All our spare time we spent at the Cook County Normal Summer School, Colonel Parker having given us free passes to all lectures. There we met teachers from all parts of the States and from Canada.
We also visited the University Settlement in one of the poorest parts of Chicago. It is known as Hull House, and is conducted on much the same lines as Toynbee Hall.
From Chicago we went to Chautauqua, the huge encampment by the side of Lake Chautauqua, in New York State. Here for several months in the year people gather (no longer in log huts, but in hotels and boarding-houses erected for the purpose) to attend the summer school, or the religious meetings, or simply to enjoy the social life and popular lectures, concerts, etc., which make the time pass quickly for them. Not only, however, in the summer does Chautauqua exercise its influence. An elaborate system of reading circles and education by correspondence has been established, and connects one summer meeting with another. It does educational work among those who are reached in no other way, and its influence is felt not only throughout the States and America generally, but even in Europe and far Japan.
We returned to New York through Ithaca, where we stopped to see Cornell University. A University Summer School was being held, and we were able to attend some lectures, and interviewed one or two professors.
A breakdown of the train by which we were to leave Ithaca delayed our journey, so we arrived in New York too late to see any more institutions, and sailed from thence feeling sad at the thought that such a delightful tour was ended; but glad, too, at the remembrance of the many friends we had made, and feeling that America would be no more to us a land of strangers.
Millicent Hughes.
REPORT I
By Amy Blanche Bramwell, B.Sc.
IN making my report of observations in one department of the Educational System of the United States, I am anxious to point out, at the very outset, that the nature of that System (its complexity, its many modifications, and the vast extent it covers) renders the work of drawing general conclusions from the data supplied by the observations of one person a task of extreme difficulty. The difficulty is further increased by the fact that my personal observations were limited to the North-Eastern States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois. These States, although covering only a small portion of the whole field of observation, differ so greatly as regards conditions and organization that they exhibit results widely opposed, and furnish facts from which it is not easy to generalize.
I had, however, many and valuable opportunities of supplementing personal observations by a further study of educational matters in the exhibit of the Educational Department of the World’s Fair, and by attending the Educational Congresses held in Chicago in July, 1893. The meetings held during the Educational Congress were, in themselves, disappointing. Nevertheless they enabled me to meet educationalists and teachers of all kinds from all parts of the United States, and to learn, by personal interviews, facts which it would have been impossible to gain by merely visiting educational institutions. I found throughout my visit that personal interviews were an important means of supplementing the observation of work actually done in the schools. In some departments, the most valuable information I gained was acquired in this way, this being especially true in connection with the Training of Secondary Teachers in the Eastern States, where the subject, although widely discussed, is only just beginning to have any practical outcome.
In reporting on the Training of Teachers in the United States, I have chiefly confined myself to the work done in:—