There is a general movement in the progressive states of the country to establish educational commissions, the business of which shall be to study the educational needs of their respective states, and to suggest sound educational legislation. Our educational system has already become so complex that ill-considered legislation is more likely to do harm than good. How can a state like Wisconsin, for instance, develop educationally in a safe, secure way without the careful study by competent men of needed legislation? Legislation of this sort ought to be proposed at least a year before it is acted upon, and it should be generally discussed by laymen as well as by educators, so that before any measure is enacted into law it may be considered on all sides.

* * * *

Partial segregation of boys and girls in the schools is spreading throughout the country. This does not mean that the principle of coeducation is being abandoned; but there is a growing conviction that boys and girls should have somewhat different work adapted to their different natures and their different needs. Not very long ago it was thought that all pupils in the schools should he put through the same sort of règime, on the theory that education should discipline an individual rather than prepare him to adjust himself to the concrete life he had to live. We are growing out of that belief, and are coming to think that pupils ought, to some extent at any rate, to choose their work according to their special needs. It is not strange that we have not earlier come to the view that the educational needs of boys and girls are not precisely alike?

*

There seem to be a few timid souls in our state who are afraid that women will not have an equal chance with men in our educational institutions.

If any reader of the Journal has fears of this kind he might visit Madison at his leisure, and inspect the new woman's building at the University, which will be ready for occupancy during the next academic year. Lathrop Hall will provide facilities for women quite in excess of those enjoyed by the men of the University. There is nothing luxurious about it; but it is intended to afford opportunities for superior physical training, and for a simple but adequate social life among women.

* * * *

The press reports that the Illinois state teachers' association has endorsed a bill providing for the establishment of a state board of education to consist of nine members. The state superintendent of public instruction will be chairman ex-officio of this board. It will have power to make rules for the supervision and inspection of schools, to govern the distribution of the general school fund, to provide courses of study, to control teachers' examinations, and to co-operate with boards of health in securing improvement in the sanitary conditions of school buildings. We have heretofore in these columns urged the desirability of establishing such a board of education in this state. Can we not move onto this soon?

*

It is encouraging, even inspiring, to note with. what unanimity the press of this state favors every movement looking toward the reasonable increase of appropriations for educational work. One section of the state is not more enthusiastic than another in urging the necessity of providing larger facilities and better trained teachers for the schools. Within the past few months we have read many articles criticising the work of the schools, but not one of these has even suggested that their financial support should be reduced, or that the salary of teachers should remain stationary. In educational literature and at educational meetings statements are frequently made to the effect that the public does not appreciate the work of teachers, but we suspect that these charges are not true, as they apply to many communities, at any rate.

"THE PARKER WAY" BOOKLET. This is an interesting little booklet just from the press showing the "Way" the Parker Teachers' Agency assists teachers to positions. Write for it. THE PARKER TEACHERS' AGENCY, Madison, Wisconsin.

A COURSE IN MORAL EDUCATION, IV.

BY PROFESSOR FRANK C. SHARP, THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

If the courses in biography and in contemporary progress have been properly conducted the pupils will approach the work of the third year in a spirit totally different from that in which the traditional school-boy listens to the traditional sermon occasionally vouchsafed him by his teacher. The desire for a stronger, purer, and more unselfish character, and the enthusiasm for service will have been awakened or strengthened among the great majority. They will accordingly now be interested in the question, What shall I do? The working out of the answer on their part will not merely inform and discipline the intellect, it will guide and strengthen the will.

The fundamental presupposition of this year's course is that the laws of morality are the laws of social welfare. Society must not be conceived as some mysterious entity, but as a name for concrete human beings with individual affections, ambitions, needs, living in relationships with each other so intimate that the good or ill of one, instead of remaining within the confines of the individual life, inevitably passes over to others, sometimes to many, not infrequently, in the end, to all. As a result of this organic nature of society, and of other factors in the constitution of man, the welfare of any one individual is inextricably intertwined with that of others, in the last resort with that of the community as a whole, as can easily be shown to our pupils by a study of the effects of intemperance. Our duty to other persons accordingly calls for the same actions in the great majority of cases as does the duty we each owe to our own permanent good. Not that the conditions of individual welfare are always and everywhere absolutely identical with the claims of the more inclusive good, else, for the intelligent man at least, there were no place for genuine self-sacrifice. The truth is rather that, to a gaze that penetrates beneath the surface, there is no such violent and thorough-going antithesis as is commonly supposed to exist. The claims which other individuals, or society as a whole, have upon us, are thus normally reinforced by the claims of our own true interests. Where interests conflict, duty calls upon us to realize the more comprehensive system of goods. But always and everywhere it is the good

or evil of some being capable of suffering and happiness, that is concerned; and loyalty to the right therefore always means, not the pursuit of some will-o'-the-wisp, but devotion to all that makes life happier, richer, and more beautiful.

There is accordingly no arbitrary element in true morality. The leader of a class in morals is therefore in essentially the same position as the teacher of hygiene. He assumes at the outset the existence of interests in the welfare of self and others. These he seeks to strengthen and render more comprehensive, precisely as the teacher of hygiene would do. Then he guides his pupils to the discovery of the rules of conduct which, in accordance with the structure of the material world and of human nature, are required for the attainment of these ends. In so doing he is helping them to determine what conduct is right in the various situations of life, and to see what are the reasons for doing right. If, from the very nature of our public schools, and their relation to the community, certain important reasons,-I mean of course the religious,-must be either omitted from the discussion or not developed in their completeness, no one but a bigot will find in this fact a ground for excluding the entire subject from the school curriculum. The school, as the representative of the public, must confine itself to those reasons with regard to which all good men agree. The pupils, who know the situation just as well as the principal does, will no more interpret this silence as a denial of the value of the religious motives, than they will suppose that the problems upon which the political parties are divided are unimportant because they are not discussed in the

class-room.

The program for the course will consist in a survey of the various duties of life as they are enumerated in any of the books prepared for that purpose. Among the manuals that may be recommended as a guide in planning the work are the following: Hyde, Practical Ethics (Holt); Everett, Ethics for Young People (Ginn); Bierbower, Ethics for Schools (Hinds & Noble). The exercises of a given day will consist in the discussion of a topic assigned in advance, with regard to which, as will be announced beforehand, the following questions will be asked: What is the right mode of conduct in the situation under consideration, and what are some of the most frequently occuring wrong ones?

Has the former any counterfeits, as rashness is the counterfeit of courage, and the vice of the spendthrift is one of the counterfeits of generosity? What are the most common temptations to the wrong actions and how may they best be avoided or overcome? How may the corresponding tendencies in the individual to wrong doing be most effectively destroyed and the tendencies towards the right be strengthened? What are the direct and indirect effects upon others, both in the way of happiness and character, of taking the right course and of taking the wrong one? What are the direct and indirect effects upon self? What other reasons, apart from these effects, can be found for taking the right course? Why are we so often callous and indifferent?

In the matter of the indirect effects of action the teacher will find a larger field of labor than he may have suspected. For several years I have been making a study of the moral judgments of our university students. With regard to lying and the breaking of a promise or contract I find them fairly familiar with the danger of creating a habit and of the difficulty of drawing the line if you once begin to permit yourself an infraction of the general rule. They are also well aware, as would be expected, of the danger to which the agent exposes himself of losing the confidence of his fellowmen; but of so obvious a consideration as that the loss of confidence in one person tends to weaken our confidence in all our fellow men as such, few of them seem ever to have thought. Nor have I discovered among them a recognition of the fact that we all tend to pass on to third parties the kinds of treatment, whether good or bad, that we have received from others.

Throughout this work we must aim to exhibit the fact that morality involves will power, never weakness of will; that it involves at least one form of intellectual power, namely the ability to put ourselves in the place of others; that it involves paying back a little of what the world has done for us, so that it becomes a point of honor; that it is an exhibition, always and everywhere, of the same spirit which we spontaneously admire in chivalry; that it unites us with the best men and women of our time and all times in the great work of promoting human progress; and finally that it is what most completely conduces to our own highest and most permanent interests. Furthermore it must

be shown how much wrong doing is reducible to cowardice, lack of fortitude, lack of persistence, and lack of self-control, or, in other words, to weakness of will; how much to treachery and other forms of deception and falseness; how much to sponging; how much to cruelty. As these are vices that every healthy-minded person instinctively and spontaneously hates, the discovery on the part of our pupils that every form of wrong doing is reducible to one or more of these-as is certainly the case-can not but produce a strong impression.

In carrying out this program the material supplied by biography and literature must be used as much as possible. A single illustration will perhaps serve to show what may be done in this way. The melancholy of Hamlet-as everybody knows— is not due to his father's death. It is due to his belief that the two women who once represented his ideal of moral perfection have proved heartless and false. The world has accordingly become for him an unweeded garden; things rank and gross in nature possess it entirely. With regard to his mother his suspicions are only too well founded. But what shall we say of Ophelia? Hamlet thinks she has turned her back upon him because he has fallen from his position as heir to a throne and become a mere inconvenient, suspected, and hated. step-son of a king. But if he had applied to the situation any of that mental acumen with which he was abundantly supplied he would have realized that Ophelia was mere clay in the hands of her father, and would have seen that Polonius was precisely the man to use his influence to compel her to break off her relations with him under the circumstances. It is but another phase of the same unwarranted obtuseness that Hamlet can suppose the whole moral order has gone to pieces while there lives such a man as Horatio. It is the study of a concrete situation like this that will render most

impressive the injunction we all treat so lightly: Judge not.

It is very easy to become a fossil. Some teachers drift into this stage, and when they do, they are more fit for a geological museum than they are for the head of a system of schools. It is so easy to drift, but it takes strength to keep abreast with

those who constitute the active workers in the teacher's ranks.-Arkansas School Journal.

I. CONDITION AND CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL LANGUAGE TEACHING.

MARY D. BRADFORD.

This is the age that is demanding that the school turn out not only good men and women, but men and women good for something. It is constructive ability of some sort that counts. Hence the strong industrial tendencies in our school systems; hence the demand in language teaching that the product of the school be trained to something more than mere appreciative power. It demands of men and women power to influence life through expressive ability.

It becomes the business of the elementary grades in their language teaching to lay the foundation for this sort of efficiency, by making Constructive Language work, that is Composition, the dominant thing. After this comes the demand that this composition, this use of language for the expression of thought, be according to correct usage. Hence the need of a second kind of language work, always subordinate to the first, arises; namely, Technical language, which has for its aim grammatical excellence.

It is my purpose here to consider the ways and means of making Elementary Composition effective for thought expression, and to show the relation of Technical language work to Composition. How may Composition work be made most successful? To summarize my theory, it is this:

First, The mind of the child must be exercised upon interesting and profitable thought material. Second, He must be led to express what he thinks by speech and writing, and do this under the guidance of the teacher whose criticisms must help him towards technical excellence.

These two sentences seem to me to imply all that is needed to make composition work effective, and at the same time they imply the relation of Technical language to the first. It is through free, natural thought expression, that the child reveals his needs in the way of grammar and vocabulary to the teacher, and her business is to minister to those needs, patiently, earnestly, persistently; until the habits of right expression form. But this technical work should be such an outgrowth of the composition work, that the pupil may see that it is for the thought's sake, and not for the form's sake that he is being drilled to correct usage. This any teacher can do, if she will adopt as her guiding principle: Form subordinate to the needs of

thought; not thought subordinate to the demands of form. Let her first put emphasis upon what the child has to say, and later help him to the best way of saying it.

What does the term Composition mean, as I am employing it?

It does not mean what it did to me in

my

school

days,-a thing to be dreaded and agonized over, a semi-annual, bi-monthly, or, at the most, monthly written dissertation on some abstract theme, nowhere in touch with my interests or ability, and largely a paraphrase of somebody's else production. No, it means any and every effort on the part of the child to express thought and feeling in words, spoken, or written. It means any effort of his to construct,-put words together to make sentences, or put sentences together to make paragraphs. It means the conversation of the primary child about his pets or her doll, or the recital by him of the fable of "The Fox and the Grape"; it means the explanation of the upper grade child of the thought process in his problem in arithmetic; the description of the steps in the making of this piece of handwork; the paragraph written to show his understanding of the influence of elevation upon climate; the reproduction of some historical account,—every such effort is composition.

To so broaden the conception of composition may lead teachers to attach more importance to various language efforts of the child; now simply listened to, with attention centred upon evidences of thought. It may lead her to use the simple, informal recital by him of some of his experiences as a means to impress the need of relevancy and coherence in such efforts. It may lead her to listen more closely to the answers of children to questions put, and to insist upon clearness and fullness, instead of accepting the, "I know, but can't tell," excuse. She will keep him working at his answer until it is what it should be as to truthfulness and form, then he will be dismissed, not only with increased power to express, but with clearer thought because of his mastery of its clear expression. Thus every class becomes a language class, and where departmental or subject teaching is in operation, every teacher becomes a language teacher.

Attention to writing is often in excess of attention to talking. The effort expended in writing is out of proportion to the results obtained. Chil