the day, sun and moon, and life in general, all are rhythmically dependent. So are, or should be, our daily habits. So long as our living program follows a rhythm, we function normally; and, on the other hand, we are thrown out of balance if this rhythm is definitely disturbed. The meals of the day fall into this routine rhythm, and we are soon conscious of an interruption of this rhythm. A meal occurring at an unusual and irregular time, extends the waiting period on the one hand and shortens the period before the next meal. Our health program aims to establish correct living habits, in which the meal rhythm habit surely is a factor. Are we not inconsistent, then, to plan the wrong period for our junior and senior high school pupils, without due cognizance of this health factor? In order to accommodate numbers and least interfere with the school program, it has become the custom to serve lunch as early as eleven-fifteen to the first group, and have the other groups follow in intervals far too short to permit of comfortable eating. Rather than to cultivate speed in eating, already a pernicious habit, an effort toward teaching socializing habits while eating might be definitely made. What if it means an extension of the school day? The defence for such action can be very clearly defined. Unless health education is founded upon practice of health chores, the value of mere teaching of theory may well be questioned. And now a word about the social program of the junior high school. Is it wise here to set up a social whirl taken over bodily from the high school? It would seem that the social program in the junior high schools might be made to serve the purpose of teaching social behavior, in order that the boys and girls, when entering the social life of high school students or otherwise, may do so without embarrassment to themselves and others. The many courtesies that are expected of men in society at large, and to women in particular, do not merely happen, but are the result of habitual responses to situations. The junior high school social in the form of a matinee rather than an evening function, furnishes a richness of situations which, when properly utilized, must result in greater ease, in natural graciousness, ability to converse, and in lessening the tendency to selfishly offend. It may well be a school function to teach dancing in its proper way and technique, as well as proper manners. Some of the dances in a physical education program may well have a place in such a matinee program. They involve much agility, grace, and general politeness, and at the same time furnish a frolicksome freedom and abandon which must be the result of dancing. Thus they may be prepared for the eventual evening social function, grounded in manners, and expectant of the new age privilege, instead of being blase at an age when they should be in the full bloom of youth. Likewise will they arrive at man and womanhood physically sound and emotionally fit to enter upon the participation in sports with safety and proper balance. The junior high school is charged with this task. May it not fail us. Some Higher Aims of the University E. P. CONKLE, THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA, W HAT I am about to say applies to the large university as well as to the small one, it seems to me; although many will differ with me. I contend that there are higher aims for university training, especially in the undergraduate courses, than the mere dissemination of facts which have been discovered, catalogued and recorded by those who have gone before,-training for thinking, and training for character. Both of these aims are, perhaps, selfish; but those who have the broader social idea in view as the aim of the university, often forget that society and social things begin with the individual. Perhaps I had better explain what I mean by "training for thinking, and training for character." Some of us who have taught for some years imagine that our job our big job and our bounden duty-is to cram our students full of knowledge, so that when they finish with us they will have at least enough facts at their command to tally on the fingers of one hand. Training for facts is all right; but it isn't enough. Because the facts we teach are not going to be especially helpful to the student when he gets out where our facts do not exactly fit every-day situations. And the memory is such a shifty thing with most of us that these facts become fuzzy and lost, and are little or no good to us. There is a training that is much more useful than hoarding facts, and that is the training in finding out facts. It is the larger idea of discovery, of original thinking, of pioneering for one's self. That, it seems to me, should be one of the higher aims of an institution where the intellect is the material with which we are dealing. I once made the statement (I don't know why) in a freshman composition class, when we were discussing the differences between high school and college life, that college classes require more original thinking than high school classes. A bright-eyed freshman girl challenged me at once. Well, I didn't argue with her; but it set me thinking. A little later I read in my alumni magazine a letter by a young graduate who had gone from college into life just the year before, with a typical university education, and he had made a rank failure of it. He wrote a strong letter of abuse, accusing the university of giving him a faulty training, of betraying his trust. He had done very well in school, and thought it was preparing him for life's work; but when he got into the real melee, he couldn't make things go. In other words, he had been a good student and had collected a lot of facts; but he didn't have any use for the facts he had collected; and, what was worse, he didn't know how to get any new ones. He had no brain of his own; what he had belonged to his professors. They had always used his brain for him; and when he met a real situation, there was no brain-muscle there to work. He was as a man lost. The world was coming at him like a pen of furious bulls, and he didn't know what to do about it. After all, it seems to me, the problem is one of training our students in correct and useful habits of thinking; of teaching them how to use their brains, how to face problems sanely and rationally and use the mental-tools at their command so as to bring them a maximum of good results. For after all, life, as well as school, is a series of situations; and the man who can think for himself in straight lines is bound to come out all right. What we need is, as has been said a million times before, a training that will train the student to do his own thinking; that will put him in new situations and help him extricate himself in a sensible way; that will give him problems requiring original solutions. It is the idea of research; of facing him against the stone wall of the unknown and telling him to get through it and come out on the other side. Professor A. J. Carlson, of the University of Chicago, in a recent talk at my university, characterized our modern education as an "education of repression." We put no premium on original thinking, original ideas, original processes of arriving at conclusions. If a student differs with us or arrives at faulty conclusions, he gets no encouragement whatever. If he has arrived at his conclusion through a process entirely his own, if he has done some genuine brain exercise, we should point out his faults and compliment him on his original thinking. Some day he may strike it right, and discover a grand, new idea. You never can tell. If a student of mine differs with me, I try to find out why,-how he arrived at his conclusion. Sometimes I can show him his faulty premise, or bad reasoning; and sometimes he can show me mine. After all, absolute truths, even in science and mathematics, are very few,-very, very few; and who can say that this is right and that is wrong? So that I have been saying that we should put our students "on their own," more. Instead of repressing their bright new ideas, however fantastic, and over-awing them with our own ponderous and imperfect thinking, we should lead them to get ahead in their own individual way. Our universities should turn out a more able-brained people, a people who can meet life with a clear, unawed mind, and see as straight through as the human mind can see. If such habits be learned in school-thinking, they will carry through to life-thinking; for, as Professor George Palmer of Harvard says: "A person is made in one piece, and the same being runs through a multitude of performances." There are those, of course, who will deny that the teacher has any duties to perform other than presenting the facts and opinions of his course in the classroom,-let the students take care of themselves! They deny any personal responsibility; they shun any contacts outside the class. It is these, especially, who swear they have no business with the character-development-nor even with the brain-development, for that matter-of the student. But swear as they will, more than they realize-much more than they realize they do influence the fledglings under their pedagogic tutelage. For students are young, especially the undergraduates; and they are emulators, copiers, hero-worshippers. And, in our mod |