more and more, until he is able to reduce his thoughts upon a book to an intelligent book review.

By conversation the teacher can do very much to develop the social phase of language a phase, which, though very important in life, is too often entirely neglected in school. The teacher may engage the children in conversation, singly, in groups or as a school. She may also arrange so that the children have opportunity to discuss matters of interest at legitimate times. In this way she may lead the child to select appropriate subjects of conversation and direct them so as to give them skill and grace in beginning or in following a conversation. For the benefit of the teacher a volume of essays entitled "The Gentle Reader" may be especially commended. One of these, "The Honorable Points of Ignorance," is especially valuable.

In all her conversation the teacher should avoid the manner of talking and smiling that must have been characteristie of Dickens's schoolmistress, who began a little essay on the upper left and ended it upon the lower right corner of a slate. The teacher should always talk to the children in a natural manner entirely free from any patronizing "teachery" affectation and any attempt to "talk down" to the child's level.

She should cultivate a distinct wellmodulated voice both in herself and in the child. If any remediable physical defects interfere with a child's voice it should be brought to the attention of the parents. Too much attention cannot be given to this question, for as a nation we are afflicted with harsh voices and careless articulation.

The teacher should employ a vocabulary more varied and elevated than that of the child and should, each day, plan to teach new words incidentally by varying the form of directions and questions and by permitting the children to repeat directions for her and to ask questions. The child should be introduced to poetic forms through the memorization of rhymes and jingles. As his age permits these forms should grow in elegance. D. C. Heath publishes excellent ten-cent editions of "Nursery Rhymes," and in

mixed grades an older child will be delighted to assist the teacher in this work.

Out

The child should hear and be encouraged to tell short stories of the anecdote variety. Until the teacher learns the taste of each child she should hear the story before it is told to the school. Both riddles and guessing games are valuable in their way. All these may be profitably employed during manual training work, after directions have been given. side of school they will afford the child a harmless means of diverting himself and others. Occasionally the teacher may read in her very best manner a beautiful poem or an amusing story while the children are left free merely to enjoy or to laugh with her or to question or to comment, as the spirit moves them. Thus love of beauty of language may grow in his heart.

Such good, time-honored devices as dictation letter-writing, speech-making and debating may be profitably called forth from oblivion and vitalized by the modern educational spirit. Passages from prose or poetry previously studied may be dictated to assist in memory work, spelling and writing and punctuation. A child whose voice needs developing may be required to dictate the lesson.

Interest may be lent to letter-writing by seizing upon some school event of unusual interest as subject for a letter to an absent schoolmate. If the child send his letter to a child in a foreign country the joy of giving and the hope of receiving unusual information will add zest to the correspondence. As the child grows older he may be taught in a pleasant and practical manner many of the small courtesies of social life, such as notes of invi-. tation, acceptance, refusal, condolence and congratulation, etc.

The child should be encouraged to express himself in speeches upon current events and if difference of opinion appear -as difference most certainly will-sides may be taken, time given for preparation and a day set for the battle of child-logic, at which the teacher may assist as a silent listener, and learn more of childmind in twenty minutes than she could in a week's work of formal child-study.

Besides the regular and the incidental

work in language much can, be done to develop imagination, taste and expression by means of music, art and the environment. The school grounds, building, furnishings and decoration should be determined not by the business needs of a brother-in-law of the president of the school board, but primarily with regard to the child's health and comfort, and secondarily with an eye to developing his taste and expression. The child should be surrounded by stimuli to observation and expression-pictures, growing plants and even animals when possible. His attention should be directed toward these objects in connection with his regular work and they should be employed as themes of conversation.

The beauty of nature of which the brother-in-law of the president of the school board cannot deprive the children -should be made objects of reverential observation. He should welcome the soft green harbinger of spring, the golden beauty of the summer wheatfield, the graceful droop of the beech, the delicate tracery of the leafless trees against the winter sky, the glory of Orion. He should be encouraged to talk and to write. of all these and he should see in picture and hear in song how the world's great masters have expressed their reverence for God's handiwork.

The reader, the language lesson and the environment are important to the child's language development, but the teacher is of prime importance. This brief sketch hints that language work calls for ability of no mean order.

The teacher who is successful in this work must be a woman of broad and deep sympathy for all the phases of nature and for all classes and conditions of men-she must have the ability to be all things to all men. She must be a good talker and a sympathetic listener, and be blessed with a keen sense of humor and a moder

ately ready wit. She should possess, to a certain degree, the gifts of the dramatic artist-a pleasant, flexible voice, an expressive face and hands and some skill in impersonating. She should be endowed with the characteristics of the true story-teller-the language sense; a respect for words and an instinct for correctness and beauty of language; the artistic imagination, that is, the ability to see poetry in common things and to seize the artistic in an event or a character.

To all these gifts of nature should be added thorough and broad training in English-grammar, rhetoric, composition, and literature; a few years, at least, of Latin for the sake of its relation to English; and an accurate knowledge of some modern language recently acquired, to quicken her sympathy with the young learner so that devices may not fail. She should have read widely in the field of literature in general and should be acquainted with the selections that are adapted or adaptable to the child's nature. She should have right literary

taste.

This special knowledge should be supplemented by a broad general knowledgeof history, the sciences and the arts. She should have special professional training so that she may understand her subjectmatter the child's soul-and the method by which the child's subject-matter-language-may be used for his physical,. mental and moral development.

She should have that insight which will enable her to see in the child what she, herself, is the possible writer of the great American masterpiece. She should have the power and the desire to lead the child into his kingdom. She should have the sympathetic encouragement of both parents and school authorities, and a salary of more than $278 a year. A good parrot trainer could not be secured for this sum.

The theory of mental discipline that has prevailed until recent years as the predominant educational ideal has a sad record of unhappy school days, blunted intellects, and impaired efficiency chargeable to its baneful rule in the school room. Yet so deeply did its roots penetrate into the educational system during the scholastic age, when it was regarded as the choicest flower of the educational process, that it has thus far partially withstood the attempts to eradicate and supplant it by the more fruitful educational ideals which the study of child-nature has revealed.

This theory of mental discipline, also spoken of as "the development of all the powers" and the "doctrine of effort," regards the child as having certain faculties which must be developed and trained by "exercising" them, without regard particularly to whether the things he does and learns will be of any value to him or not. In fact many, following in the steps of Plato, have believed that the mind, in order to develop its powers most effectively, should concern itself largely with universal truth uncontaminated by contact with the affairs of the work-a-day world. It made no difference to the believers in mental discipline that these abstractions were without interest to the child. "Life is a struggle at the best," they said. "We are occupied much of the time with uncongenial tasks, and we must be prepared to do them well, regardless of our feelings. Train pupils by hard, exacting discipline to perform difficult, disagreeable tasks successfully, and some day they will rise up and call us blessed. The straight and narrow way leadeth not through pleasant fields and peaceful valleys, but through thickets. and briers. This life is a dreary existence. We must not look for happiness and joy in our work; all we can hope for is to do our duty uncomplainingly and accomplish the work whereunto we were sent into the world."

This ideal naturally exalted the discip

linary aspect of education. The will of the child was broken early in life at all costs. He was plunged into the study of books by the most difficult method-the "A, B. C." method. He was obliged to learn the catechism and long selections of unintelligible words to train his memory. He early took up the study of grammar, made unnecessarily difficult, and arithmetic, burdened with many impossible and torturing problems, to develop his reason. The cane or switch was always at hand to stir up lagging attention and to subdue any tendencies of the recalcitrant will to assert itself. The few that survived this educational struggle for existence to enter the higher schools continued to discipline their minds by a study of Latin and Greek and mathematics, which were regarded as the disciplinary studies par excellence. To what extent this ideal manifests itself in the schools today in the choice of subjects for the curriculum, in the way they are taught, and the results expected and attained by the school and college, I will leave the reader to judge.

There are two fundamental misconceptions in this theory of mental discipline, as it has been commonly interpreted, which should be thoughtfully considered by every teacher. First, the child, whose distinctive interests are disregarded by his teacher, early learns to adapt himself to his environment by conforming externally to the requirements of the teacher, while his mind is far adrift among pleasant fields of imagery of his own making. He doesn't dare play truant physically, so he drags his body to school and then safely sends his mind roaming over the fields of fancy. He becomes very skilful in giving just so much of himself and his attention to the teacher's requirements as to keep out of trouble. As Dr. Dewey so well puts it in his "Interest as Related to the Will": "The great fallacy of the so-called effort theory is that it identifies the exercise and training of the will with certain ex

ternal activities and certain external results. It is supposed that because a child is occupied at some outward task and because he succeeds in exhibiting the required product, that he is really putting forth will, and that definite intellectual and moral habits are in process of formation. If, however, the task has appealed to him simply as a task, it is certain psychologically that the child is simply engaged in acquiring the habit of divided attention. While we are congratulating ourselves upon the well-disciplined habits which the pupil is acquiring, we fail to commiserate ourselves because the deeper intellectual and moral nature of the child has secured absolutely no discipline at all, but has been left to follow its own caprices, the disordered suggestions of the moment, or of past experience. The training of this internal imagery is infinitely more important than the development of certain outward habits of movement. I do not see how any one at all familiar with the great mass of existing school work can deny that the greater part of pupils are gradually forming habits of divided attention." To emphasize the possibility of forming this habit of divided attention, we need only remind ourselves that brute animals can be trained to show certain outward manifestations of great intelligence, while their minds are centered on the bone or lump of sugar or the lash in the trainer's hand.

The other important misconception is the theory that a general training of the mind or of the faculties can be secured by training in special activities. In the scholastic education, memory and reason were believed to be the most important faculties to be trained, therefore the dead languages and mathematics held the primary in the curriculum. The study of these subjects, it was thought-has the belief entirely disappeared?-would produce power out of all proportion to the amount of energy required to learn them and this power could be used for any mental activity. An old algebra textbook was entitled, "Ye Whetstone of Wit", implying that the subject made a good grindstone on which to sharpen the

faculties. Grammar was similarly held in high esteem because of the training in logical thinking and subtle analysis it was supposed to give. A recent survey of the literature on the teaching of grammar showed a remarkable agreement, even among modern writers, with this opinion of the disciplinary value of grammar, it being uniformly cited as the chief argument for the teaching of the subject.

Modern psychology has clarified our thinking on this point. A good deal of careful experimenting has been done to determine the extent to which training in one activity will improve the ability in other allied activities. Professor James has shown* that the natural retentiveness of the memory cannot be improved by practice, and his results have been confirmed by other investigations. They conclude that any improvement in memory can only come about through improved methods of memorizing.

Professors Thorndike and Woodworth's experiments along this linet have perhaps been the most carefully conducted and are certainly the most conclusive. They trained adults to become expert in a great variety of activities and then tested their improvement in similar activities involving what has generally been regarded as the same kinds of ability. For instance, they secured a great degree of accuracy in estimating short lines and found that the subject had improved only slightly in estimating longer lines. One who had learned to estimate accurately small weights of a particular shape and size showed much less improvement in estimating heavier weights or those of the same weight but of different shapes and sizes. They obtained similar results in the whole series of experiments.

The conclusions of these investigators were that (1) improvement in any ability rarely brings about equal improvement in any other ability no matter how similar the two activities involved may be; (2) improvement is noticed in the second trait to the extent that there are identical elements in the mental processes involved in both activities, as in addition

James' Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 668. †Thorndike's Educational Psychology, p. 90.

and multiplication (which is largely addition); and (3) there is also improvement where general habits and ideas of method gained in the training in the first. trait will assist in the second trait, as in memorizing, the method of learning a selection by repetition of the entire selection instead of phrase by phrase is found to apply both to poetry and prose.

All of this experimental work reveals the high degree of specialization of the mind and confutes the theory that there can be gained a general training of it or of its "faculties," perception, memory, reason and imagination, by studying certain traditional abstract subjects. Even such traits as mathematical, linguistic, or historical ability can not be trained as a whole by any special exercise in arithmetic, language or history, for careful consideration will cause us to realize that ability in arithmetic or in English means nothing psychologically because it includes so many different abilities. Thus a person may be at the same time unfailingly accurate in addition of integers, fair in division of integers, poor in additon of fractions and very poor in division of fractions, or he might be excellent in solving one kind of problem and a failure in another kind. It has likewise been demonstrated experimentally* that there is no more relation among the abilities required for the three usual forms of English instruction-grammar, composition and interpretation-than among three entirely different subjects, as arithmetic, grammar and history. The psychologists had prepared the way for this specialized view of the mind by previously showing that the brain, together with the rest of the nervous system, is an organ for transmitting particular sensations. coming in from our environment into specific actions. Each new situation confronting us, with its particular complex of sensations, is more or less different from all other situations that we have faced. Our success in meeting the situation will depend primarily upon the number of elements in it which we have mastered in our previous experience. Admitting, then, that the mind is a *In an unpublished study by the writer.

highly specialized organ which enables us to adapt ourselves to the numberless particular situations of life, it is evident that education, to be most effective, should give as direct preparation as possible for the situations which our pupils in general will be called upon to meet and control, and not seek to prepare for any situation that may arise, as the believers in formal discipline have attempted to do. To illustrate practically, pupils should learn to solve the kinds of problems in mathematics that they are likely to be called upon to solve in their experience, instead of working at problems never heard of outside the school room in order to obtain a fictitious mental training. The pupil should be conceived of not as an isolated individual whose powers and capacities can be developed in the abstract, but as a social being, inseparably dependent upon his environment for his maintenance and development. The social environment, instead of being neglected as in the past, will thus be accorded its rightfully supreme place in education.

The new conception of mental discipline will not then be an abstract formal process in which the powers of the child are to be exercised without reference to his interests and the use to which they are to be put; nor will it be a mere preparation for future life. Dr. Dewey tells of a swimming school in Chicago which professes to teach how to swim without going near the water. Equally ridiculous is a school which aims only to prepare for life. The true mental and moral discipline will result from a willing, hearty participation of the child in the ever varied, absorbingly interesting life about him as a means to his self-realization. Whatever fails to enlist his interest and co-operation is therefore thwarting his mental development, for it is cultivating in him the habit of divided attention. Let us not, then, evade his question, "What is the use of this study?" For if we can not satisfy him and ourselves that it is to be of real value in enabling him to live more worthily or more happily, it should be excluded from his curriculum. Our best schools have gone a long way towards eliminating this dead wood from