In the departmental work in our public schools there seems to be no system. Each teacher prescribes home work without any knowledge of what others of the same grade do, and without any apparent consideration in favor of the individual pupil. The result is that the total amount for each night is absurdly in excess of the capacity of the ordinary, or for that matter the extraordinary, pupil. This engenders nervousness and irritability, and is contrary to the ethics of education,—the fundamental law of which should be the preservation of good health. We must have regard for the physical and mental health of each pupil, and as the capacity of each pupil is different, the system is committing an egregious wrong by sacrificing the weaker instead of adapting the burden according to the strength and endurance of the bearer.

The High School System Fallacious.—Even the high schools do not seem to be wisely availing themselves of their opportunity from the eugenic or economic standpoint. According to the report of the Commissioner of Education of the United States the percentage of pupils studying some of the more important subjects in the year 1909-1910 is stated as follows:

Latin, French and German 83 per cent.
Algebra and Geometry 88 " "
English Literature 57 " "
Rhetoric 57 " "
History 55 " "
Domestic Economy,--including
sewing, cooking and household
economies 4 " "

If only barely four per cent. of the girls in our high schools are studying subjects which directly contribute to their efficiency as home-makers, what are the prospects for worthy parenthood in the light of the fact that seventy-five per cent. of all women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are married?

The function of the high school, so far as girls are concerned, is to conserve health, to train for domestic efficiency and motherhood, and if necessary for economic independence. It must also furnish the stimulus for mental culture and direct a proper aspiration for social enlightenment. The curriculum should include biology, hygiene, psychology, home beautifying, the story-telling side of literature, music and a few other studies tending to make woman more like woman than she is to-day. When we have this, teaching for mothercraft will be more nearly realized.

From the eugenic standpoint the present system of education is not satisfactory. To attain our end it is essential to devise other means of education. It must be remembered, however, that no system of education alone can ever enable us to achieve our end, no matter how perfect the system may be. Education can only draw out what is in the child; it cannot draw out what is not there. What the child is, depends upon its heredity. The pedagogic ability of the school-master will never make a genius.

A child's mind may be likened to a block puzzle, each block representing a part of a picture, which can only be completed when they are all arranged in their correct places. Each block is an ancestral legacy,—the child's heritage—and to find its proper place in order to

complete the character picture—to solve the riddle of the jumbled blocks,—is the duty of the educator. He can only manipulate what is there, and the test of his system will depend upon his ability to solve the puzzle of the ancestral blocks. We must divorce ourselves from the idea that a child's mind, at the beginning, is an empty space, to be filled in with knowledge according to the ability of the teacher; or that it is like a sheet of paper, to be written upon. Education, and the educator, is absolutely limited to "drawing out" what heredity put there. Education frequently is given credit which rightly belongs to nature. A child cannot do certain things until nature intends that it should. A baby cannot possibly walk until the nervous mechanism which controls the function of walking is developed. Many children walk at the first attempt, simply because they did not make the first attempt until after nature had perfected the mechanism and the innate ability to walk was already there. Suppose we tried to teach that baby to walk a month before nature was ready; each day we patiently coax it to "step out," we guide it from support to support, and we protect it from stumbling. Some day it walks, and we congratulate ourselves on the victory, when as a matter of fact, we not only had nothing to do with it but were impertinent meddlers, not instructors. Nature was the teacher and she was quite capable of completing the task without our aid. It is reasonable also to assume that any effort to force a natural function is quite likely to do much harm. We have found this to be so in various departments of education when the system was wrongly conceived. In physical culture this principle has been demonstrated over and over again.

If our ancestral legacy is a good one, our picture blocks will be numerous and it will be possible for the proper system of education, aided by a suitable environment, to arrange them into many designs. If, on the other hand, our heredity did not endow us abundantly the number of our picture blocks may be limited to three or four, and they will be easily arranged so as to form a simple picture. The one represents a child whom heredity has richly endowed, the other one whom it has