lems or a greater number of problems illustrating the principles of which the whole class is endeavoring to gain a working knowledge, may be given to those showing mathematical talent; more elaborate or a greater number of observations and reports in nature study may be called for from those whose ability lies in this direction; while in the case of others the surplus ability and energy may find its natural outlet in more reading along certain lines, in more elegant or in a greater number of manual achievements, etc. Further than this, the ability and energy of the more fortunately endowed children, wherever practicable (and that it is generally practicable many teachers have testified), should be employed to some extent in helping their less advanced classmates. This is desirable not alone for the moral culture incidental to this kind of coöperation, nor merely because a child can sometimes learn better from his fellows a little in advance of him than from adults, but also because we learn so much by teaching, that, aside from the moral benefit coming to the child teacher from this cultivation of the spirit of helpfulness, his measure of mastery of the special kind of work in which he excels his fellows will usually be much increased by this kind of exercise of his powers. But however else provision should be made for meeting the needs of the brighter members of the class, a part of their surplus energy and quickness to learn should be taken advantage of to give them more leisure for healthful, out-of-door exercise and recreation, lest they suffer from some of the forms of ill health, especially nervous disorders, to which the child of precocious mental development so often falls victim.

It is evident that the kind of procedure here proposed, in the conduct of the school, involves a large amount of individual work, but the mistake must not be made of supposing that it would favor the abolition of class work. Far from it. A large part of the work of the school would be class work; not only would much of the original exposition and later explanation by the teacher be given to the class as a whole, but much of the "recitation", or response of the pupils, would be given to the class as a whole or to a large group thereof. Indeed, the experience of those who have worked along the lines indicated seems to confirm what might naturally be expected-that the attention of the other members of the class, and the liveliness and excellence of the contribution

of the individual pupil will be all the greater if, for example, the latter has been observing or doing something in nature study with which his classmates are not equally familiar, or if he is reading something which the whole class has not been engaged in reading for a length of time determined by the size of the class and the slowness of the poorest reader it may contain !

$2. As large classes could be successfully conducted by a single teacher under the plan proposed as could be successfully conducted by a single teacher under any existing system. Under this system there would naturally be considerable group work within the class; but these groups would be flexible and constantly changing, and the child would not be working with group A in reading, although unskillful in that kind of activity, just because he might happen to be quick at figures and expert in manual work; the group would not be fixed for the term or for just so many weeks upon the basis of the child's apparent brightness or backwardness in general, but groups would form themselves, as it were, in every kind of school occupation, in accordance with what the different children might be doing in the several lines of school activity. One of the greatest benefits of this would be that the children would not be prejudiced,; and their selfconfidence unduly discouraged or encouraged, as the case might be, by an artificial estimate of their rank among their fellows; but greater mutual respect, a healthier self-confidence, and therefore more pleasure in life and greater zest and success for every individual, would arise out of the recognition of the fact that in school, children do not necessarily belong in one of the two opposite classes, the "bright" and the "dull", but that child A may be able to do this thing better than C and D, while D may be able to do the next thing better than A and not so well as B, and so on.*

Although it would doubtless be well, under any system, to have small classes, containing not more than two dozen children, I would emphasize the fact that this system would lend itself quite as well as any other to economy in the number of teachers, for

*For an especially interesting account of successful individual work in classes of average size, see Mrs. Adelia R. Hornbrook's "Laboratory Method of Teaching Mathematics in Secondary Schools", American Educational Bulletin No. VI, American Book Co., 1895. See also the lecture and bibliography on "Individual Instruction" in the valuable syllabus of Cornell University Course of Friday Lectures on High School Work and Administration, and the elaborate presentation of the results of this method in the case of a foreign language class given in Preston W. Search's "Ideal School." (Appleton, New York).

with the help of one or more assistant teachers or normal training school cadets in each school, who might divide their time between several different classes, one of them assisting teacher A in one room the first part of the forenoon, and working in teacher B's class in another room later in the day,-class teacher's could work successfully with large classes, and thus the expense for teacher's salaries need not be great. The especial function of the cadets or assistant teachers should generally be to help the children individually or in small groups; and the class teacher might well assign the conduct of the extra work of the brighter or more advanced pupils to the assistant, giving her own especial attention more largely to the less able children, because to help bright children, skill in teaching is relatively less important than knowledge of the subject (in which the cadet, fresh from her studies, is generally not much, if at all, inferior to the experienced teacher), whereas the duller children need all the pedagogical skill that the experienced teacher can bring to their assistance.*

It should be borne in mind that under the system herein proposed, in which the same class-teacher would have charge of a class throughout the whole of a given school period corresponding to one of the stages of psycho-physical development referred to in Postulate III, the number of classes in a given school could most readily, and in a manner so flexible as to be almost automatic, be adapted to the size and wealth of the community. While a comparatively small community might not have more than three or four classes in its elementary department (or school of boyhood and girlhood proper), starting one each year, a larger community with its correspondingly larger school fund, might start classes not only semi-annually but quarterly, bi-monthly, or even oftener, so that any child in this stage of psycho-physical development could, at any time throughout the school year, find some class that would be almost perfectly adapted to his exact stage of advancement; and in such large schools, while it would doubtless generally be advisable for a child to continue in the same class, under the same teacher, throughout the whole school period in

*For a discussion of the economy of making use of assistant teachers to work in the same room with the teachers of large classes, see especially the syllabus (with bibliography) of a lecture by Superintendent Kennedy of Batavia, N. Y., given on page 53 of the Cornell University Course of Friday Lectures on High School Work and Administration; and see also Mr. Kennedy's presentation of the subject on page 295 of the National Educational Association's Preceedings for 1901.

question (a period roughly estimated at from three to four years in length in the case of the elementary department), it would be possible at any time to transfer from one class to another a child whose mental and physical growth was especially rapid or especially slow, or who by reason of the peculiarity of his own or his teacher's disposition, should not be getting on well in the class in which he happened at the time to be. In such a large school, having a number of classes started at nearly the same time some of the classes might be proceeding quite rapidly while others were progressing very slowly, the teacher of class A might be able to get most of her class very rapidly over the ground in its study of elementary mathematics but might have to go very slow with them in English, while class B might be making especially rapid progress in English but be slower than other classes in mathematics or in the acquisition of manual dexterity. It would be easy under such conditions to transfer pupils from one class to another so as to group the children in such a manner that they could work together most successfully and harmoniously.

§3. While the matters already referred to are important, the greater benefit, perhaps, that would come from the adoption of the proposed system of reorganizing our schools, is to be found in the change it would make in the relation of the teachers to her work, the inspiring freedom it would give her when she should be released from the treadmill grind of a machine operative engaged upon a part of a part of something with the ultimate form of which she has nothing to do, and thus deprived of the stimulus and reward of the artist-worker, who has, and must have if he or she is to continue to be an artist, the satisfaction of carrying a piece of work to its natural completion. No longer tyrannized over by the necessity of bringing every class and the whole class the bright and the dull, the sanguine and the phlegmatic, those favored by a cultured and prosperous home and those handicapped by a home environment of poverty, ignorance and indifference, those well and those ill prepared no longer kept in a constant state of nervous strain by the necessity of bringing each rapidly succeeding class, as a whole, to a preordained point in the curriculum within a certain number of weeks so as to make connection with another equally short-lived class at a fixed date twelve, six or three months from the time she first looks her little

company of individuals in the face, the teacher, transformed from a factory-hand into one whose work is dignified and rendered interesting by the fact that it covers the whole of a natural period of child life, instead of an arbitrary section of such a unit, may well feel the inspiration of the artist, finding continual delight in a noble work freely pursued. She could then proceed serenely without undue haste, to do her best to help the children in her charge to the most perfect development individually possible for each one of them within the phycho-physical period of development constituting her field of work.

Her duty would no longer be to impart to all of her pupils, regardless of their various idiosyncrasies, exactly the same amount of information in just so many subjects, and to train them all to exactly the same degree of proficiency in certain prescribed activities. But wherever any individual of her class should appear to have completed the period of psycho-physical development to which her department of the school was designed to minister, it would be her duty (after consultation with her principal and with the parents of the young person) to transfer the latter to the next department of the school, even though the estimated time for the completion of the stage of development represented by her own department had not elapsed and she should not be ready to pass her class as a whole over to the teacher in charge of the next higher department, and even though the young person in question, although more mature, should not be more, but should even be less proficient in the work of this department of the school than most of the classmates he would leave behind him. If, on the other hand, it should happen that the development of one or more of the children under the care of an elementarydepartment teacher, for instance, should be so much more backward than that of the average, that such child or children should not be mature enough to go on with the rest of the class, it would be the duty of the teacher of this class, A, let us say, to transfer such children to the teacher of class B of the same department,not necessarily to remain in class B until the B teacher should promote her class as a whole to the secondary transition department and start again with a class of youngsters coming from the primary transition department, but each one of these children should remain until the teacher and the supervising authority