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example, in 1908, that was followed in three short years by 32 other cities. * Another outcome has been the playground movement-184 cities now making "supervised play" as much a province of education as any that ministers to intellectual growth - under play directors. † Sanitation and hygiene in general are being looked after as never before - the relations of school architecture and hygiene, the needs of underfed children, the abolition of the common drinking cup, homely but necessary attention to personal cleanliness, health, exercise, etc., and a due regard to sex hygiene.||

Because no formal religious instruction can be given in our public schools, and all forms of religious belief must be respected and tolerated, the erroneous impression prevails that the spiritual nature of the child has been neglected. If this impression turns only on the old question of "The Bible in the Schools," it is still unwarranted, for no law had

*See a paper by Leonard P. Ayres, Open-Air Schools, in National Education Association Report for 1911, pp. 898-903.

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† Among many other writings on this subject is the chapter on Recreation" in Garber, Current Educational Activities, pp. 73-79; Edward R. Shaw, School Hygiene (1901); William F. Barry, The Hygiene of the Schoolroom (1904). A magazine, The Playground, is published by the Playground Association of America (New York).

Nicholas Murray Butler, Education in the United States, vol. i., p. 409 et seq. (1900).

For a discussion of the comparatively new subject of sex hygiene, see a thoughtful paper by Dr. Francis M. Green in Proceedings of the National Education Association for 1911, pp. 917925.

*

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ever been passed by any State legislature specifically excluding the Bible by name from use in the public schools; on the contrary nine States have passed mandatory or non-exclusion laws, and five States permissive laws. But if religion means, or leads to, morality, the sentiment is utterly untrue; for the moral influence of the public school is entirely on the side of what Dr. Eliot speaks of as the "combination of three ideals which are the supreme result of the best human thinking and feeling through all recorded recorded time truth, beauty and goodness.'

The Boy Scout movement, school banks, self government (one New York school, at least, has its own "police department") "street cleaning week," etc., promote frugality, self-control, and the civic sense, and help to simplify some of the old, vexing problems of "discipline " which used to find their only solution in corporal punishment. This was abolished from the New York City schools in 1870 and from other schools at varying periods. It is now the age of better, because more indirect, methods; and though there are still truants and truancy schools in spite of compulsory education laws in all northern States and many of those of the South, and an enrolment in our 60 public reform.

* Paul Monroe (ed.), Cyclopædia of Education, vol. i., pp. 370-377 (1911).

† John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (1909); George H. Palmer, Ethical and Moral Instruction in Schools (1909).

schools, in 1910, of 42,381, there is a more hopeful trend, even when the reformatory stage is reached, of the practical psychological treatment of delinquents found in such schools as the "George Junior Republic" and (in England) of the Tiny Town."*

The psychology of the text book has undergone a revolution in the last fifty years. On the merely material side this is surprisingly true

paper, ink, type and binding. Maps, charts and tables are much more numerous and accurate; the beauty and finish of illustrations are of course beyond all comparison with those that childish eyes used to consider works of art; but the great advance has been made in the text itself. The modern text-book is humanized; it has been written for the purpose of teaching the pupil, and not for the purpose of presenting a subject; it represents a desire to adjust truths and the presentation of truths to the mind of the pupil.t

The length of the school year varies from 70 days in North Carolina to 190 days in some of the New England States. In New York it is 175. The average length of the school year has advanced from 130 days in 1880 to 155 in 1900. Onehalf of a school month has been added in the last decade, which has increased educational effectiveness by

* World's Work (March, 1910); Garber, Annals of Educational Progress, pp. 251-253.

Among other authorities, Dexter (History of Education in the United States, pp. 207-218) has a chapter on text books.

8 per cent. School hours also vary greatly. In some large cities, notably New York, where it seems impossible to provide full time for all pupils, in view of the 25,000 annual addition to the school population, half-day shifts for many thousands of children must be resorted to. The entire subject of the school year and school hours is inextricably bound up with the complexities of child labor legislation.*

The number of public school teachers in 1909 was 506,040. The proportion of men to women teachers has diminished, since 1870, from 40 to 21 per cent.; in some States it is now less than 10 per cent. The average monthly salary for men teachers in 1909 was $63.39, an increase in ten years of $16.86; for women teachers in 1909 the average salary was $50.08, an increase of $11.45. In New York City the long struggle for the principle of "equal pay for equal work" culminated in October of 1911, under the leadership of Miss. Grace Strachan, in a successful verdict; the aldermen still fix the salaries, but hereafter no discrimination can be made on account of sex. What the results will be, no one can foretell; if it accelerates the "dearth of male teachers "t and tends to further "feminization," it complicates a problem already regarded as suffi

*See the Report of the Commissioner of Education on Industrial Education (1910).

Dexter, Educational Progress, p. 180 et seq. G. Stanley Hall, Feminization in School and Home, in World's Work (May, 1908).

ciently serious. There are at least two possible ameliorations - higher salaries for men, and teachers' pensions. The latter subject has received increasing attention since about 1900, and while in some States "teachers' insurance " or "retirement fund" plans prevail, managed by the teachers themselves, the general trend is toward the very logical conclusion that the authority paying the salaries should pay the pensions also.*

Teachers must themselves be taught, and the growth in the number of normal schools in the last half-century has been larger than the growth in any other form of professional education. At the close of the war there were less than 50; ten years later, 66; and in 1911, 288, both public and private; there are also numerous pedagogical courses in high schools, colleges and universities. In 1911 there were 84,095 students reported in the normal schools; 14,680 pursuing normal courses in public high schools, and 5,246 in private high schools and academies; in colleges and universities, 11,256 in the pedagogical departments; bringing the total up to 115,277. The number of normal school graduates in 1911 was 16,669.

Normal schools were, at their inception, largely "model schools" for training in methods, and lay open to the peril of imitativeness and undue

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all its fascinating phases.* A much more definite relationship has also been established between scholastic and professional training, to the advantage of both. But normal schools are not the only source of training for teachers. There are teachers' institutest of numerous types - an original, sui generis, American ideaconferences, meetings, local or State teachers' associations, summer schools in colleges, "Chautauquas, and special gatherings like those at Penikese in the 70's, where "Louis Agassiz, teacher," was such an inspirational guide; while extension and correspondence courses, reading circles, visiting days for public school teachers, and "Sabbatical years " for college and university professors are

* W. Preyer, The Mind of the Child (2 vols., 1888-89); Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (1896); Edward A. Ross, Social Psychology, especially the chapters on "Suggestibility" (1908); Hugo Münsterburg, Psychology and the Teacher (1909); John Dewey, How We Think (1910); Edward L. Thorndyke, The Elements of Psychology (1907); and Edwin A. Kirkpatrick, Genetic Psychology (1909), are among the many valuable and interesting books on this subject.

Butler, Education in the United States, p. 382 et seq.

among the instrumentalities that keep the modern teacher in line with the increasing demands of a profession which is probably the mightiest existing force for the betterment of man.* It must be said that many of the wonderful advances made in both public and private schools do not apply, or are sadly deficient, in rural schools; and while a great improvement is now taking place, especially through the "consolidation" and "township "system, it is true, from the very nature of the case, that the ordinary country school is yet a far cry from the city type. "It is," to quote President Cleveland, "a condition, not a theory," that confronts the schools in thinly populated districts. Poor or inadequate fieldings, too short school terms, low standards of qualifications for teachers, defective courses of study, inadequate inspection, community indifference, ignorance, parsimony and ultra-conservatism of school boards, impossibility of specialization where pupils are so few, and, worst of all, the incubus of the once settled conviction, now happily passing, that the rural school cannot be as proportionally progressive in its field as the city school in a more fortunate environment, are all responsible factors in this condition.

The

two years later that throws much light on the subject; and the problem is being tackled through a multiplicity of special adaptations, of which the model rural school at Macomb, Illinois, is an example, whose purpose is to take up a typical, needy, inefficient country school and build it up through all obstacles to the greatest possible degree of efficiency for the community in which it is located.”’*

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What has been remarked about rural schools may also find partial application, though from a different point of view, to education in the South. Of course the war made havoc with education as with everything else, so that, at first, recovery was tedious and complicated with bi-racial problems. But with governmental as

well as denominational aid, and the impetus of great funds, to be referred to later, competent leadership is introducing the "New South" to a new educational era, a veritable renaissance, especially in industrial and vocational training.†

Negro education in the South was initiated by the Freedmen's Bureau, created by an act of Congress in 1865 and placed under the management of General O. O. Howard. In the five years of its existence it established 4,239 colored schools throughout the South, with an enrolment of a quarter

of a million of pupils, and at a cost of $6,513,955. Since then, education of the negro has gone steadily forward, aided by the Federal and State governments, and philanthropic and religious bodies. It now embraces the common school, normal, professional and industrial schools, especially the latter, and extends to the high school and college. The most successful and best known of the negro schools are the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, founded by Samuel T. Armstrong in 1868 (Indians were admitted in 1878), and Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, launched on July 4, 1881.*

In 1910 there were 1,116,811 negro children in average daily attendance in the elementary schools of 16 Southern States, an increase of 16 per cent. in ten years. In 1911 there was an enrolment of 9,641 students in the 150 colored public high schools of 23 States reporting to the Bureau of Education an increase of nearly 60 per cent. since 1900; and in the secondary and higher schools for negroes (not including the public high schools named above) there were 40,945 elementary pupils, 23,834 secondary students, and 5,313 students in professional and collegiate classes.

The great "Education Funds " have been alluded to, of which six have been established since the Civil

* Booker T. Washington, Working with the Hands.

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War.* The Peabody fund was started in 1867 with a gift of $5,000,000 by George Peabody, "to promote intellectual, moral and industrial education in the most destitute portions of the Southern States "; in 1912, by the terms of the gift, the remainder of the fund was allotted, and the agency ceased to exist. The John F. Slater fund for negro education was established in 1882 by a gift of $1,000,000, which has been increased by wise management to $1,500,000. The General Education Board, chartered by Congress for the purposes of Southern education, received its start from John D. Rockefeller, whose further gifts have brought its endowment up to $30,000,000. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching started in 1903 with an endowment of $10,000,000, which the donor had increased by 1912 to $22,000,000. The Russell Sage Foundation, incorporated in 1907, includes education as one of the beneficiaries of its $10,000,000 endowment. And in 1907 the will of Miss Anna T. Jeanes, of Phil

adelphia, set aside $1,000,000 to the very needy field of rural education for the Southern negro.