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the same class with American boys and girls five or six years old. For a time, at least, the foreigners require to be segregated and to receive special treatment.

MUST IMPROVE TEACHERS' CONDITION To secure training for efficiency the conditions of teaching must be such that each teacher shall be able to do his best work. By common consent one of these conditions is that teachers shall not be subjected to the ignominy of seeking political or other influence or cringing for the favor of any man in order to secure appointment or promotion. During the past year two events have occurred which seem to be full of promise for the establishment of this condition. The public school teachers of Philadelphia have been freed from the bondage to ward politicians in which they were held for well-nigh a century; and the one-man power, beneficent as such a system proved under a Draper and at Jones in Cleveland, has been supplanted by an apparently more rational system. Independence of thought and freedom of initiative are necessary to the teachers of a nation whose stability and welfare as a republic depend upon the independence, the intelligence and the free initiative of its citizens. Independence of thought and freedom of initiative may be throttled by bad laws, but under the best of laws they will be maintained only by the teachers themselves. By making it unprofessional to seek appointment or promotion through. social, religious or political influence the teachers of this country have it in their power to establish one of the most essential conditions of education for efficiency.

We are beginning to see that every school should be a model of good housekeeping and a model of good government through co-operative management. What more may the schools do? They can provide knowledge and intellectual entertainment for adults as well as for children.

They can keep their doors open summer as well as winter, evening as well as morning. They can make all welcome for reading, for instruction, for social intercourse, and for recreation. But I for one believe they may do still more.

When I look upon the anæmic faces. and undeveloped bodies that mark so many of the children of the tenements, when I read of the terrible ravages of tuberculosis in the same quarters, I cannot but think that the city should provide wholesome food at the lowest possible cost in public school kitchens. To lay the legal burden of learning upon children whose blood is impoverished and whose digestion is impaired by insufficient or unwholesome feeding is not in accord with the boasted altruism of an advanced civilization or with the divine command: Feed the hungry. Is this not also a subject for investigation by our national council?

And should it some day come to pass that men will look upon corruption in public and corporate life, such as of late we have seen exposed in New York, Philadeiphia and St. Louis, with the same loathing with which they regard crime in private life, it will be when the schools are in earnest about teaching our young people the fundamental laws of ethics, that

The ten commandments will not budge, And stealing still continues stealing.

But economic perils and racial differences are the teachers' opportunity. Here in this country are gathered the sons and the daughters of all nations. Ours is the task not merely of teaching them our language and respect for our laws, but of imbuing them with the spirit of selfdirection, our precious inheritance from the Puritans; the spirit of initiative which comes to us from the pioneers who subdued a continent to the uses of mankind; and the spirit of co-operation.

I

THE STANDARDS OF LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

HON. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN, MAYOR OF NEW YORK

T may be that I am old-fashioned, that my theories are obsolete, but I assure you I am sincere in saying that I believe that schools exist for man, and not man for schools. There is no more misused, misapplied, and misunderstood word in the English language than education. To teach is one thing; to educate is another. You can teach a bullfinch to whistle "Hail Columbia," or a parrot to sing the "Star-Spangled Banner," but in neither case will your efforts have resulted in producing a useful American citizen.

Teaching, so far as it goes, is most admirable, but the teaching of children that does not educate can scarcely justify any expenditure of public moneys. What our scheme of government requires is that our children be educated. They must be taught, of course, as a condition precedent to the education; but the teaching is only a means to an end, and is by no means an end in itself.

MERE MONEY-MAKING MACHINES

In the race for wealth in which for years we have been engaged, our educators, recognizing the economic law of supply and demand, have tried to bring to market only salable goods. When fond. parents have preferred that colleges should turn out money-making machines rather than educated men, colleges have met the demand, and well chosen elective courses have graduated hard-headed young men ready to begin the struggle for life. Time being literally money, every day saved in preparation for the contest has been considered of advantage. A bachelorof-arts degree in many cases means that its recipient is a specialist in some one narrow line of money-making, and not that he is the possessor of a liberal education.

The craze to turn out complete money-making machines is not confined to

our colleges, it has even entered the field of public education.

As the requirements of modern conditions change, so the requirements needed. to meet modern conditions change. The three R's of yesterday may not necessarily be the three R's of to-day. But there are certain fundamental subjects that everyone must know and know well if success in after life is to be hoped for. However much opinions may differ as to what should constitute a liberal or a fundamental education, there should be no difference of opinion as to what should form the groundwork.

PLEA FOR THE "THREE R'S"

I do not believe any one can be educated who has not at least a smattering of the three R's. It may possibly serve some mysteriously useful purpose to teach twelve-year-old boys who cannot read even the simplest English to sew buttons on shirts, or to drill girls of the same age to whom the rule of three is unknown, in the theory but not in the practice of music. and cooking-for both are often bracketed. together in our school curricula. But the ignorant outsider who is excluded from the Parnassus of "educational circles" may be permitted to wonder at the wherefore of it all.

It is anything but flattering to our "standards of local administration" that the products of our great urban public schools seldom succeed at either West Point or Annapolis. Run through a list of the honor men at both academies, and, while you will often find among them the products of private institutions, you will find that the vast majority come from the little cross-road country schoolhouse, whose simple-minded teacher-God bless her!-has had no other working capital at her command than a fair knowledge of the

three R's, which she has conscientiously imparted to her pupils.

I trust you will not imagine that I am playing Devil's advocate, at the canonization of what in so-called "educational circles" are known as "educational utilities." Many of them are really most useful, if properly and thoroughly taught. But the tendency which exists to exploit the teacher at the expense of the taught inevitably results in giving the pupil the merest smattering of innumerable subjects, in puzzling his poor little brain without developing it.

"GET-WISE-QUICK" THEORIES

The chief purpose--for that matter the only purpose of public education-for it is with public education only that we are concerned to-day-is to make good citizens of the republic. We owe an equal duty to every boy and girl in the land, to see to it that every child whose parents cannot afford to give it an education is thoroughly grounded in at least. the rudiments of learning, is taught to study and to think, and is given the tools with which if so disposed it may still further educate itself. "Get-wise-quick" theories are as pernicious as "Get-richquick" concerns. We cannot hope to produce scholars ready-made. If we can cultivate the habit of study and of thought we shall have accomplished much.

The country needs men of thought and men of learning, and needs them badly. The man who thinks may be a greater patriot than the man who does. We have deified action at the expense of thought. We suffer from the spirit of unrest, which frequently prompts us to ill-considered, immatured and thoughtless action. We are inclined to applaud the man who does, not so much because he accomplishes anything useful as because he accomplishes something, be it good, bad or indifferent.

THE DECLINE OF CONTENT

Contentment bids fair to be banished from our existence. Contentment and happiness are synonymous, but we prefer to sacrifice both in a struggle for the unobtainable. Were our ambitions laudable, our state of mind would be most commendable, but unfortunately we scarcely know what we are striving for. We have forgotten that deeds are merely a means to an end. Having no particular end in view, we treat the deeds themselves as the summum bonum, the ultimate object of attainment.

You who are here to-day are charged in your life's work with one of the sublimest missions in the world. Not to make savants or scholars, not to make writers of books or sages, but to make honest, thoughtful, God-fearing men and women. If you succeed in doing this you will have proved the reason for your existence.

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I

THE FUTURE OF TEACHERS' SALARIES

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION

AM glad to mention here that the

average annual increase in higher education throws open nearly one thousand new places a year in colleges and universities for teachers promoted from the secondary schools who have the requisite skill and scholarship. There were in 1890, 7,918 professors and instructors in the colleges and universities of the United States, not counting the professional schools. In 1903 the number had risen to 20,887. It started with less than 8,000 and has an increase of new places in thirteen years almost equal to one thousand a year (12,969). The secondary schools of the United States counted 16,329 teachers in 1890, and in 1903, counted 33,795. This increase gave 17,466 new positions in thirteen years for teachers in public and private schools.

What may be called the higher occupations, which have to do with protection and culture, increased with a considerable degree of uniformity in the thirty years ending in 1900, showing an increase from 32,000 to 44,000 thirty years later in each million.

Professors and teachers were counted by the census in 1870 at 10,141 in each million, but the quota of 1900 in each million is increased to 18,509.

The recent canvass of the salaries by the special committee of which Colonel Wright, the chairman, makes report this year, gives us data from which we may complete our list of better-salaried positions besides those in colleges already named, counting in superintendents, assistant superintendents, high school prinupals, elementary school principals, high school teachers (not principals), elementary school teachers, six classes, reported in 467 cities of over eight thousand inhabitants.

This list aggregates 53,554 positions, with annual salaries of $600 and over, onehalf of which pay $800 and upwards, and 14,193 of $500 to $600, and 17,728 annual salaries below $500.

I stop at salaries at six hundred dollars because he who receives six hundred dollars per year receives more than his quota of the total production of the United States, the total income of the nation in 1900, made on liberal basis, being only $551.56 per inhabitant, if divided among the entire number of men, women and children, seventy-six millions in all.

Teachers, if there are any who claim. an increase of salary beyond a salary of $551.56 a year on the ground of their natural right to a pro rata share of the wealth produced in the United States, could not urge a valid plea because the total wealth distributed even without payment of interest on capital or rent on real estate does not yield beyond that average sum to the twenty-nine millions of persons following a gainful occupation in the United States.

The average person having a gainful occupation in 1850 produced less than $500 ($484.80); in 1860, $651.48; in 1870, $849.03; in 1880, $721.93; in 1890, $990.32; in 1900, $1,065.69. The larger the sum produced by the average person in the United States the greater his ability to support schools and furnish positions of large salaries for the highest order of teachers. These figures, therefore, on the increase of productive power on the part of the individual wage earner in the United States are full of hope for the future of the teacher as regards his salary and his social position.

Science makes possible mechanic invention and it makes possible also the use of the forces of nature to reenforce human power and the power of domestic

animals. This progress in the reenforcing of the human might as it goes on from year to year may be expected to increase the wealth-producing power of the individual. It would seem that in fifty years, from 1850 to 1900, the wealth-producing power has more than doubled. All countries show increased power of wealth production in proportion as they adopt labor-saving ma

chinery, but few to the extent of the United States.

The future of Teachers' Salaries is therefore a bright and promising one viewed in the light of the general industrial progress, but a far more hopeful one viewed from the economical law of increased values for vocations that have for their object protection and culture.

THE NATION'S EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE

ANDREW S. DRAPER, COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, NEW YORK STATE

WE hold all endowed institutions of

learning as part of the public educa

tional system of the country. We look upon private and proprietary institutions, if moved by correct influences and managed by proper methods, to be deserving of aid and commendation. We give to sectarian and denominational schools our fraternal regard and professional coöperation. We express our regret that any may think it necessary to decline the privileges of the public school system and maintain schools at their own expense, on conscientious grounds. If we cannot accept their thought, we will recognize sincerity where ever it is convincing. We will articulate, so far as we may, with every educational activity calculated to quicken the nation's moral sense or uplift the nation's intellectual life. It is the overwhelming, and, we believe, the settled American opinion that neither the federal power nor that of any state can sustain a business relation with, or give financial aid to, or divide its responsibility with, any class or interest not common to every citizen and every section; but that affords no ground for irritation between any class or sectional interest, and any phase of the state or federal power.

A FUNDAMENTAL POINT

It is fundamental in America that women shall have the same educational opportunities as men. The opportunities The opportunities

are not to be equivalent in the opinion of men, but they are to be identical in the opinion of women. All offerings are to be open and the right of election is to be free. The sentiment is growing that the education of men and women must be in the same institutions, if the opportunities are to be even; that there is no moral reason why this should not be so, and that good morals, good sense, and the soundest educational ends are promoted by having it so. There is yet some prejudice against it in the eastern states, but logic, justice, and experience are concluding the matter.

No other country and no other age ever dreamed of such private benefactions to learning as learning as we have become accustomed to. The common impulse honors the benefactors and holds the gifts to be sacred. and inviolable public trusts. They must be neither impaired nor misdirected. The laws must assure the ends for which they are created; public sentiment must see that trustees execute the purpose of the givers with exactness.

We are never to forget that the schools are not only to educate people in order that they may be educated, but to educate them in order that they may do things. They are to be trained for labor and for effectiveness. The schools must help to make the pupils and the people know that the attitude of the republic in the world is nothing different from the attitude of the

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