as a whole, is not without its responsibility for the lot of the child, but parents are the specially deputed guardians of the children. Their task is a heavy one and one which they almost always are frank to confess seems to them too difficult for accomplishment. Every mother would at times send her child to the state institution if she could do it as easily as her neighbor who has taken a child for adoption sends him back when he has proven himself to be unworthy, says a friend who is herself a mother. The business of rearing a child, even of rearing the best of children, is a hard one, a responsibility which those who have it recognize themselves as unequal to cope with. Being a parent is a human job concerning which much knowledge has accumulated. There seems to be no very good reason why parents should not be trained for their task just as experts in any line are trained. This training should come after they have children rather than before, for it is only when the child puts in his appearance that one really begins to know about children. Every city should have a school for mothers in session throughout the year. It could be under the direction either of the board of education or of the board of health, since the instruction should be the same in either case and partake of the functions of both bodies. Attendance, say for one hour a week, might well be compulsory for six months after the first child is a month old. Having provided for the instruction of the mother it is now our duty to talk about the instruction of the child. His physical well-being is of the first importance. Health and strength are things we

must be helped in our early years to get for ourselves. How many boys and girls of your generation and mine suffered untold horrors from toothache and go through life marred and maimed because their parents had no care to help them to preserve their teeth at a time when they were too young to do it themselves? In New York City recently there was a tooth brush drill in Central Park in which hundreds of public school children took part, whose sole object was to impress the need for the care of their teeth upon them. This is a good illustration of the stress which modern society is beginning to put upon these matters. How many children have been sent to an early grave after a brief life made miserable by tuberculosis simply because they were not given breathing lessons and taught to use their lungs properly? Again how many have suffered from eyestrain, from earache, from adenoids, and how many have been allowed to indulge in play or work which gave them defective hearts to suffer from as long as they lived? The health of the child determines the health of the adult to such an extent that modern society finds that it must bend its energies to constructive efforts in this direction.

Modern society feels that the education of the children is its supreme constructive activity. Its laws forbidding child labor, requiring attendance at school, training and carefully supervising teachers, setting apart funds for the erection of elaborate school buildings, providing an elementary education and after it high school or trade instruction for all, are some of the evidences of its solicitude that each

child may be guaranteed his right to instruction. This has been called the century of the child and until the declaration of war a year ago it seemed to be rightly named. It bids fair now to go down in history as the century of disaster. At any rate it is clear that nothing will prevent the destruction of civilization and the complete extinction of progress but such a world-wide rectification of human intentions as only a completer devotion to education can bring about. We are, I think, upon the eve of the greatest educational revival that the world has yet seen. It will be an education, however, which is not primarily materialistic. It will have for its prime purpose the culture of human ideals.

I have not spoken of the great system of agencies by which society seeks to redeem the socially unfit and to restore them to social fitness. It is not that I have forgotten them that I overlook them, but because I regard them all as remedial, as purely custodial for those who are defective at birth, or existing to undo the ill results which defective homes, defective schools, and a social life which is careless and indifferent to its own welfare produce. The agencies which exist to do repair work can not compare in importance with the agencies which exist to make such repair work unnecessary. It is upon the constructive forces of society that our attention must be fixed. If one could bring it to pass that the homes and the schools and public opinion itself should do their duty, there would be little need for juvenile courts, reform schools and prisons in the land.

"IS THE STRESS WHICH IS NOW BEING PUT UPON THE PRACTICAL INTERFERING WITH THE IDEALISTIC TRAINING OF OUR BOYS AND GIRLS?" 1

A RECENT report of the United States Commissioner of Education contains the statement that the vocationalizing of education remains the dominant note of the year. It will probably continue to be of paramount importance for many years, since the vocational movement in its larger aspects bears such vital relation to the whole problem of widening democracy.

There can be no question that this movement is on. It has two forms, one the movement for definite vocational or trade or occupational training, the other a much larger movement to make education of all sorts definitely and specifically preparatory for the life that the student will lead by making that life the basis of his education throughout. Any one who reads the most interesting educational paper which comes to my table - the Educational Supplement of the London Times - will not be long in discovering that this current of educational change is running far more rapidly in England just now than it is in America. That education must be modernized by being made so practical that it will fit men

1 An address before the Religious Education Association, Boston, February 28, 1917.

and women to cope with the everyday affairs of life is as definite a conviction over there as that England must win the war. If our nation becomes involved in the war, it will come out of it with many times more interest in practical education than it now has. In short the world seems to have entered upon an educational renaissance far more important and more widereaching than any educational revival through which it has yet passed. We live at one of those great times when old things are rapidly passing away and all things are being made new.

I am asked to consider the question whether or not this insurging of practicalizing education may not interfere with the idealistic training of the young. My answer is unqualifiedly no. On the contrary it is certain to do for us what education has by no means done in the past, it is certain to make idealism abound. In one of their conversations Goethe warns Eckermann that to attempt to realize the ideal is vain and futile, for not that but to idealize the real is our problem. Now this whole vocationalizing effort has no other purpose than to help folks to idealize the real. I used to be a teacher in a missionary school for the children of ex-slaves in the midst of the black belt in the south. Ours was a school with a strong preference for the classical type of studies; there were newer studies there, but they were not received gladly. We taught book work of the prevailing kind, great quantities of reading, writing and spelling without any particular effort to see to it that our students read what they should have read, or wrote what they should have written or spelled the