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instruction, it is necessary to regard both the principles of psychology and the wants of practical life. But it seems to me that the plan of common-school-instruction, which seems to be much in vogue in this country, and which might be designated as the harmonious and symmetrical-development plan, has not been a success, and that it is not likely to meet the wants of our times. For one, I find myself more and more inclined to favor the plan of selecting the most practically useful subjects of instruction, and of teaching as many of them as possible by the shortest and most comprehensive methods. If this course is pursued, I feel sure that, during the proper period of commonschool-instruction, not only a competent knowledge of what have been called the common English branches may be acquired, but also a very useful amount of knowledge of the elements of the industrial branches I have mentioned. And this is no mere theory, unsustained by facts of experience. It is actually done where common-schooleducation has been most systematically developed. The Prussian programme to which I referred affords an illustration. Let such a scheme be carried out in a rational way, and there would be no just ground of complaint, either that our pupils were overworked or that they were not properly instructed in matters pertaining to the practical affairs of life.

Mr. NEWELL, of Maryland. Mr. President, a few thoughts have been suggested by the able and exhaustive paper that has just been read, which I will take the liberty to place before the department.

In the first place I would say, contrary to what Mr. Philbrick advanced in his paper, that in the State of Maryland we have endeavored to map out a programme for the use of all schools under the grade of high school. The plan is uniform. The State-board have undertaken to eliminate from the ordinary course of instruction the matters which they thought might best be dispensed with. They have endeavored to group together the courses of study in the order in which they thought they ought to be pursued. Their object has been to map out a very general chart and to give very minute instructions for both teachers and pupils to pursue. After the 1st of July next the State of Maryland will require all teachers, of every grade, to be examined in the elements of geometry and in physiology, before they can get certificates as teachers. One year has been given them to make preparation for this examination.

I feel a little disappointed, Mr. President, in the contents of the paper that we have heard read. And, in speaking for a very few minutes on this point, I hope the department will indulge me if I speak rather as a person who is doubting and looking for information, and as submitting suggestions to arouse the thoughts of others, than as one who has already come to a conclusion. And, while I have thought a great deal on the matter, but have not come to any conclusion at all, it is clear that there is a difference between the three departments of ed ucation alleged in the paper by Mr. Philbrick: that which is scientific, whether of a low or of a high degree; that which is technical; and that which lies intermediate between the two, and which we designate by the term industrial. Between these two, the scientific and the technical, there lies a large arable ground, which can be cultivated if we only know how to do it. It seems to me, Mr. President, that among

the just complaints which are mentioned with regard to our commonschool system, taken in a general aspect, is this one, which deserves our attention: that the school-room tends to make pupils too much of school-boys and school-girls, and too little of practical young men and young women. We have many instances of boys and girls who have gone through the ordinary routine of school-instruction, who are fair spellers and readers, who can go through the books and answer more questions in geography and in history than I can do, for one, and yet who have no sense of the application of these branches of which they have acquired a knowledge, and who feel utterly lost when they come into active life and attempt to turn these school-room-accomplishments to practical purpose. To illustrate: It was the general belief-and I don't know whether the theory has dropped out of existence yet or not -that a boy might go through the ordinary school-process of bookkeeping and be pronounced by his teacher as a very fair book-keeper, and yet when he came into the actual business of life he had to begin at the A B C's and learn anew again before he was competent for the practical work. And this kind of education, this superficial knowledge, which is of no use beyond the school-room, I think obtains almost everywhere.

Still further. The complaint runs, whether justly or not I will not say-and let it be remembered that I am not speaking dogmatically, but merely throwing out these suggestions as they occur to my mindthat the work of the school-room exclusively pursued for eight or ten, and, in some cases, twelve, years, terminates in making the boy or girl an enemy to hard work. Now, I put the case very broadly. Let the boy come out of the school with the idea that what he has learned in school can be transmuted into a force which will stand in the place of hard work. I remember several lines in the spelling-book which illus trate this absurdity:

For learning was the only thing

That made poor Pepin's son a king.

And this false idea as to the value of knowledge has taken a strong hold on the minds of the uneducated. They think it is something which will enable the boy to do without work. I have heard over and over again, in my own experience, the admonition, "If you don't go to school and learn, you will have to go to the fields and work."

Now, Mr. President, I hold that this is a false view; that the proper view to be taken is just the opposite: that if you have this education, and will then work, you will be the better workman. But under no circumstances can intellectual cultivation take the place of honest, hard labor.

Just a little further: Is it fair that the cultivation of the head should be to the exclusion of the hands? In other words, that intellectual labor, pursued for eight or ten or twelve years, to the utter exclusion of bodily labor, tends to unfit a man for bodily labor? Should there not

be within the proper limits of our common-school-curriculum such a course of training as will teach the boys and girls that, while intellectual labor is great and is good, manual labor must be performed by somebody or other; that there is no disgrace to the girl in sweeping the floor; that it is just as useful for a graduate of the high school to know how to cook a beefsteak as to know how to read and analyze; that, while they may properly learn to trace the earth along the chart from one end to the other and give glowing descriptions of everything they see on the way, it is of more importance to know those little minutia of housekeeping upon which the comfort and happiness of human beings depend? And the poor boy, while he plods and toils in absurd problems, should not forget that the knowledge thus acquired is not of so much importance as the cultivation of the hands.

Mr. Z. RICHARDS. Mr. President, I want here to express the gratification I have experienced in listening to the very clear and able paper that has been read by Mr. Philbrick. It seems to me that he has struck at the very root of the matter. I am pleased also with the remarks made by Mr. Newell. I think the suggestions thrown out by Mr. Philbrick with reference to the changes needed in elementary education are such as should impress the mind of every gentleman here to-day. I know that to carry out the views advanced would work a revolution. We all know that it would revolutionize our whole system of elementary education in almost all parts of our country. I ask, ought not the system to be revolutionized? I verily believe so.

I want to allude to one point in the paper just read in reference to what has heretofore been considered as almost all that was necessary in the primary schools, to wit, reading and writing and arithmetic and geography. Now, I think we have placed too high an estimate upon the importance of these branches. The great difficulty, Mr. Chairman, is that nine-tenths of our children go forth from our common schools not able to read. They can call the words; they can repeat them; but they are not able to read in the true sense of the term. I can take a so-called good English scholar, a graduate from one of our grammar-schools, if you please, and put a Latin reader, or Cicero, or Sallust into his hands, and while he can call the words, while he can give them a sort of pronunciation-of course he can give the English pronunciation-yet he cannot read in the true sense of the term. And why? Because he does not know what the language means. And that is the difficulty, Mr. President, with nine-tenths of the scholars that go forth from our public schools. Terms are introduced, expressions are used, forms of description and styles of language with which he is almost as unfamiliar when he leaves the school-room as when he first commenced. We want that he should have the ability to read understandingly. And the first book put into the hands of the child should be that which teaches those elements, those terms of language, if you please, which he will have to become familiar with when he enters upon the active affairs and busi

ness of life. Take any of the boys of our schools, if you please who have graduated, many of them from our high schools, our grammarschools, and how many are there of them that can tell every particular part of that chair, and give me the terms correctly as the mechanic who made it himself would use them? Take this as in application to every one of the arts and in almost every variety of business that we have in this country. Ask any one of these graduated pupils to describe the difference between two chairs or between any two objects that have similar names, and you will find that nine-tenths of them are barren in the knowledge of terms necessary to give a satisfactory explanation. The difficulty is that our first lessons in reading are defective in this respect. What are we to do? I would have our books made up of something besides nonsense, as they are almost universally now in our elementary schools. The reading-books should be such as to bring in use those terms which the child shall use in after-life. It is in language that the child needs to be qualified as well as in things. If he understands the meaning of the terms which he sees in his books, he is becoming qualified, not only in the meaning of words, but in things.

This is the true way, it seems to me, for this system which you call practical education to be introduced into our primary schools. It should begin in our primary schools-the first elements, of course.

Now, I am deeply interested in this subject, and I hope gentlemen here will feel the importance of the principles laid down in that paper sufficiently well to use their efforts in carrying them out and in seeing that they are more generally understood and felt in all parts of our country.

General EATON. If there is no special business now before the department, I move an adjournment until 7 o'clock this evening.

The motion was agreed to.

EVENING-SESSION.

The department came to order at 7 o'clock, and President Wilson introduced Professor H. C. Spencer, who said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: It gives me great pleasure at this time to be able to present to each of the individual members of this department a copy of the Theory of Spencerian Penmanship.

Professor Spencer then distributed the work referred to.

ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR WALTER SMITH.

At the close of the distribution the president introduced Prof. Walter Smith, art-director of the State of Massachusetts, who read a paper upon

INDUSTRIAL DRAWING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

This subject, upon which I am to address you, appears to be one that has a dailyincreasing interest for educators. It comes under discussion at the meetings of teachers; is the subject of letters and leading articles in educational and other newspapers and of reviews in magazines and periodicals.

Having studied this matter for the last twenty-five years with the incentive of love and the opportunity given by having nothing else to do, it may be supposed that the subject, in most of its phases, is somewhat familiar to me. I have watched the development ab ovo of this branch of education in some countries of the Old World, and it becomes an all-absorbing subject to me to observe its development in the New.

It is with much satisfaction that I see the general interest now felt in industrial drawing and its consideration with an earnestness by educators that shows the importance attached to it. And it is fortunate for this country that the attention of leading educators is being given to the matter after its possibility has been demonstrated, so that the subject for consideration is relieved from the theoretical question of whether it is possible to teach industrial drawing, and is confined to the practical question of whether it is desirable, and, if desirable, what is the best way of teaching it. There can be no doubt that in the field of education a great transformation is occurring, so important that the days we live in will probably be regarded in future centuries as a historical epoch of the first order. It has been brought about by the social revolution in the condition and circumstances of the masses of the people which the last hundred years have been gradually developing; and this change has established as an ideal educational standard the thorough and equal education of all.

Compared with such a result the education of the past, previous to the last hundred. years, had as an ideal the higher education of a few, the few being the governing and professional classes, and a condition in which ignorance was undisturbed bliss for the rest of mankind.

Called upon to express these two ideals of education by two words, I would say, that of the past was classic, that of the future will be industrial, the first being represented by endowed universities, the second by free public schools.

Before the work of the endowed-schools commission began in old England, the subjects prescribed to be taught in the endowed grammar-schools were Latin and Greek, with religious instruction from the Holy Scriptures, and all other subjects were regarded as modern frivolities, to be paid for as extras, so much a year for arithmetic, so much for writing, and so much for every other or groups of other subjects. And before the beginning of the nineteenth century, broadly speaking, the endowed grammar-schools, one in each large town, were the only public free schools in England, so that the people who were not content with a classical and biblical fare, and could not pay for extras, had to go away starving from this educational Barmacide feast.

What was true in the education of children was equally true in that of men. The universities were a reflex of the grammar-schools; both were apparatus for creating rulers in church and state, and the rest of the people were found to be more easily governed in proportion as they were left out in the cold, educationally.

The engineer, architect, artist, scientist, was produced by no university; he came in spite of universities, who, if they noticed him at all, it was to treat him with passive contempt or active persecution.

Though this may have never been the case to so great an extent in this new country as it was in the old, yet it was to a definite degree true everywhere before the latter half of the last century, and now is true no longer in the sense in which it was true then.

The more modern institutions for education have not been molded on the patterns of the old, any more than the New England grammar-school is like that established by Queen Elizabeth. Next to Harvard College the most important agency for the education of adults now existing in Boston is the Institute of Technology, and here, if the truth must be told, the living sciences and arts have usurped the place of the dead languages and Bible-history.

Recently the study of drawing has been added to the elective studies pursued by the students of Harvard, and those who are curious in such matters have only to consult Circular No. 2, 1874, issued by the Bureau of Education, to see that Yale, aud Syracuse, and Cincinnati, and New York, and Philadelphia are up and doing in the specialty of

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