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Editorial.

OSTON, and New England generally, may well be congratulated upon the success of the recent meeting of the N. E. A. It was a great gathering, and notable in many ways. It was enormous in point of registration. It was notable in the well arranged and well executed programs. It was noticeable among meetings of this body, for the large attendance at the several sessions of the different sections. Boston did herself proud in the amount of money raised for local administration and entertainment; for the facility with which the business of the organization was carried on, and for the completeness of messenger, guide, and information service, at the meeting places and throughout the city.

Boston and the official management of the N. E. A. deserve the thanks of the teaching profession throughout the country. It has set a high standard by which to measure future meetings. But certainly to no other one man is the great success of the meeting due as to President Eliot. His touch was apparent in every important proceeding. It followed a master mind. His addresses were models of fine speech and courageous thought. As presiding officer of the large meetings he was ideal. As genial host he will be lovingly remembered by thousands who saw and met him for the first time. President Eliot's meeting of the N. E. A. will go down in American educational history as a notable and profitable session.

Next to the meetings in profit to teachers, far more than the meetings in many cases, were the visits of Western school people to points of historic interest in and near Boston. Never did any body of teachers so use their one available week, and never was Boston so used, perhaps, as during this week of July 6 to 13, 1903. There were few teachers who did not see something each day besides the meetings; and there are few places of real historical interest that altogether escaped visitors during these days.

It was a time of pilgrimages, and manly resolves, and patriotic fervor, and schoolmaster devotion. Not New England and colonial history alone will be taught with better spirit this new school year, but all history, as the new view has found the universal element in social institutions. Not the Revolution only, but the Civil War, and the great Western frontier, and the inland trade, and the industrial. problems of a nation, will be seen to have larger meanings, and to

concern the whole people. These thousands of teachers cannot quite return to mere lesson hearing and the making of perfunctory charts of historic dates and names. The N. E. A. of 1903 afforded a means of liberalizing education to thousands of teachers who saw the East for the first time.

THE

HE summer just closed has been a notable one for teachers in many ways. The short terms of schools, for review, academic and professional studies have everywhere been crowded. The session. at Harvard has had nearly twice the usual enrollment. Chautauqua, and Martha's Vineyard, and Knoxville, and Nashville, and Chicago, and Denver, and Omaha, have all been full to their several capacities.

Thousands of teachers have had from two to six weeks of more or less serious study. And it is well. Of the ten to twelve weeks of vacation, no teacher will be the worse now for having spent one fourth to one half the time in real work. The colleges, and special schools, and summer Chautauquas, and private classes, have themselves reaped a rich harvest, and done an incalculable good to teachers. great encouragement for the year to know that because of these many schools, and the Boston outing and foreign travel, thousands of children will have instruction that is all the better because it is fresh and at first hand.

It offers

It is encouraging in another respect, also, this large summer school attendance. The colleges and universities are doing both teachers and students, and themselves, a commendable service in opening their classrooms and laboratories and libraries to this freer use by a hungering public.

In this respect the last ten years mark a comparatively new era among these higher institutions. Their equipments are made more generally available, the learning of their faculties, their facilities for research, the atmosphere of culture, and the stimulus to study. Because of these privileges thousands are drawn into the student habit, teachers become more scholarly, the uses of the laboratory and the library are brought to many who do not reach the lecture and classroom of the college.

Such schools dignify real learning. The mushroom schools of a generation ago have less and less repute, as the real work of the colleges becomes known. It pays to make the best work of the schools familiar to the rank and file of teachers and students. To some, of mediocre ability, it will be found to be only veneer; but to many it will be real inspiration for better things. The colleges which use their

rich equipments for longer terms are doing themselves a service by increasing their patronage, and enriching the work of the lower schools through the hundreds of aspiring teachers.

EW educational topics are more "in the air" at present than those which concern the shortening of the courses of school study. With twelve years given to the elementary and secondary studies, and four years to the college course, the period seems long in preparation for professional studies. The problem is not by any means as simple as at first appears. More than five out of six pupils who reach the high school stop short of any pretense at professional training, and most of them fail to reach the college. Indeed, in most cities, the serious question is one which concerns the thousands who do not complete even a high school course. What shortening or lengthening of the course is required in the interest of these?

Without entering upon any extended argument for or against the shortening of the college course, the editorial venture is submitted here that the college course is none too long as it is, and for those who attempt it.

Were the elementary course reduced to seven years, and the high school so constituted that the stronger pupils might finish it in three or three and a half years, the four years of the college course could yet be taken, and the professional studies be begun by the time the student is about twenty years of age.

even six

Much time is wasted in the later elementary grades. Nowhere else in the school course is there such danger from habits of dawdling as during the period from ten to fifteen years of age. Attention during these years to the fundamentals in education, hard work for short hours, and sensible teaching, would accomplish far more in seven, or schools now do in eight years. years, than many The later years of the secondary school, and the entire period of the college, stand for a certain breadth of discipline and the culture side of life's problems that this industrial age can ill afford to lose. These later years prepare the leaders in great public interests,-in the professions, in commerce and industry, in finance and invention; and the college and university must put the catholicity of their training as leaders, beyond the peradventure of narrowness or veneer, or mere show, or even unreflecting skill. Save to the college its full time. Covet better instruction in the grades that will make possible a reduction in the years before college, and save the high school to many who do not now reach its classes.

ON

NE of the most interesting movements of the day in school and other educational affairs is that for a training having a distinct civic purpose. In many states and radiating from a few important centers, the influence is gaining in both force and purposefulness.

The various forms of village and home improvement societies; clubs among youth and adults to encourage the growth and care of trees and flowers; women's clubs having civic interests; organized concern in municipal affairs; the institutional church and the socialized pulpit; public interest in and intelligent study of great economic and social problems; movements among interested parties for the improvement of factory conditions; numerous citizens' parties and efforts to purify the ballot; compulsory school attendance laws and the regulation of child labor; the free platform and press discussion of public economic and civic programs; art and park improvement societies in cities; vacation schools and playgrounds; evening classes for the day employed; free public lectures for adults on current and scientific problems; freer access of all classes to libraries, art galleries, museums, parks and improving collections; the utilization of vacant lands in cities and their nearby suburbs; the extension of free mail deliveries; more intelligent landscape gardening in open places; more systematic efforts to introduce and preserve an attractive and wholesome cleanliness in cities; the lessening of the smoke menace in manufacturing cities; protests and legislation against obnoxious bill boards along or in view of highways; the employment of fine art decorations in schools and public halls, along the highways, and in open parks; the terracing and ornamentation of unsightly hillsides and river and lake fronts; the construction of artificial lakes when natural bodies of water are wanting; the establishment of public drinking fountains; the preservation of natural picturesque features; the care in supplying abundant and pure water; better systems of sewerage and general sanitation; safe disposal of garbage and waste; various forms of school extension; the arts and crafts societies; various efforts at rural improvement, are some of the better developed movements for civic improvement.

It is a great day, and the time seems to be ripe for schools to do far more than has yet been done elsewhere than in a few experimental centers, to organize the interest as a means of educating the youth. Whatever other purposes the school maintains, it should look to fitting the youth for the best possible citizenship.

PROG

ROGRAMS of association meetings and recent institutes, lectures, and personal conferences during the vacation now closing, emphasize the very general interest shown by school men in the educational uses of thinking that involves doing. The term manual training must greatly increase its content, if it is to serve to compass the current thought on constructive exercises, or a new term must be found. Many years ago Whittier wrote,

"No task is ill where hand and brain

And skill and strength have equal gain,"

and those who have to do with directed education are interested to discover the sequence of school tasks that shall best accomplish this purpose. Whether it shall be child work at primitive industries, the making of things mentioned or suggested by other lessons, and the general reading, the following of an arbitrary series of formal constructive exercises using the several plastic materials, or the voluntary performances of children with raw materials, stimulated by the wise teacher who adds skill to knowledge, most teachers now agree that, more or less regularly, as a part of every day's work, each child should carry into concrete uses the knowledge he has acquired. Only so is an experience completed, rounded out. Knowledge becomes his only who has used it, lived it, concreted it in conduct or service. Work with tools, few or many, and work that employs no tool but the hand and such instruments as the hand extemporizes; the uses of the senses in original observation, heading their own voyage of discovery; guiding behavior through individual purpose; whatever selfinitiative that adjusts means to self-appointed ends, partakes of the nature of the only constructive work that seems to be much worth while. Manual training as usually understood is much, but not all. Sloyd has its value. But both of them, and the scores of similar and related hand exercises more or less common in the better schools, are phases only of the movement that requires the addition of doing as the complement of thinking,-resourceful, interested, self-directed doing to round out interested thinking.

The program of the recent meeting of the N. E. A. was rich in every department in suggestion of the serviceableness of such principle.