question, is, What can be done for the 999 out of each 1,000 who know nothing about farming? There is but one place to reach them, and that is the district school. A complete course in agriculture could not be given, yet it would be a great thing even to get the boy or girl to thinking about farming and observing; to learning some of the principles of plant growth; some facts concerning soils; the points of the dairy cow, of the beef type, of horses, sheep, swine and poultry; the principles of feeds and manures, the prevention of plant diseases; the natures of insects and how to exterminate them. These things could be taught in an elementary way. It would open the eyes to the fact that farming is something more than drudgery, that it demands the best thinking and skill that a man can obtain. In many cases it would induce the boys to attend the agricultural colleges. But most of them can not do this, and the colleges could not accommodate them all if they could.

The opportunities for teaching agriculture in the district school are excellent. The boys and girls are living in a great agricultural laboratory and all that is needed is some one to call their attention to what is going on about them in this laboratory. Such persons are not very numerous, but they are needed, and needed very much. It would be most interesting and of high value both from the

educational standpoint and from an agricultural standpoint. The good results would only be limited by the ability of teachers and the capacity of the student. This problem is now receiving a good deal of attention and the immediate solution will be the teaching of agriculture in the district school. The future may improve on it.

One thing which stands in the way of giving this kind of instruction in the district school is to find teachers who are properly trained. The average school teacher knows little or nothing of farming. Through the winter the stress of breadwinning prevents him going to an agricultural college. It is to overcome this difficulty that a summer school in agriculture is to be conducted at Winona Lake during the coming season, opening on July 9 and continuing for about six weeks. A school garden will be cultivated by the students and in the study of plant life and soils the laboratory of Winona Agricultural Institute will be used. The experiments in this summer school will be so simple that any teacher may carry them out in a district school. The summer school will have two courses, one for the study of soils and plants and the other will deal largely with the dairy cow. In both courses especial attention will be given to the needs of the teacher who desires to teach agriculture in the district school.

In October, 1889, a new school was opened at Abbotsholme, Derbyshire, England. While it maintains many of the characteristics of the typical English school, it has broken so many traditional lines, and made so many innovations, that the educational world has watched it with interest for a decade and a half. Its founder, Dr. Cecil Reddie, has been embarrassed by the mass of letters of inquiry which have come to him, not only from all parts of England, but from continental Europe, from the United States, and from South America as well. It is in the light of this widespread interest in the school that an attempt is here made to tell briefly what it is doing, and to state the principles and aims which underlie its curriculum and daily program. Information regarding it has been obtained chiefly from Dr. Cecil Reddie's book, "Abbotsholme," published in 1900, by George Allen, London, pp. 640.

It might be said at the outset that the school is for boys only, for boys between the ages of eleven and eighteen, and for boys, too, of a definite stratum in society. The founder recognizes that there are three classes in the English population "the millions, the thousands and the hundreds." The school needed by the first class, he thinks, is not the one most needed by the second class, and vice versa. Abbotsholme is intended for the third. and highest class the class from which come the teachers, the organizers, the rulers of the nation.

The object of the school is the harmonious development of the whole boy. It is the development of his mental possibilities, the exercise and growth of his

physical organism, the improvement of his moral nature and religious consciousness, and appropriate training and stimulation of his artistic and imaginative sense. All sides of a boy's nature are worthy of development, and capable of it when correct means are used. Abbotsholme, therefore, suffers the training along no one of these lines to be either incidental or accidental. It rather provides that during each day of school life a certain part of the routine shall minister to muscles, nerves, and lungs; another period shall aim primarily at an appeal to the boys' aesthetic nature; a third shall furnish stimulation for appropriate response of the intelligence and cognitive phase of their minds; while a fourth offers opportunity for moral and religious thinking, and for development of a normally ethical and religious sense. course, the school does not suppose that a lesson in literature might not contribute to a boy's appreciation of that which is beautiful in conduct as well as beautiful in art; nor does it think that an excursion taken, we shall say, in the interest of natural science might not result in improvement of a boy's physique, his intellectual reach, his taste for beauty, and his conduct. It does believe, however, that an harmonious development is more likely to result from a program which is four-fold in its nature than from one which offers a more limited variety of stimuli. Abbotsholme, therefore, trains along these lines: (1) Physical and manual; (2) artistic and imaginative; (3) literary and intellectual; (4) moral and religious. These divisions we may consider in the above order and in some detail.

Of

PHYSICAL AND MANUAL TRAINING.

Not all the physical training is derived from mere games, but a certain reasonable portion of it comes from useful manual labor.

There are several things that seem worth saying about both the games and the labor in this school. One is this: The games are not for the few, to the exclusion of the many, as happens in so Who has not seen the many schools. tennis court, the diamond, the gridiron and the track monopolized by the students who already had extraordinary skill in these directions? On the other hand, is it an uncommon thing for the boy who needs some redder blood, ruddier cheeks, and harder muscle fiber to spend his days with his books, having little encouragement or opportunity, perhaps, to participate in the games his constitution is calling for? But at Abbotsholme every boy is obliged, unless prevented by ill health, to join in out-door pursuits and games from two to six o'clock each afternoon. Football, cricket, running, wrestling, swimming these are some of the exhilarating subjects, not elective, but required of every boy; while boating, fishing, bicycling, boxing, fencing and photographing are encouraged.

The attention given to useful manual labor is especially worthy of note. The aim is to give a more perfect physical development than is possible through games alone; to develop a knowledge of, and interest in, industrial pursuits; to create a more wholesome attitude towards manual labor, and a keener sympathy and respect for laboring classes. To these ends carpentry, shop work, the care of animals and the rudiments of farming and gardening are taught, not to some only, but to all the boys.

During the first year of life on the school estate, the boys had the following practical work to do: Dingles to clear, Dingles to clear, weeds to cut, fences to repair, gates to tar, houses to paint, hay to make, gardens to trench and manure, pig-sties and duck ponds to make. Of the four hours spent each afternoon in physical and manual pursuits and games, the greater part must be spent in real, productive labor.

How well parents appreciate this phase of an education for their boys may be inferred from the following letter quoted in the Pall Mall Gazette. The writer had just been to Abbotsholme to see his son, a boy of some twelve years. A pertinent paragraph only is here repeated:

"The writer's first view of his son as a new scholar revealed him at the top of a ladder in company with a pail of whitewash, of which he had transferred a little to the roof of a shed and more to his own person. Perhaps he did not look pretty, but he had rarely looked so useful."

ARTISTIC AND IMAGINATIVE TRAINING.

If we may form a conclusion based upon the reading and study of the prospectus and manual of the school; upon pictures of the well-decorated and homelike rooms in the buildings, and of the attractive gardens and lawns surrounding them, with their flower-bordered walks and drives; and finally upon the testimony of numerous critics competent to judge, Ruskin and Thring have not talked and written in vain for Abbotsholme. But in addition to the passive influences of art so much in evidence, music and poetry and drawing have a prominent place in the curriculum as means to an artistic end. The belief is entertained that a pupil gets more art from good reading than from much formal class-work in literature. In view of this, one evening is set apart each week for reading Shakespeare aloud. The oral and expressive side of reading is emphasized in the daily recitation in that subject. Every boy with any ability is taught singing; all learn to copy music, and most of the boys learn to play some instrument. Every week there is a musical evening, and every day for a half hour there is a piano or organ recital after dinner. Drawing in all its branches is compulsory for all, and much time is given to it. The drawings and designs required for carpentry and clay modeling are made in the drawing school, and graphic methods are widely used in the natural science work. "To develop in every boy a general, useful power; to train hand and eye to steady accuracy,

neatness and quickness; and lastly, to train the eye to see the harmonies of form and color, and the aesthetic feelings to discern false taste"-these are ends to be attained by the work in drawing, as stated by Dr. Reddie. From the foregoing it will be seen that the school under review differs from most schools of our acquaintance in the importance it attaches to training the aesthetic sense. This is especially true of music, for few educators since Plato wrote his Republic have given so large a place to music in the harmonious unfolding of child

nature.

LITERARY AND INTELLECTUAL TRAINING.

It would be easy to discuss this phase of the Abbotsholme school at length. The limits of this paper, however, will permit only a few observations. The first one is this: The whole scheme is a protest against the preeminence generally given to the classics in English schools. Less attention to Greek and Latin and more stress upon the English tongue is the rule at Abbotsholme. The traditional superiority of Latin and Greek as disciplinary studies is discredited. The same intellectual habits may be confirmed; the same development of powers of analysis, discrimination, judgment, memory and the rest may come from a study of the modern languages, with the added gain of utility, it is claimed. It is not even worth while to study the classics for the sake of their literature, it is said. As we do not need to read Isaiah in Hebrew, nor John's gospel in Greek, to appreciate it, so may we get a reasonable understanding and appreciation of what is excellent in classical literature from translations of the same. Latin and Greek in their elementary forms, however, are taught as an aid to the understanding of English and French. And if an occasional boy is found whose bent is towards more Latin and Greek, or if his future career is decided upon early enough to make it evident that more Latin would be greatly to his advantage, opportunity is given him for such study.

While Latin and Greek receive but slight attention, a thorough knowledge

of French, German, or both, is provided for. French, which is the easier of the two to learn, is begun when the boys are about eleven. German is begun two years later, while French is continued, though with less time given to it. In all the language-teaching, conversation is carried on in the tongue being taught. The teaching is reinforced by appropriate gestures, acting, pictures, and everything that may make the work concrete and the impressions vivid. The school pays little attention to the grammar of a language until after the boys have learned to some extent to speak it. But it should be borne in mind that English is the first consideration and that cognate languages are of only secondary importance. The great aim in education, from the standpoint of language, is ability to speak and write the English language and to understand and appreciate its literary treasures.

Liberal use is made of the manual work, games, outings and excursions as material for conversational and composition lessons. No claim is made here for originality, of course. Successful teachers everywhere recognize that pupils express themselves most freely and most faultlessly when they are acquainted with and interested in their themes. Abbotsholme is no exception.

Geography and history are both so taught as to lead the boys to constantly look out for the relation of cause to effect. These two subjects are closely correlated; and yet the dependence of history upon geography is overemphasized, it seems. for it can scarcely be true to the extent that Dr. Reddie claims, "that the main work in history is to show that human life is largely moulded by physical conditions and that the geography of a country furnishes the chief key to its national, commercial and spiritual development." The plan of having the boys study translations of the best ancient authors is commendable. Acquaintance with the sources of history is too often reserved exclusively for the university. Studying the conditions of modern English life by visiting fields of British industry is also a praiseworthy feature of the program here.

In teaching natural science the plan is to begin with the observation of external facts and phenomena close at hand. Little effort is made at first to classify these facts and phenomena, but gradually an effort is made to push out towards more hidden and abstruse generalizations, and natural science in due time breaks up into botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, etc. So far as it is possible all the sciences are taught as they have grown in the human mind historically. Thus the culture-epoch theory is transferred and applied to a new field from history with whose teaching students of Herbartian pedagogy have long been wont to associate it. In connection with the natural science department there are laboratories for chemistry and for physics, none for zoölogy, a museum for geology and a type garden for botany. The most commendable of all the science teaching in the school is the teaching of physiology and hygiene. The boys are taught with particular care the laws which govern their own lives, and the habits, physical, mental and moral, which are necessary to acquire and keep sound health. Teethcleaning after breakfast and supper, the early cold water plunge, the daily bath, the morning run of twelve hundred yards, lung drill in the open air, stripped to the waist (to teach breathing), the necessity for regular attention to necessary and natural functions of intestines and kidneys the execution of these is a part of the program which excites favorable comment from all who know the school. Mathematics has a place in the curriculum, though there is little that is striking about its teaching or its extent. On the whole there is perhaps less Euclidean and more concrete and practical geometry than in most schools of its grade. The work is intimately connected with drawing, mechanics, surveying and engineering. Working drawings are made of picture frames, lockers, tables, etc., while the boys make maps from their own surveys of gardens, fields and out-buildings. Every boy learns bookkeeping, and to make it more concrete and practical, different boys keep account of the different portions of the expenditure of the school.

Thus the accounts of the farm, garden, workshop, games, stationery, laboratory, food and fuel are in their hands.

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING.

A common thought is that all good teaching is moral in its effect; that any lesson adequately taught contributes to the development of moral character. Abbotsholme, however, recognizes the need of something of a more positive nature in the field of ethics and religion to supplement the moral results of the ordinary lessons. Accordingly the whole school assembles for devotional exercises lasting ten minutes each morning and for similar exercises again in the evening. Dogmas and sectarianism are avoided, but there is religious teaching nevertheless. Abbotsholme assumes that there is enough of hope and faith and belief common to all thinking people to make worship and reverence possible in school as well as out of it. Portions of the Gospels and selections from the Psalms the boys learn by heart, but the study and the teaching alike center around the life of Jesus Christ, the great teacher. Care is taken to select such stories of biblical or other characters as are suited to the boys' stage of interest and experience, and to expunge those whose example is pernicious. But after all, the religious teaching is held to be less helpful than the religious example of the teachers' living. Says Dr. Lietz, formerly connected with the school and later founder of a similar school at Ilsenberg, Germany: "Our pupils must never see or hear us scoff about sacred things, nor find us indifferent or indulgent about what is wrong. They must observe in us reverence for what is holy, indignation at wrongdoing, pitying gentleness for weakness, and boundless readiness at all times to help every one. They ought to see each of the masters. doing that which Jesus did to his disciples. and to all men: forgiving, helping, reproving, healing, consoling, encouraging; in a word-loving."

Perhaps this is the place to mention that prizes and marks have no place at Abbotsholme. Every boy learns to vie,