routine methods, when some specific suggestions from their superintendent would change the whole character of their work."

Close, intelligent and sympathetic direction is also necessary if the teachers long in service are to maintain the highest standards of efficiency. Very few people in any occupation do their best at all times, unless conscious of the oversight of someone who appreciates their best efforts and is aware of their failures. This is peculiarly true of teachers, for the routine of the classroom tends to fix habits, to lesson adaptability, and, possibly, to deaden ambition. Teachers can not stand still; they must advance or decrease. in skill and power. All teachers will grow in effectiveness, if helped, instructed and inspired by a capable supervisor.

To train the teachers while in service, they must have the assistance of an able helper. A superintendent may view the work and, out of his wider knowledge, pronounce it excellent, fair or poor. Mere inspection does not, however, carry with it the idea of

showing the teacher how to improve. Constructive supervision, on the other hand, possesses some of the qualities of foremanship. The constructive supervisor feels a false note in the school room as keenly as a master musician does a wrong touch on the piano. Like the musician, he points out the mistake, and has the exercise repeated until every defect is removed, harmony is restored, and the execution is perfect. A superintendent may discover and recommend the removal of the poorest teachers. He does nothing, however, to make the average teacher more efficient. The work in his schools will always be mediocre.

The constructive supervisor will be quick to appreciate and commend the good. He will be as prompt to point out and correct a violation of the principles of sound pedagogy or anything bad in the details of the practice of teaching as he has been to sympathize with and encourage the best efforts. Such a supervisor will bring the whole teaching force to a high standard of efficiency.

When, as in the present instance, the writer can wrap herself in the mystery of insignificance, she enjoys the unchallenged privilege of taking a high stand; of unveiling the truth with a flourish like a prophetess of old although she may know, in her heart of hearts, that were she judged by her own standards, her measure

ment would be invisible to the naked eye. Browning furnishes the necessary apology for my temerity in this line:

"Our reach must exceed our grasp or what's heaven for?"

In this educational renaissance, when a full and uncramped rounding out of individuality is insisted upon, as a

finished product of our school system, aesthetics is coming in for its own. And it is time, for the earliest and most general classification of all things. is into the beautiful and the ugly, before the relations of utility and morality are thought of.

Before the merit of any phase of education can be pronounced upon, the aim of education must be decided. It is generally agreed that the training that fits best for life is that which is best. There are differences of opinion in regard to the training, fittest for this, and the subject narrows itself down to the question "What is life?" Is it a matter of dollars and cents? Or is it a matter of ceaseless burrowing in the mummy dust of the past? Shall we start our pupils on long trails and false scents that lead away from the most vital things and make them like the scholars in Swift's famous satire, who were so engrossed in nonsensical, speculative theories that they had to have "flappers" to follow them about in order to keep them from running amuck of objects in their path? Or are we to train them simply to earn a livelihood? Shall we take into account that life is more than meat and raiment.

Does not the living of life, in the highest way, demand the greatest physical, intellectual and spiritual power? Then what tends to develop these factors has its place in the training of youth, and as nearly as possible they must be well balanced or we have else a grotesque, deformed product to rise up and pronounce sentence upon us.

The utilitarian side of education is perhaps most important, for a shortsighted plodder is better, any day, than

a useless dreamer, and the training that develops a mere dilletante is as false as the Gadgrind history which would. eliminate all imagination. And yet what matters it, if a man gains the whole world and lose his birthright of a certain amount of aesthetic culture? He is indeed an Esaw. One who is so taken up with higher plane curves and dead languages that his ear is deaf to the bird song near at hand, and his eye blinded to the flower at his feet, has hit wide of the mark. When"The primrose by the river's brim A yellow primrose is to him And it is nothing more" the case deserves pity. The problem becomes how to embroider the background of utilitarianism with the fancy stitch of aesthetic truth, and preserve the proper relation.

It is a serious defect in American. ideals that the Almighty Dollar shuts out much beauty of nature and art. Not

"How much good in anything

But how much money will it bring?" is too often our standard of measurement. We are most concerned with the number of shekels our attainments pour into our coffers and not with the amount of the personal enrichment we may gain, and so we go on commercializing and distorting our existences and those of our pupils.

"Training for ordinary citizenship. should cultivate the love of beauty in both nature and art; at least the ability to distinguish between loveliness and ugliness. When the spiritual nature is not developed, the artistic sensibilities of highest happiness and broadest usefulness are deadened. He who has aesthetic appreciation can make higher and more varied use of

wealth and knowledge to his own growing happiness and to the betterment of society than can one who is clamped down to the dead level of utilitarian common place." Keferstein says: "We call him aesthetically cultured who is sensitive to the beautiful, who receives it with joy, judges it intelligently and endeavors to give it expression in his own person and environment."

In its broadest sense, aesthetics is nothing less than beautiful living in a beautiful environment, "for the finest of all fine arts is the art of living. He who paints a picture, carves a statute, composes an opera, a poem or a beautiful building does well, but he who can paint and carve the quality of the day into lines of beauty, for those about him, does best of all."

"The right art education is both Greek and Christian in charity, it seeks at once, the ideals of beauty and love." The arts give fullest expression to man's highest life; they are essential to his spiritual growth, all of which is far from the common notion that art studies are mere amusement for idle young ladies and sentimental fops. Aesthetic culture comes through a study of nature, of literature, of music, of pictures and architecture.

Literature, true to its place among the fine arts, has ever satisfied something nobler than love of money; something higher than eagerness for facts; through its appeal to the imagination, it has done much to satisfy the craving for beauty. And yet both scientific and philological methods SO abound that students often endure a course in Shakespeare with scarce a suspicion that they are studying poetry. Stratton Brooks argues against the

folly of student paraphrasing; he says it makes butchers of them and that we cannot keep the soul and spirit of a poem which depends upon its unities when we take it apart "to see the wheels go round." He also says that we are not justified in teaching pupils to suppress all rhyme and rhythm in reading poetry as it is emphasizing the intellectual at the expense of the emotional, a making of bricks without straw. So, we must find a golden mean between the emotional and intellectual and not permit the students to become water-logged, so to speak, by soaking in the wine of good literature nor yet allow them to brandish the scalpel of the anatomist. No pupil who has ever sympathetically read any of the great snow poems by Whittier, Lowell or Emerson, can ever again look upon a snow storm as common place. It gives him a new appreciation of what before may have meant simply coasting and snow balling.

Music is also of inestimable value in aesthetic development. It lifts the spirit to higher planes. It strengthens and ennobles. In his musical education the student is laying up solace for all the woes life may bring him.

Attention directed to the art of building might bear fruit in future of fewer private and public houses that offend the sight. Architecture need not be the hodge podge it frequently is, often finding expression in the marriage of Greek portico effect and colonial upper story, a combination that would set Ruskin's teeth on edge.

An appreciation of good pictures is a means of personal enrichment. The power to recognize the ear marks of the different masters may not add one jot or title to our exchequers and yet

it certainly does open a new door to us to know the difference between the chromo "Little Spring Blossom" and Hofman's "Head of Christ" or Raphael's "Sistine Madonna." Students who have this ability are less apt to adorn themselves and their rooms in such marvelous bad taste. Drawing gives a certain power of observation and appreciation of form combinations and therefore is another means of aesthetic culture. So also, is reading aloud-elocution with the fire works left out.

Interest in aesthetic value is the magic salve of the dervish that opens our eyes to what we were blind to before. It will enable our pupils, who are to be the forces of the future, to transform the world into something more beautiful and spiritually uplifting. Our cities will all have civic improvement leagues that will do things not idly dream them. Hideous advertising signs, empty barrels, old tin cans, ash heaps and luxuriant weed patches will cease to flourish in street and byway and back yard.

Red brick buildings will quit insisting on wearing indigo blue blinds. at windows. Wall paper, that perhaps of all things imaginable,

is capable of the grossest offense against good taste, will be less like a slap in the face to the observer. Pictures and picture frames will no longer be an insult to the artistic conscience; and color combinations in dress and furnishing will be less nerve racking to the initiated. It is time the gospel of good taste in the things we wear, was preached. It is a valuable asset in personal efficiency and should be studied. As men are more restricted, both as to color and cut than women, they sin less in the matter of

costume.

Pupils will no longer deface school property and the hand writing on the wall, as ominous a portent in its way. as that at Belshazzar's feast, will fade as softly into oblivion as a loaned silk umbrella.

All this may be done by teaching the power of beauty. Moreover a happiness, a peace of spirit may be attained through approaching Nature, the great mother of loveliness, with the seeing eye and the hearing ear, and the poor, erring human heart can learn to still its tumult through an appreciation of the grandeur in common things. Then, fellow teachers, let us haste the millenium.

Seventh Institute.

For the most part the discussions in the last two chapters of the book we have been reviewing in the columns of the Educator-Journal may be regarded as favorable to such a program of agricultural education as we are endeavoring to carry out in Indiana. The state department's program for argicultural education deals principally with the curriculum and the administration of the community school. We are succeeding fairly well in parts of the state in redirecting the curriculum for the rural school in some such manner as is sugested in Chapters XV and XVI of Educational Resources of Village and Rural Communities.

In the first place, we have recognized the fact that the schools should train men and women for leadership in rural communities, that our agricultural interests are large and should be given due consideration in our educational program, that our schools have been and are now, in too great a degree, giving attention to courses of study "formulated for children with city motives," and that our rural schools are not universally keeping "pace with the needs of our rapidly developing agricultural life."

In the next place we are endeavoring to direct the work of all of our schools to the end of meeting the elementary educational needs of the communities served by the various schools. Thus, "nature study, elementary agriculture, several forms of hand-craft," domestic science, music, drawing, and physical training are receiving consideration in our schools. And of equal importance to these subjects is the new emphasis that is being placed on the time-honored essentials, reading, arithmetic, geography, language, etc. Some of the text-book adoptions by the state. board of education point clearly to the fact that there is an insistent demand for a practical bearing of arithmetic, geography, science and language work upon daily problems of rural life. Many of our schools are putting into practice the theory that "geography and arithmetic may be made to deal with much that is near at hand and used in everyday life." In these schools the children are taught "less of stocks and bonds, cube root and troy weight; and more of dairy problems, rotation of farm crops, spraying mixtures, and handy farm measures.

While, from the point of view of the state department of public instruction,