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at best a poor imitation of a man. A woman's problem is not to blunt her sensitiveness; for a man to do that is bad enough. It is to turn her sensitiveness into strength; to make herself, by just so much the more sensitive she is, just so much stronger. Any education that dwarfs her power to do these things renders her so much the less a woman; no education can make her a man. College women, as I see them, are the best women in America-not a whit more masculine than other women, but trained to clearer thinking, to clearer seeingtrained, above all, to a constancy of earnestness. With this training they have learned to put away childish things. It must be that some of the former things shall pass away; that the lower joy shall make room for the higher; that the happiness of play, though no healthy mind can lose it altogether, shall yield more and more to the happiness of work. I believe that in all our better known colleges the standard is, as it should be, a standard of womanhood.-President Briggs, Radcliffe College.

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System in Education

Two important principles of general method stand out in our educational system. One of these is that in school as in life we learn through the senses and that good class teaching is really only leading each child to see for himself the thing to be presented. Teaching is therefore in large part giving each child a chance to learn for himself and by the exercise of his own powers of observation. Again, observation on the part of a child also implies movement always. So our schools are workshops and play houses. The kindergarten, the laboratory, the gymnasium, the workshop, the mechanical institute and the trade school are inevitable corollaries and accompaniments of our civilization and our revised theory of education.

Next we note the reorganization going on in the machinery of the system. The board appoints an executive head by which it is represented on the education side. Then there are supervisors and special teachers who direct instruction in special lines, principals who are responsible for the organization, the tone and quality of the work of the separate school plants, and finally the schoolroom teacher. How can we locate responsibility with such a variety of supervision? It seems a long distance from the circumference to the center. There is but one possible explanation and answer.

Each of these officials helps to provide the aid and conditions that will enable the teacher better to do her work well. In her task she must be left free to act, often free to choose, and not infrequently to initiate. Indeed our entire system-course of study, discipline and advancement of the individual calls for the teacher's initiative, and we put a premium on such originality, bring it into notice at the grade institute and incorporate the result of it in our theory and practice.

This is the same principle that obtains in every other professional line and in every industrial and commercial enterprise. It is this principle of the freedom of the teacher that distinguishes our American education from the dead uniformity and prescription that prevails abroad and in any examination system, and is the glory of every phase of the life of democratic America.-Supt. C. F. Carroll, Rochester, N. Y.

Gains and Losses in Modern Education

THE graduates of our present schools and colleges excel their fathers in contact with reality, in candor and open-mindedness, and love of truth. This is the prerequisite of all modern study. We have also gained in genuine scholarship, in better training of our teachers, in the grading of the schools, in our educational equipment, and in the grasp of educational history and theory. We have gained vastly in that our school teachers regard their work more truly as a permanent profession. We have made room for the heart as well as the head in education, and have realized that the emotions and the will are the core of the personality.

But encouraging as these definite gains may be, they should not blind us to the defects of our virtues, or lull us into easy optimism. Criticism is the first step in creation.

The young people of to-day, as compared with those of 50 years ago, are notably deficient in capacity for sustained thinking. They lack analytic power. They do not know how to sit down with a mental snarl and disentangle it. They do not as quickly distinguish the pertinent from the irrelevant, the kernel from the husk, as did their fathers. They have tasted every fruit of the tree of knowledge; they know a thousand interesting scraps. They are versatile, ingenious and attractive, but they are easily befogged, quickly led astray by sophistry, and easily led to surrender conviction when it conflicts with interest. Dean Shailer writes: "The youths of to-day have far less capacity for serious work than their fathers. There has been a serious degradation of the capacity for education in the less studious half of the college men." We could easily quote a score of such opinions.

One reason for this is doubtless to be found in the universal reaction from the former drill and persistent iteration of former times.

The pendulum has swung so far that the clock has almost stopped. The "doctrine of interest has almost banished the doctrine of effort. It is beautiful indeed to see the children handle the bright cardboard and soft worsted, and pretend that they are butterflies newly hatched out. Yet life has something more in it than bright-colored yarns, and in one or two more important respects the life of the boy, or even the girl, should differ from that of the butterfly. The gifts and games are good; but the question still remains whether the boy can fall down stairs without crying, and tell the truth when it hurts, and learn the multiplication table without whining.-President Faunce, Brown University.

December

With whisper and rustle and start and hush
The dry leaves murmur on tree and bush.
On sombre pines, with boughs bent low.
Forsaken nests are piled with snow.
The chickadees, alert for seeds,
Chatter and cling to the swaying weeds.
The snow drifts deep in the country ways,
And short and cold are the cheerless days,
Yet, fair on the brow of the frozen night
The Christmas stars shine, large and bright.

-Sara Andrew Shafer, in The Outlook.

Best to Be Found

In Other Magazines

A GRADE, or school, properly and wisely seated is already half governed. --Exchange.

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EDUCATIONAL ANAESTHETICS: One day, as a certain schoolmaster, with aspect fierce and cane upraised, was about to punish one of his pupils, the little fellow said, quite innocently, and doubtless with some vague recollection of a visit to the dentist, "please, sir, may-may I take gas?"-Exchange.

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ALL have some "rough places" through life, and the teacher has her share, but so many worry over things that come their way, and thus fall into the mistaken idea that their pathway is void of all sunshine. Worry spoils many a teacher and many a schoolroom. The Creator never intended that his people should spend their lives in discontent. Here is a great opportunity for the teacher to teach by precept and example the value of living a life of sunshine.-Arkansas School Journal.

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IN a graded school it is specially important that some well-defined syllabus be planned and used to avoid loss of interest through wearying repetition. What criticism can be too severe for the school in which a child of the sixth grade remarks with contempt as the tea-kettle is brought in for the science lesson, "The same old tea-kettle that we have had every term."-Nature Study Review.

MISS ALICE JONES, formerly of St. Mary's College, Raleigh, who is now teacher of Latin in Winthrop Normal College, Rock Hill, S. C., gives four reasons why students fail in Latin:

I. Poor training in English: Ignorance as to the construction of the English language and imperfect training in the essential forms of English grammar.

2. A lack of knowledge of the Roman people: Their history, their manners and customs.

3. Imperfect training in the first steps of Latin.

4. A lack of life on the part of the teachers in presenting and developing the lessons from day to day.

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TOO MANY a parent is satisfied if his child is trained to make a living. We teachers must have a higher aim; we must feel that we are training our pupils to make not, in the first place, a living, but a life. There is a wide. difference. The beasts of the field make a living. They rise in the morning, eat the food that God provides, and the day is over. They die and the world is no better for their living. Some men are like this; they eat and sleep

and die and the world never knows that they are gone. This is not life, such men make a living. This rather will be our ideal for ourselves and our pupils; we will so live that wherever we may be our presence shall be felt. Our associates will be better because we have known them. life in our communities will be purer because we have lived in them, and we ourselves will win the blessing that comes to those who bring out the heaven that lies hidden upon this earth.-Exchange.

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WHAT WE MOST NEED: Men who cannot be bought.

Men who put character above wealth.

Men who possess opinions and a will.

Men who will not lose their individuality in a crowd.

The civic

Men who will not think anything profitable that is dishonest. Men who will be honest in small things as well as great things. Men who will make no compromise with questionable things. Men whose ambitions are not confined to their own selfish desires. Men who are willing to sacrifice private interests for the public good. Men who are not afraid to take chances, who are not afraid of failure. Men who will not have one brand of honesty for business purposes and another for private life.-Citizen's Bulletin.

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A SCHOOL TEACHER dreamed that she quit teaching and bought a farm. She felt happy in the prospect of freedom and profit. The crop planted was wheat, and the yield was large; again the teacher was happy. The total amounted to 7,000 bushels, and the market price was a dollar a bushel; she sold it all and felt that now she could afford to do something she long had wished to do. But the wheat had been sold to 7,000 different people, a bushel to each one. A few of them paid cash but more did not, and many of them neglected to pay even when reminded. She was troubled, but awoke to find she was still a teacher. It required no Joseph to interpret the dream; she saw the point, gave heed to the printer and remitted promptly for her subscription.-The Western Teacher.

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WHERE COLORS COME FROM: The cochineal bug furnishes many of the most brilliant colors, including the bright carmine, crimson, purple lake, and scarlet. The cuttlefish gives the sepia, and Indian yellow comes from the camel.

Ivory chips produce ivory black and bone black, and the exquisite Persian blue was discovered accidentally by fusing horses' hoofs and other refuse animal matter with impure potassium carbonate. Crimson lake comes from the roots and barks of certain trees; blue-black from the charcoal of the vine chalk; and Turkey red comes from the root of the madder plant found in Hindustan. India ink is made from burned camphor by the Chinese.-Exchange.

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SPECIAL ATTENTION TO DULL PUPILS: In view of recent developments it is little less than criminal to permit any dull child to remain in a class with ordinary children with a teacher who has not the time, and has not had

the training and experience to deal with him. Ninety-five per cent. of the dull children are either defective, physically or mentally, or are capable of doing average work if rightly handled.

All nagging, sarcasm, scolding, and irritating of a dull child is assuredly criminal.

Defective eyes and ears are often the cause. Sometimes it is retarded or arrested mental development. Sometimes it is a disheartened or discouraged state of mind, sometimes it is the result of confusion resulting from inefficient teaching at critical stages in study. An expert would know just why the dullness existed, and how to remedy it. A city that allows old-time conditions to continue deserves indictment in the courts. It is as bad as a polluted water supply. Journal of Education.

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FUNNY, WASN'T IT? Coming down from my summer cottage in the Adirondacks last week, I drove twelve miles to reach a trolley line which, in due course, if all went right, reached the steam railway depot. Midway and about six miles from anywhere, the trolley collapsed and left all hands stranded in the woods. I was depending on the trolley ride to catch my train for Albany to reach New York the next morning, where I had an important engagement. It was, however, no use, the trolley was stalled for keeps, and to get there on time was impossible. I fretted in some talk with the conductor, explained my New York appointment, that it must be kept, but he said impossible, and he couldn't help it. When I finished talking, a good-faced intelligent countryman with sun-browned cheek and shrewd, twinkly eyes, who had overhead the conversation, said: "My friend, you are not young, and neither are you old, but is this really the first time in your life you have been disappointed-the first time your plans have been frustrated?" Funny, wasn't it?-John A. Walker.

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WHEN Booth Tarkington was at Princeton University the editor of the college paper was a young fellow who took himself and his literary responsibilities with portentous seriousness. He was wont to speak in accents of emphatic scorn of the quality of the submitted contributions from which he was supposed to make a periodical worthy of the senior class. One day he found in his letter box a poem which moved him to more than usual disgust. See here," he snorted contemptuously, "this is what some fool freshman sends in and calls poetry. How am I going to make a magazine out of stuff like this? How am I, I ask?" "Oh, that!" spoke up Tarkington, "yes, I sent that in myself." "So you wrote it, did you?" growled the managing editor. "No," said Tarkington sweetly, "I didn't write it. I only copied it. It was written by Tennyson."-The Progressive Printer.

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BEFORE all else the teacher should know himself. He should be sure of himself. Sure that he has made no mistake in choosing his field of labor and confident that he is fitted in every way to do what he has undertaken. You have heard of the man who thought himself called to the ministry because he saw the letters P. C. blazoned on the sky and interpreted the vision as meaning Preach Christ, when it really meant "Plow Corn." Let

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