WHAT I am about to say to you, fellow teachers, may well enough be taken as a sort of introduction to the inquiries which the committee from our State Council of Education has invited you to undertake during the year now opening, I mean the inquiries (1) into the course of study that is best for elementary schools, and (2) into the arrangement of the chosen studies that is most suitable in view of the educational aims. You listened to our committee's report with patient, nay, with interested attention, and you doubtless noted, at its close a few moments ago, the course of reading recommended as auxiliary to your study of the various questions proposed. You therefore cannot have failed to take especial notice of the prominence given in that course of reading to the two Reports, now heard of everywhere, sent out to the educational world by our National Educational Association. fer, of course, to the "Report of the Committee of Ten" and the "Report of the Committee of Fifteen."

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These two Reports are named by the committee from our State Council as the primary and chief texts by which your studies on the elementary curriculum and its arrangement are to be guided. It is only the "Report of the Committee of Fifteen," to be sure, that treats directly

of your question; and the Council has accordingly asked me to say to you a rew words about that, particularly with reference to the very lively discussion which its exposition of principles has provoked. Still, as our State Council committee has conjoined with this Report of the Fifteen the Report of the Ten,doubtless because some principles in the latter, though laid down for secondary schools, are felt to be of great importance for elementary schools as well,--it will be natural and proper for me, in what I say, to bring out something of the relations subsisting between the two Reports, noticing particularly certain marked differences between them.

By way of preliminary, it is worth saying that the "Report of the Committee of Fifteen" really contains three distinct reports on three very distinct subjects connected with elementary schools, the committee having been divided for this purpose into three sections, of five members each; so that it is only with the second of these sections that we are really concerned this morning--the section whose report deals with the Correlation of Elementary Studies. We are consequently to consider, not the views of fifteen, but only of five committeemen. For the sake of a brief and convenient style of citation, then, I shall

refer to these two great Reports, during the rest of my remarks, as the Report of the Ten and the Report of the Five.

Strongly as these two Reports resemble each other in their exceptional ability, there is nothing more striking about them than the different, yes, the contrasted fates with which they have thus far met.

The Report of the Ten has been hailed with an acclaim so nearly universal that the few dissenting voices are practically drowned in the wave of approval; but the Report of the Five seems in some danger of having its voice overwhelmed in the clamor of dissent which it has roused. The reasons for this great contrast of fates attending two performances so akin in preeminent merit are not merely a matter for our curious interest, but are an imperative object of our inquiry, if we would be true to the heart of great educational discussions. Accordingly, though it will be impossible to do any full justice to the subject in the few minutes at our disposal, I will endeavor to show, in a brief and imperfect way, what the main causes are that have brought this great difference about.

Notable of both the Reports is the fact that each is dominated by the influence of one mind--that of the chairman of the committee in charge of it; and this to a degree quite unusual in such cases. So that, in effect, we have in these two Reports the expression of the minds of two men of profoundly differing types; the two, in fact, who by a silent general consent have now for years been acknowledged as in their respective kinds unquestionably the leaders of our American education. In the Report of the Ten we have the mind of the President of Harvard University; and not only upon the matter of an orderly and sound curriculum for secondary schools, but implicitly upon the far profounder matter of the determining principle for the whole scheme of a peo

ple's education.

In the Report of the Five, we have the mind of the United States Commissioner of Education; and he, too, in setting forth the principles determining the right correlation of studies for elementary schools, finds his occasion, and indeed the necessity, to give us explicitly his full mind upon the principles that should determine all selection and all correlation of all studies, if education is to be sound; and he takes such a course in this great matter as to make his mind upon it appear as if it were the mind of mankind itself thereon. For his chief argument is, that the safety of the human kind as an historical whole is what is in issue in the question of correlating studies, and that the all-controlling principle in a right correlation is the due selection and apportioning of studies in the light of their bearing on the historic integrity of the human race, and on the integrity of 'each child as a member in a whole that is to be historically continuous, and genuinely because historically progressive. What really makes these two Reports so interesting and so significant is the conflict latent in them between these two marked personalities. We can read in this the deeper conflict of two greta af of personality--two types of human aim and purpose; two contending views, in fact, upon the meaning, the explanation, and the direction of life; in short, the conflict of two philosophies.

The gist of the difference between these two philosophies, and consequently between the two Reports, is the different value which they place (1) upon the native tendencies of each particular hu man being that lead him away from a fixed common type of mankind, and (2) upon that universal or rational type. The one proceeds upon the view that each peculiar and individual expression of the common human nature is the one fact of truly cardinal value; the other, upon the

view that the supreme consideration must be the type characteristally human,--not private and peculiar, but public, generic, and, above all, historic. The one fills its eye with the single human being and his peculiar whole of personal endowment, in no other exactly repeated, and incapable of being replaced by anything but itself; the other, with the imposing whole of the universal rational nature, in comparison with which individual variations seem trivial, and which appears clothed with the authority and majesty of history, and with the incomparble warrant of a public judgment that has borne the test of time, of experience, of the long conflict of considerate reflection and experience-sobered forethought with the complex and adverse circumstances amid which the race has had to mature. The one, therefore, finds the chief motives of educational aims and methods in the interests of the single pupil; the other, in the rational authority of the human type, historically developed and tested and warranted. The watchword of the one will be that word now heard so constantly from almost every quarter, the word so naturally dear to every modern heart, the word so attractive, so fas. cinating,--the kindling word Interest; the watchword of the other, that word which, if often forgotten amid the whirl of contending and confusing interests, is still the word that wakes the deepest

chords in the human soul whenever it is heard, the commanding word Duty, the bracing word Character, the invigorating phrase A Reasonable Life. Everywhere the one philosophy, and accordingly the one Report, echoes to the theme of election in education,-the greatest possible range of free choice by the individual student as to what he will study, guided by what he finds answering to his native interests in subjects; everywhere the other, to the theme of a rational system of subjects for study,

which is held to express the universal reason of mankind in its several essential aspects, and which must enter into every scheme of education that can claim to be truly human, in the sense of being genuinely reasonable. Thus the one philosophy, with its accordant Report, finds the master-principle of education in personal native impulse, in personal Desire; the other finds it in a public or generic intelligent judgment, that gets at the abiding heart of human nature with all the mass and momentum of history, in a universal Rational Will, which is to judge, to master, and to use, all individual desires. Consequently, the Report of the Ten appeals directly to the foremost tendencies of the times, the present mood of the Zeitgeist, and naturally finds a corresponding response. But the Report of the Five has to stem the prevailing current; indeed, has to turn it from its course; and it not only invites the prevalent thought to an unrelished self-criticism, but it demands as the effective means of this a much subtler and deeper order of thinking than the habitual flow of consciousness finds easy. This, as it seems to me, largely accounts for the present greater success of the Report of the Committee of Ten; but it also foretells, as I believe, the profounder coming acceptance of the Report of the Five, -an acceptance that may be slow in maturing, and that will no doubt be attended with corrective criticism of details, but that will be all the more settled and secure.

Another reason for the difference in fate of the two Reports is undoubtedly to be found in the different methods by which they are respectively supplied with evidence to convince and to influence those to whom they are addressed. This difference of methods is, in part, ingrained in the very difference of view and aim which we have just considered; but it is, in perhaps greater part, also owing

to the characteristic powers of their two authors. Without the least disparagement of either, I think we may truly say that if the author of the first has a ge nius for administration, the author of the other has a genius for thought, for penetrating to first principles and to fundamental reasons. Thus the Report of the Ten, instead of arguing, proceeds, with the genuine administrative instinct, directly to the established sources of administrative authority, and, selecting approved representatives of the staff actually engaged in managing and teaching secondary schools, obtains their opin ions, justly reckoned weighty, on the several questions raised. These are colligated, judiciously sifted, adjusted, most skillfully harmonized; and the condensed result--briefly, pertinently and forcibly set forth carries with it, naturally, all the convincing weight that judgment already accepted and taken for granted must always have, and must have in the highest degree when there is confidence in the process by which its adequate representatives have been selected, and confidence in the administrative capacity of the man who selects them. Far different from this simple appeal to what the public directly concerned has already definitely settled, and this masterful avoidance of inquiries that may unsettle everything, and must unavoidably unsettle much, and stir up the more or less violent dispute that inevitably attends. all starting of real questions-far differerent from this is the problem of the man who will inquire into the final reasons of things; who cannot find it in him to admit that what either individuals or communities, either personal instincts or gradually acquired customs and habits of feeling, merely want to have or to do is what in reason they ought to have and to do, but is drawn onward by a high conviction that there is a discoverable reason, an ideal justification, for every.

thing that is worth man's while to do or to have. The Report of the Five inquiries into the chief problem of education in this spirit of deep and truly sober speculation. It opens matters to the bottom, and stirs them up from their depths. Its direct appeal to the ultimate reason in the case, its appeal from mere fact and actual practice to ideal considerations, may be in the best sense stimulating, but it carries with it the unavoidable consequence that the judgment of its readers, once invited and aroused, will surely be diverse, will be strongly so at first, and will require a process more or less tedious, a lapse of time possibly long, in order to come to a settled harmony.

Accordingly, the author of this Report has found himself—very likely without surprise-confronted with a keen opposition to his main positions, and that too from the very class of minds among our school managers who may well claim to rank among the most intelligently alert. There are three main lines of objection which they follow in criticising the Report.

The first of these is, that its author's view on correlation of studies misses the real aim entirely: his scheme, they say, is not correlation in the true sense of the word at all. His system should be called, rather, a system for the selection and valuation of studies; a system of their coordination instead of their correlation. Correlation, they will have it, means the bringing of the subjects of study into a closer unity than that of coördination; it means that they shall be brought into a unity of subordination, and that some subject, or rather some principle of dealing with all subjects, needs to be found that will serve to reduce each to its proper place and function as an auxiliary of greater or less subordination in the process of real education. It must settle which of them is really principal and substantive, and