the prospective teachers now in the normal school and the teachers training college, who can not be made because they were not born right, it is well to raise the question if many born all right have not been spoiled in the making which precedes the normal school. Professional training for high school service is needed today as never before, because of the rapid extension of high schools. Let us however hesitate to accept this training in the art of teaching at the expense of substantial scholarship. It is unwise to spend time in training a young woman in methods of teaching mathematics before she herself has mastered at least the elements of higher mathematics. How to teach Latin is an important subject of study for the prospective high school teacher, but it should come after the training to know and enjoy Cicero, Horace and Juvenal-not before, and never without it.

If it be true that the high school is the school of all the people, demanding a certain elasticity of curriculum, we must ask ourselves on what principles the selection of subjects should proceed. I believe the day is not very far distant when we shall insist that the pupil under the wise guidance of home and teachers shall select a course running through four years of the high school, with the privilege of reconsidering that selection at the end of one year and again at the end of the second and the third year. But the choice and the revisions must ever be under such guidance as will insure that in the end there has been completed a thoroughly organized and coherent course.

A plea has been made for a return to the larger use of written examinations in high schools. It is well to test the knowledge which young people are supposed to have acquired, and to compel them to state intelligently the information secured. But, when we realize that very few high school teachers could pass all the examinations for graduation from their own schools, we should hesitate to put the examination fetish up again for wor ship. As an absolute and independent test of ability to do farther and better work it has been proved over and over again to be a complete failure. I hope no one is going out of this convocation

with any reinforcement for the temptation to take a backward step in this matter of written examinations. We still have too many of them rather than too few. Many of us would gladly welcome the day when we might be relieved of some of the responsibility involved in certifying pupils to college. Personally, I feel that there can be no safe and satisfactory system of certification from secondary school to college which does not involve at least annual visitation, observation, and testing of classes by several members of the faculty of the college extending the privilege of admission on certificate. But I would be the last to urge the abolition of the certification plan of many of our New England colleges and the substitution of examinations on the ground that we would thereby be enabled to do better. work in our high schools. It is a sorry secondary school which can not get the best work out of teachers and pupils without holding over both the exactions of written examinations by outside authority; and I am inclined to believe that the least inspiring of the high schools of our country would be found to be those most subjected to such tests.

To one feature of Dr Brown's paper, I wish to call special attention. The secondary school is itself a life, as well as a preparation for life. We can not get away from the fact that it is in one sense a college fitting school. We ought not to get away from the other fact that a large percentage of pupils are there for something else than getting ready to go to college. We do make generous provision for the youth going to college or technical school. Let us recognize the demand for equal preparation of the boys and girls who are to go directly out into the various activities of business life. Great interest attaches to the problem now being worked out in such schools as the Mechanics arts high school of Springfield Mass., where the school authorities are endeavoring to make just as good provision for the young men who are to go out into the mills and factories, stores and shops as for those who will go to college or technical school, and this too without ignoring the fact that the high school is primarily a school of liberal culture.

Formal discussion

Sup't Charles B. Gilbert

The pendulum, from reach to reach
Of warring creeds, the sages teach,

It swingeth, swingeth ever.

But at the point between

Men call the golden mean

It stayeth never.

No department of human activity is more subject to this law of undulatory flux than education. The reasons are obvious. We possess but few fixed principles and hence eagerly snatch at each new thought with the hope that at last we have a creed. Moreover, educational ideals and efforts necessarily reflect the prevailing conditions, psychologic, sociologic and creedal, in the society whose youth are being educated, and today in the social world there prevails the utmost uncertainty of doctrine and be lief regarding the most fundamental questions, such as those of religion, of sociology, of economics. Particularly is there the widest divergence of opinion regarding the relations of each to each and of each to the social whole. Public thought is vibrat ing between the extremes of paternalism and socialism at one reach and individualism at the other. Men know not where they stand, and, worse, know not where they want to stand. Ever shouting for the individual, they continually put new burdens on the state. We have no prophet and no vision. Is it any wonder, then, that the educational ideals waver? The school, we say, must introduce the child to such a life as he should lead after leaving its halls. That were well enough if you were sure of the meaning and end of life.

So we vibrate from paternalism in school to extreme individ ualism, and again and more frequently from one form of paternalism to another. Indeed, the present question appears to be which form of paternalism is better. 25 years ago high schools were struggling for existence, but their ideals were fixed. Their recognized office was to introduce all youth who entered them to the blessings of an orthodox liberal education whose backbone was mathematics and the ancient languages.

The first departure from this standard came through the necessity of throwing a sop to the taxpaying Cerberus. The public demanded that the utilitarian needs of the individual be met in the people's schools. This popular demand found a strong sup port in individualistic philosophy, and in the subsequent theory of the cultural equivalence of studies, and thus liberal education was liberalized. The drift from this to a new form of paternalism was very rapid, till now we hear the demand for a vocational foundation for education.

The

The first reach of the pendulum was this: the state must give all its children who can take time for it a liberal culture. foundation of a liberal culture rests on Latin and mathematics, hence all must study Latin and mathematics. A genuine though almost innocuous paternalism. The present reach is this: the state must fit all its youth for life. The essential of life for most is an occupation. Hence the state must teach each child the rudiments at least of the business he is to follow. If he is to go to college, it must fit him for this. If he is to go into commercial life, it must give him a commercial training. If he is to follow one of the mechanic arts, it must teach him the elements of his art; and this to many minds justifies manual training.

The latter in its paternalism goes far beyond the liberal culture theory and is nearer pure socialism than its advocates would admit. The fact that we are on this are of the pendulum I suppose none of us would venture to deny. The only question is, do we want this sort of thing? Are we yet ready for such complete socialism in our public schools? Even if we are in theory, even if we have accepted a socialistic basis for education by the state, as I for one have not, would it be best for the children? Are we ready to say that the children in our secondary schools must choose a vocation before choosing a course of study? Again, I for one am not. In my judgment vocationalism has no place in public secondary schools. Nor would I go back to the narrow limits of so-called liberal culture. One form of paternalism ignores the individual and says that the same food and the

same medicine are equally good for all and, like Mrs Squeers's treacle and brimstone, must be taken by all. The other form of paternalism produces a forced or rather a pseudo-individualism and says to the callow and immature youth, entering a high school, you must now determine your life work, and we will put you into the groove you choose and shove you along. I have time only to outline the thought.

But I wish to urge this suggestion. Let all of our high school courses lead to a general culture. Provide courses enough to meet the aptitudes and possibilities of all, but let them all be cultural rather than vocational in aim and administration, that we may make of each youth the largest human being that he is capable of becoming. Train to strength, acuteness and vigorous activity all his tentacles, give him as many interests and as much and as varied power as he has capacity for and send him into the world a live, capable being, to find his own sphere of activity. The broader and fuller his development, the more likely he is to choose aright, the less likely to be a round peg in a square hole, spending his whole life in getting squared.

This is as far from one alternative as the other, and it is remote from undue paternalism and extreme socialism.

Prin. Fred Van Dusen-I shall offer no apology for departing, in the few minutes allotted to me, from the lines of thought so ably pursued by the previous speakers. I shall speak briefly of a matter which is not so much an actual present tendency perhaps in secondary education as it is a probability in the future work of the school. The topic referred to is the so-called system of individual instruction. The term "so-called" is used advisedly to avoid any possible suggestion that the efficacy, the immeasurable potency of individual instruction is a new idea, unknown to educators of either the present or the past. I have heard the subject treated with so great enthusiasm and with claims apparently so extravagant as to arouse the suspicion that the advocates of the system regard it as an absolute novelty in the science of education. Probably such suspicions are unjust.