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THE EXTENSION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION.

WHAT IT IS THAT IS BEING EXTENDED.

During the fall of 1912 a bitter political contest was waged in Jersey City. The decisive rally, tense and surcharged with partisan feeling, at which public sentiment was finally captured by one of the striving factions, was held in the city high school. Having in mind the violent possibilities natural to a political mass meeting, the education authorities took precautions. Through the newspapers the public was instructed regarding the hour of opening the doors and the particular entrances to be used in entering and leaving the building, and it was informed of the ban upon smoking. Citizens were also requested to cooperate with the police in maintaining order in and around the school premises. The orderliness that resulted was remarkable, considering the occasion. The audience, which included many ladies, showed no disposition to smoke during the proceedings, and only a few had to be cautioned about it at the doors. "In fact," reported Supt. of Schools Henry Snyder, "the prevalent good order was the cause for much favorable comment." Thus the matter of talking over the affairs of government and of selecting public servants, a business that is often transacted amidst sordid surroundings and but feebly participated in by large and important elements of the population, was dignified and made more widely representative through coming under the shelter of the public-school system. In this incident we see an illustration of a community activity being modified by public school control.

There is a tendency to overlook the precise nature of the process known as public education. It is a common habit to think of the activities which go on in the classroom as in some essential way different from those which go on in the parlor, the office, and the shop. The imposing and intricate machinery of modern education makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that nothing is done within the school that is not done outside of the school. Children learned to understand graphic signs and to count things by means of symbols long before schools existed. In the tribal period, history and poetry were imparted to the young through the camp-fire recitals of the elders. To-day boys and girls begin to pick up the three R's and to acquire something of local geography before they enter a classroom. Many boys use saws and hammers before they get into the manual training shop, and most girls do something with dishes before they enter the domestic science room. With everybody, learning begins before the

school days and continues after they have passed, and even during them it goes on outside of the classroom as much perhaps as within it. The distinctive work of the school is to make certain common activities go better than they ordinarily do apart from it. Essentially, it is an improving, elevating, ameliorative function that the school has always attempted to perform, and must from its very nature always strive to perform in the future. It may not always enrich the character of the activity it takes over, but it always insists upon its conformity to a certain manner. Its efficacy in imposing upon human conduct a desired mold was first appreciated, naturally enough, by the church, an institution which has supported it from the earliest times and by which it will probably always be regarded as a necessary instrument. With the development of democracy and the increasing participation of the common people in the affairs of government, concern was felt as to the wisdom and intelligence which the masses would display in the exercise of suffrage. This anxiety arose from the belief that the intellectual training of the rising generation, which was then being given largely in the home, and only to a limited degree by the church and private agencies, was not sufficiently even, systematic, and efficient to insure the adequate education of all the future citizens. Education was indeed going on in one way or another everywhere, but it was not uniformly good enough. And so the public school was instituted to better generally the rudimentary instruction then in existence.

Bettering, in the sense intended here, does not mean that the public school, upon assuming the burden of teaching the three R's, immediately improved the quality of that process as carried on in exceptionally favored homes or private schools. What is meant is that, through the transfer, in the main, of this instruction from careless, untutored, and unsystematic parents to persons specially prepared for and devoting regular periods to teaching, the learning of the three R's was greatly facilitated for the multitudes of boys and girls who had hitherto enjoyed no particular educational advantages. By improving the instruction of a large part of the children, the public school bettered the bulk of the elementary instruction for all. Other activities which have been unevenly and inadequately performed by the home are being continually taken over by the public school with the same kind of ameliorative result.

Let us take one other example. Parents, as a rule, have always cared in some way for the bodies of their children. Their solicitude may have resulted in little more than trimming the hair or providing clothes; it may have taken the absurd Chinese form of binding the feet, but it has seldom been absent altogether. On the other hand, few fathers, even to-day, have in practice attained to the height of their obligation in this matter; that is to say, few parents are sys

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The privilege of belonging to a mandolin club need not be limited to college students.

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B. NOVELTY SEWING AND IRISH CROCHET CLUB-BOSTON EVENING CENTERS.

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