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work of one arbitrary will, or of a few arbitrary wills; but rather that it should be government by the people for the people. We all began to think that the right conception of government for the citizen might teach us something concerning the government of a child. It occurred to us that, if self government was the whole object of political freedom, then self control might be the legitimate primary object of a child's development. Again, home discipline began to change for the better. Family government became gentler; and all these changes in society helped wonderfully to the beneficent change in the school. There has not been a more blessed change in the world than this change in home and school discipline from fear to love, from driving to leading. Wonderful has been the fruit of this change on the temper of our people and the happiness of our homes.

I pass on to another immense change, brought about quite outside the schools and colleges, which has nevertheless affected profoundly the public provision of systematic instruction. During the last fifty years, on account of industrial changes, the population in our own country, and in most of the civilized countries of the world, has been rushing into cities and large towns. This rush into urban life has had a very ill effect on schools. It has tended to make schools large machines; and of course it has deprived the children of the natural out of door sports of country life. The grading of classes in a large school had to be inflexible, and the product had to be uniform like that of a flour mill. That meant that the quick children were held back and the slow were driven forward, to the great disadvantage of both sorts. It meant also bad air, bad light, and crowded rooms, with fifty or seventy pupils to a teacher. These are impossible conditions for good teaching. The condensation of population introduced new risks of health; so that what was the normal rural death rate rose in all large cities and towns to an unnatural height. The children suffered most from these increasing risks. Gradually, but chiefly within the last twenty years, we began to escape from some of these evils. We gave greater attention to good air, proper heat, and proper light; we gave greater flexibility to programs, and options among studies; in

short, we attended to the conditions under which the children and the teachers worked, and tried to make them wholesome. But more than that it has been absolutely necessary to do.

When a child grows up in the country it gets a natural training in accurate observation. It wants to find a four leaf clover; it runs to see where the green snake went to; it tracks the woodchuck to its hole and gets it out; it learns the songs of the birds; and knows when the smelts run up the brooks, and when the twilight is just right for finding the partridges. In short, the country child gets naturally a broad training in observation. It also has on the farm an admirable training in manual labor. From an early age it can actually contribute to the care of animals, the successful conduct of the household, and the general welfare of the family. In the city all this natural training is lacking, and substitutes for it have to be artificially provided. This necessity has brought into our schools nature study and manual training, to teach the child to use its eyes and its hands, and to develop its senses and its muscular powers; and these new beneficent agencies in education, already well in play, are in the near future to go far beyond any stage at present reached. We do not yet see how to replace in urban education the training which the farmer's boy or the seacoast boy gets from his habitual contest with the adverse forces of nature. The Gott's island boy, on the coast of Maine, goes out with his father in the early winter morning in a half open sailboat to visit their lobster traps and bring home the entrapped lobsters. They start with a gentle breeze and a quiet sea, though the temperature is low. The boy knows just how to steer the boat five or six miles to sea, where the traps are sunk on some rocky spot which the lobsters love. The father is busy pulling the traps; the boy watches the weather, and suddenly he says: "Father, there is a northwester coming. See the clouds driving this way over the hills!" The boy knows just as well as the father what that means. It means a fearful beat to windward to get home, facing a savage wind and a falling temperature, the spray dashing over the vessel, and freezing to the sails and ropes, and loading down the bow with ice. It means a life and death struggle for hours-the question being: Shall we

get into harbor or not before we sink? Now, that is a magnificent training for a boy, and the sheltered city offers nothing like it. The adverse forces of nature, if not so formidable that men cannot cope with them, are strenuous teachers; but in modern cities we hardly know that the wind blows, or that the flood is coming, or that bitter cold is imperiling all animal life.

Lastly, a new motive is presented in our day to the teacher, the parent, and the children-the motive of joy through achievement. The great joy in life for us all, after the domestic affections, is doing something and doing it well, getting where we want to get, and bringing others where they would like to be. Give every child, we say, the joy of achievement. Do not set it to do what you know it cannot do well. Set it to do what you think it can do well, and show it how. That is just what goes on in a happy kindergarten, or in a successful university conference or seminary. This is the new and happy aim in modern education-joy and gladness in achievement. I need not say that freedom is necessary to this joy. Schools used to set children doing things they could not do well. That, is the unpardonable sin in educational administration. It is not for the happiness of the children only that this new motive -to increase joy-has come to bless us. It brings new happiness to the teacher also. It is means of happiness for everybody throughout life. As a result of the advent of this new policy we are learning not to use with children a motive that will not work when the children are grown up. To be sure, we must admit that this doctrine condemns almost all the school discipline of the past, and much of the family discipline; but the future will not mind that, if it finds the new doctrine beneficent.

I do not know a more sacred occupation than the function of a superintendent of schools in the United States. The more I see of the kind of work a good superintendent does, the more I am impressed with its beneficent character. It seems to me that nobody's name lives in this world-to be blessed-that has not associated his life work with some kind of human emancipation, physical, mental, or moral.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.

BY R. B. HUGHES.

[R. E. Hughes is the leading British authority on comparative education, and has made first hand investigations of the school systems of the principal countries of the world. A graduate of Oxford university and the College of London, he has been a professor of pedagogy. His studies on comparative education are embodied in Schools at Home and Abroad and The Making of Citizens, and he is author also of many contributions to the educational periodicals of Europe and America.]

A study of American education convinces the impartial critic that, behind all the imperfections and inequalities of the system, there is an intense national earnestness, which will carry this people to a future that is as yet but dimly perceived and understood. America is climbing to the stars blindfolded and unconsciously. The mountain is indeed in labor, but instead of a mouse there will come forth a child, bearing the torch in its hand, and scattering the rays of the democratic ideal around a benighted world.

The American pioneers, sprung as they were from the Puritanical stock of England, carried with them an intense belief in the virtue of education. Exiles from the country they loved, they asked only that in quiet insignificance they might lay the foundations of civil and religious liberty. But these men of such strong convictions, who for principle were willing to pay the price of banishment, were alike worthy of honor for the nobility of their lineage and for their high intellectual acquirements. A New England writer says that they were the most highly educated men that ever led colonies. We shall not, then, be surprised to find that they devoted themselves with such earnestness to the cause of education, being fully aware that without the schoolmaster and schoolhouse, nothing could save them from sinking into barbarism. Such was their conviction on this point, that scarcely a lustrum was allowed to pass before they placed the schoolhouse beside the church, determined that upon these two-education and religion-they would lay the foundation of the new government. To realize the democratic ideal, which is the foundation stone

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of the American commonwealth, it was necessary to organize an effective system of universal education. And so we find the fathers of Massachusetts inaugurating a system of public schools as far back as 1647, "to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers." This national belief in the absolute necessity of education for the well being of the commonwealth is reiterated again and again. "I apprehend," said Daniel Webster, "no danger to our country from a foreign foe; our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of the government, from their carelessness and negligence, I confess I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy." And he called the free public school a wise and liberal system of police, by which property and the peace of society are secured.

The American people have recognized the absolute indispensability of a national system of education. The school system is an essential part of the social organism. The whole of society is permeated by this respect for the school. There is, as a German observer said, a great hunger for education. This people feel that there is no greater crime upon God's footstool than ignorance. Ignorance is the mother of all evil.

The politician, it is true, has hitherto done much to hinder the satisfying of this desire; yet there are unmistakable signs that this will not be tolerated much longer. This intense belief in education will do more than all the governments in the world; faith will move mountains. The American common people believe in their schools, the European common people only tolerate them.

With the American's enthusiastic faith in the future of his schools has grown a determination that they shall be the expression of the national democratic ideal. American democracy-Saxon democracy-is individualistic, not social. Every citizen is entitled to complete self development, chiefly

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