LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL.

DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR,

BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, February 1, 1916.

SIR: Among the papers read in the conference on education of the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress, held in Washington December 27, 1915, to January 8, 1916, two contain so much of interest and value to those who are responsible for the organization of secondary schools that I have obtained the permission of their authors to have them published for distribution to principals of high schools in the United States. I am transmitting them herewith for that purpose. Since in many important particulars they supplement each other, I recommend that they be printed and bound together as a single number of the bulletin of the Bureau of Education. Respectfully submitted.

The SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.

P. P. CLAXTON,
Commissioner.

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THE CHANGES NEEDED IN AMERICAN SECONDARY EDUCATION.

By CHARLES W. ELIOT.

The best part of all human knowledge has come by exact and studied observation made through the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The most important part of education has always been the training of the senses through which that best part of knowledge comes. This training has two precious results in the individual, besides the faculty of accurate observation-one the acquisition of some sort of skill; the other the habit of careful reflection and measured reasoning which results in precise statement and record.

A baby's assiduity in observation and experimentation and the rapidity of its progress in sense-training are probably never matched in after life.

The boy on a farm has admirable opportunities to train eye, ear, and hand, because he can always be looking at the sky and the soils, the woods, the crops, and the forests, having familiar intercourse with many domestic animals, using various tools, listening to the innumerable sweet sounds which wind, water, birds, and insects make on the countryside, and in his holidays hunting, fishing, and roaming. The fundamental trades, such as those of the carpenter, mason, blacksmith, wheelwright, painter, hand leatherworker and shoemaker, have provided immensely valuable education for the human race, and have, indeed, been the chief means of raising barbarous peoples to a condition of approximate civilization. To-day, the teaching of those trades, without much use of machinery, is the best mode of developing the natural powers of a backward people.

In noble and rich families some training of the senses was obtained all through feudal times; because the men were brought up to war and the chase, and the women not only shared in some degree the sports of the men, but acquired the manual skill which sewing, knitting, hand-weaving, and embroidering demand.

The advent of mechanical power and machinery has greatly impaired the educational value of many trades, and this impairment has become so common that it may almost be called universal. The

accurate joints a carpenter used to make by the careful use of his own eyes and hands are now made by machines almost without human intervention. The horseshoe which a blacksmith used to turn by hand on his anvil, and temper in his own little fire with a very accurate appreciation of the changing tints of the hot metal, is now turned out by machinery as one of a hundred thousand, almost without touch of human hand or glance of human eye. The ordinary uniformity of a machine product is due to invariability in the action of the machine, and this invariability is a main object from the point of view of the inventor or the proprietor; but that same invariability makes the tending of the machine of little use in the education of the human being that tends it-child, woman, or man.

The difference between a good workman and a poor one in agriculture, mining, or manufacturing is the difference between the man who possesses well-trained senses and good judgment in using them and the man who does not.

It follows from these considerations that the training of the senses should always have been a prime object in human education, at every stage from primary to professional. That prime object it has never been, and is not to-day. The kind of education the modern world has inherited from ancient times was based chiefly on literature. Its principal materials, beside some elementary mathematics, were sacred and profane writings, both prose and poetry, including descriptive narration, history, philosophy, and religion; but accompanying this tradition of language and literature was another highly useful transmission from ancient times-the study of the fine arts, with the many kinds of skill that are indispensable to artistic creation. Wherever in Europe the cultivation of the fine arts has survived in vigor, there the varied skill of the artist in music, painting, sculpture, and architecture has been a saving element in national education, although it affected strongly only a limited number of persons. The English nation was less influenced by artistic culture than the nations of the Continent. American secondary and higher education copied English models, and were also injuriously affected by the Puritan, Genevan, Scotch-Presbyterian, and Quaker disdain for the fine arts. As a result the programs of secondary schools in the United States allotted only an insignificant portion of school time to the cultivation of the senses through music and drawing; and, until lately, boys and girls in secondary schools did not have their attention directed to the fine arts by any outside or voluntary organizations. As a rule, the young men admitted to American colleges can neither draw nor sing; and they possess no other skill of eye, ear, or hand.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, a new element in the education of the white race has been developing, slowly for a hundred