without conscious obedience to definite laws. It is the latter phase to which I refer here. It has its definite claims, and offers definite rewards. A multitude of educational facts in the current history of education shows the personal attitudes of the school public,-teachers, students, and patrons. These facts can generally be tabulated and presented in a large way to exposition students, so as to impress them with the present status and trend of education from various view-points. The number of students following particular courses or pursuing particular studies; the ratio of the teaching force to the number of students in different departments; the number of professionally trained teachers in the different sections of our school system, including the university; the number of teachers who are giving attention to the study of the child and adolescent, or familiarizing themselves with the results of such study,these and a hundred other statistical facts can be included in this part of exposition work.

If all the leading problems of education are given recognition, still other advantages will follow. A minor benefit results from the opportunity to secure at an exposition much that is now gathered by means of "questionnaires," with which teachers and school officers are plied and sometimes harassed. A larger benefit comes from the greater educative value derived by school authorities from the work of preparing school exhibits.

Finally there should be a place for the ideal in a school exhibit. Progressive educators and investigators see beyond the present aim, course, method, and organization. Some are using the reliable material which has been accumulatingmaterial eloquent of newer and better things-to show the direction of advance or to formulate new plans. This movement should be encouraged. It should have graphic representation at the next great American exposition. The actual and the ideal will thus touch each other. This is not to court the visionary, for this work, being based on well-defined experiment and fact, is in close touch with the present. It is true that all sure progress comes through the patient process of evolution, but everywhere we are facing the ideal, and influenced by it. It is a part of practical life, and even suggested by it. History,

both past and present, is full of illustrations showing the power of the ideal to influence, direct, and hasten the evolutionary process. It is a part of the evolution of civilization, in which the human element in things is working under the inspiration of an ever-widening conception of the Divine. From its very nature the exposition is admirably fitted not only to picture the present, but also to enforce the ideal.

The Co-ordination of Polytechnic
Schools

S. EDWARD WARREN, C.E., NEWTON, MASS.

HE foreordination of polytechnic schools is attested by the constitution of man as a being endowed with large capacities for mastery over nature by making it tributary to him. Their co-ordination consists in placing and holding them in what is their true and should be their duly recognized relative position in a properly organized, complete educational system.

So long ago as 1866, in a pamphlet entitled Notes on Polytechnic or Scientific Schools, I said, in a "prefatory note," that these . pages, put forth in advance of a possible fuller treatment. . are

an attempt to respond, even if but . . .

poly

provisionally, to much earnest inquiry concerning technic schools; and to the evident . . . need of correct popular information relative to them. It is hoped that they may also contribute to unity of sentiment and action . . among their friends. . . especially their alumni, and their officers, and thoughtful and earnest members."

I have never hitherto found time, among many engrossing new cares and the duties incident to then unforeseen changes, to make and put forth the never wholly forgotten "fuller treatment" just alluded to. But a notable article by Prof. D. C. Jackson, in Science for April 24, 1903, entitled "The Potency of Engineering Schools, and Their Imperfections," reinforced by another article by Prof. R. H. Thurston, on "Functions of Technical Science in Education . . .," in Science for June 19, 1903, to which I should now, writing later, add "The General Efficiency of Technical Education," by Prof. W. C. Mendenhall, in Science for September 4, 1903, have so far revived my 'long suspended but never lost interest in my subject as to prompt me to prepare the present article. In it I propose to limit myself substantially to what have long seemed obvious fundamentals, with their normal consequences, yet which still

wait for fuller general recognition, and thence for more complete practical realization.

Historic, as distinguished from present-day, meanings have more or less encumbered or confused definitions of the successive grades of institutions of learning. Thus, taking the broadest of institutional terms in the field of education, schools have been defined1 as "collections of persons brought together . . . for the purpose of imparting and receiving instruction." Further, "The word school is commonly applied to an organization intended to provide elementary, secondary, or professional instruction, and not to an institution designed to offer exclusively non-professional studies of college or university grade." Here, although a college, or a university, actually is a kind of school, according to the former of the two above quoted definitions, we have in the second definition the familiar contrasted coupling of the words school and college. Let us take a moment to reconcile the two definitions. When, for example, a father is asked if he is going to send his boy to college when he has done going to school, everyone would understand that only a secondary school, whether academy or high school, was meant. No one would understand that the father, in answering this question, had a thought of sending his son to college after graduating from a law, medical, or other professional school. Thus the college clearly appears to be not merely distinct in name and characteristic purpose, but also in educational grade; so that we have, 1. Elementary schools; 2. Secondary schools; 3. Colleges; 4. Professional schools.

To avoid suspicion of ambiguity the briefest rehearsal of the distinctive sphere of each of these grades may be pardoned.

Elementary schools, sometimes sub-graded as primary, intermediate, and grammar schools, are devoted to the most universally necessary elements of knowledge, reading and writing, well called the pass keys to all other knowledge that the pupil may come to desire or need; arithmetic and geometry as indispensable to the business and mechanical wants of common life; and some beginnings in other most generally useful knowledge, as history and geography; with such touches, at least, of nature

1. Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia, article on "Schools."

study and manual training congruous to the locality as recognize nature as companionably linked to man, and also recognize the hand as the profitably teachable servant of the mind, and thence by reflex action a strengthener of the mind itself.

Secondary schools thence lead the growing pupil through larger study to a higher outlook, whence his broader view, seen also with larger self-acquaintance, may fairly enable him to judge, under advice, whether he wishes to go further in other than the great universal school of real life, and, if so, in what direction.

The college here meets and conducts those who do desire still fuller and higher knowledge for the love of it, and as mental gymnastics for disciplining the mental faculties, in behalf of the benefit of such discipline, or "culture," in whatever subsequent station or pursuit one may be found.

Finally, the professional school waits to receive and train any whose chosen life pursuit demands the full, exact and minute special knowledge immediately belonging to such pursuit, whether law, medicine, divinity, etc., or architecture, engineering, mining, etc.,-all to the end that the professional man shall most completely realize the ideal, that special professional life should rest as a massive column on the broad and ample base of the three preceding educational grades.

Returning from this digression, the same result, before found as to the proper number and natural order of educational grades, is reached by noting the growing tendency to require the college B.A. degree, or a more or less substantial equivalent for it, for admission to professional schools. For example, a number of French, Scotch, English, and United States theological schools are named in the Cyclopedia article before referred to as admitting only bachelors of arts to their courses, and as conferring the degree of bachelor of divinity after three years. Likewise, while medical schools-also sometimes styled colleges-were first regularly organized in the United States in 1765, yet no uniform requirements for admission to them were required until 1892; but now, for example, the supervising body known as the University Regents of the State of New York "requires that, there,