analytic investigation there is isolation of parts one from another, with a view to find the sources of the influences which produce the phenomena shown in the object. The mind brings everything to the test of this idea. Every phenomenon that exists comes from beyond itself, and analysis will be able to trace the source.

Now, this frame of mind, which insists on a foreign origin of all that goes to constitute an object, debars itself in advance from the province of religion, art, and literature as well as of philosophy. For self-determination, personal activity, is the first principle assumed by religion, and it is tacitly assumed by art and literature, Classic and Christian. The very definition of philosophy implies this, for it is the attempt to explain the world by the assumption of a first principle, and to show that all classes of objects imply that principle as ultimate presupposition. According to this view it is important not to attempt to hasten the use of a strictly scientific method on the part of the child. In his first years he is acquiring the results of civilization rather as an outfit of habits, usages, and traditions than as a scientific discovery. He cannot be expected to stand over against the culture of his time, and challenge one and all of its conventionalities to justify themselves before his reason. His reason is too weak. He is rather in the imitation stage of mind than in that of criticism. He will not reach the comparative or critical method until the era of higher education.

However this may be, it is clear that the educational value of science and its method is a very important question, and that on it depends the settlement of the question where specialization may begin. To commence the use of the real scientific method would imply a radical change also in methods from the beginning. This may be realized by considering the hold which even the kindergarten retains upon symbolism and upon art and literature. But in the opinion of a majority of your Committee natural science itself should be approached, in the earliest years of the elementary school, rather in the form of results with glimpses into the methods by which these results were reached. In the last two years (the seventh and eighth) there may be some strictness of scientific form and an exhibition of the method of discovery. The pupil, too, may to some extent put this method in practice himself. In the secondary school there should be some laboratory work. But the pupil cannot be expected to acquire for himself fully the scientific method of dealing with nature until the second part of higher education—its post-graduate work. Nevertheless this good should be kept in view from the first year of the elementary school, and there should be a gradual and continual approach to it.

In the study of general history appears another branch of the secondary course. History of the native land is assumed to be an elementary study. History of the world is certainly a step further away from the experience of the child. It is held by some teachers to be in accordance with proper method to begin with the foreign relations of one’s native land and to work outward to the world-history. The European relations involved in the discovery and colonization of America furnish the only explanation to a multitude of questions that the pupil has started in the elementary school. He should move outward from what he has already learned, by the study of a new concentric circle of grounds and reasons, according to this view. This, however, is not the usual course taken. On beginning secondary history the pupil is set back face to face with the period of tradition, just when historic traces first make their appearance. He is, by this arrangement, broken off from the part of history that he has become acquainted with, and made to grapple with that period which has no relation to his previous investigations. It is to be said, however, that general history lays stress on the religious thread of connection, though less now than formerly. The world history is a conception of the great Christian thinker, St. Augustine, who held that the world and its history is a sort of antiphonic hymn, in which God reads his counsels, and the earth and man read the responses. He induced Orosius, his pupil, to sketch a general history in the spirit of his view. It was natural that the Old Testament histories, and especially the chapters of Genesis, should furnish the most striking part of its contents. This general history was connected with religion, and brought closer to the experience of the individual than the history of his own people. To commence history with the Garden of Eden, the Fall of Man, and the Noachian Deluge was to begin with what was most familiar to all minds, and most instructive, because it concerned most nearly the conduct of life. Thus religion furnished the apperceptive material by which the early portions of history were recognized, classified, and made a part of experience.

Now that studies in archæology, especially those in the Nile and Euphrates valleys, are changing the chronologies and the records of early times and adding new records of the past, bringing to light national movements and collisions of peoples, together with data by which to determine the status of their industrial civilization, their religious ideas, and the form of their literature and art, the concentric arrangement of all this material around the history of the chosen people as a nucleus is no longer possible. The question has arisen, therefore, whether general history should not be rearranged for the secondary school, and made to connect with American history for apperceptive material rather than with Old Testament history. To this it has been replied with force that the idea of a world history, as St. Augustine conceived it, is the noblest educative ideal ever connected with the subject of history. Future versions of general history will not desert this standpoint, we are told, even if they take as their basis that of ethnology and anthropology, for these, too, will exhibit a plan in human history—an educative principle that leads nations toward freedom and science, because the Creator of nature has made it, in its fundamental constitution, an evolution or progressive development of individuality. Thus the idea of divine Providence is retained, though made more comprehensive by bringing the whole content of natural laws within his will as his method of work.

These considerations, we are reminded by the partisans of humanity studies, point back to the educative value of history as corrective of the one-sidedness of the method of science. Science seeks explanation in the mechanical conditions of, and impulses received from, the environment, while history keeps its gaze fixed on human purposes, and studies the genesis of national actions through the previous stages of feelings, convictions, and conscious ideas. In history the pupil has for his object self-activity, reaction against environment, instead of mechanism, or activity through another.

The history of English literature is another study of the secondary school. It is very properly placed beyond the elementary school, for as taught it consists largely of the biographies of men of letters. The pupils who have not yet learned any great work of literature should not be pestered with literary biography, for at that stage the greatness of the men of letters cannot be seen. Plutarch makes great biographies because he shows heroic struggles and great deeds. The heroism of artists and poets consists in sacrificing all for the sake of their creations. The majority of them come off sadly at the hands of the biographer, for the reason that the very sides of their lives are described which they had slighted and neglected for the sake of the Muses. The prophets of Israel did not live in city palaces, but in caves; they did not wear fine raiment, nor feed sumptuously, nor conform to the codes of polite society. They were no courtiers when they approached the king. They neglected all the other institutions—family, productive industry, and state—for the sake of one, the Church, and even that not the established ceremonial of the people, but a higher and more direct communing with Jehovah. So with artists and men of letters, it is more or less the case, that the institutional side of their lives is neglected, or unsymmetrical, or if this is not the case, it will be found prosaic and uneventful, throwing no light on their matchless productions.

For these reasons, should not the present use of literary biography as it exists in secondary schools, and is gradually making its way into elementary schools, be discouraged, and the time now given to it devoted to the study of literary works of art? It will be admitted that the exposure of the foibles of artists has an immoral tendency on youth: for example, one affects to be a poet, and justifies laxity and self-indulgence through the example of Byron. Those who support this view hold that we should not dignify the immoral and defective side of life by making it a branch of study in school.

Correlation by synthesis of studies.

Your Committee would mention another sense in which the expression correlation of studies is sometimes used. It is held by advocates of an artificial centre of the course of study. They use, for example, De Foe’s Robinson Crusoe for a reading exercise, and connect with it the lessons in geography and arithmetic. It has been pointed out by critics of this method that there is always danger of covering up the literary features of the reading matter under accessories of mathematics and natural science. If the material for other branches is to be sought for in connection with the literary exercise, it will distract the attention from the poetic unity. On the other hand, arithmetic and geography cannot be unfolded freely and comprehensively if they are to wait on the opportunities afforded in a poem or novel for their development. A correlation of this kind, instead of being a deeper correlation, such as is found in all parts of human learning by the studies of the college and university, is rather a shallow and uninteresting kind of correlation, that reminds one of the system of mnemonics, or artificial memory, which neglects the association of facts and events with their causes and the history of their evolution, and looks for unessential quips, puns, or accidental suggestions with a view to strengthening the memory. The effect of this is to weaken the power of systematic thinking which deals with essential relations, and substitute for it a chaotic memory that ties together things through false and seeming relations, not of the things and events, but of the words that denote them.

The correlation of geography and arithmetic and history in and through the unity of a work of fiction is at best an artificial correlation, which will stand in the way of the true objective correlation. It is a temporary scaffolding made for school purposes. Instruction should avoid such temporary structures as much as possible, and when used they should be only used for the day, and not for the year, because of the danger of building up an apperceptive centre in the child’s mind that will not harmonize with the true apperceptive centre required by the civilization. The story of Robinson Crusoe has intense interest to the child as a lesson in sociology, showing him the helplessness of isolated man and the re-enforcement that comes to him through society. It shows the importance of the division of labor. All children should read this book in the later years of the elementary course, and a few profitable discussions may be had in school regarding its significance. But De Foe painted in it only the side of adventure that he found in his countrymen in his epoch, England after the defeat of the Armada having taken up a career of conquest on the seas, ending by colonization and a world commerce. The liking for adventure continues to this day among all Anglo-Saxon peoples, and beyond other nationalities there is in English-speaking populations a delight in building up civilization from the very foundation. This is only, however, one phase of the Anglo-Saxon mind. Consequently the history of Crusoe is not a proper centre for a year’s study in school. It omits cities, governments, the world commerce, the international process, the Church, the newspaper and book from view, and they are not even reflected in it.

Your Committee would call attention in this connection to the importance of the pedagogical principle of analysis and isolation as preceding synthesis and correlation. There should be rigid isolation of the elements of each branch for the purpose of getting a clear conception of what is individual and peculiar in a special province of learning. Otherwise one will not gain from each its special contribution to the whole. That there is some danger from the kind of correlation that essays to teach all branches in each will be apparent from this point of view.