keep its mind open to the beauty and interest of the myriad phases of life, and to encourage the gradual perception of the orderly development of all that is, yet a larger freedom of individual treatment of the children would be possible and desirable here, and a systematic line of development would be less necessary.

The Elementary Department (or Intermediate Department) would be entered by the normal child whose course we have been following, in his ninth or tenth year, and here he would usually spend four years under the same teacher, who would conduct him through the whole elementary school curriculum, with the assistance, in the larger cities, of special teachers for manual training, physical culture, and foreign language, and for music, drawing,

etc.

The Secondary Transition Department would then be entered by our normal child in his thirteenth or fourteenth year, and its course would ordinarily be completed in a year.

The Adolescent Department, Secondary Department, or High School would be entered by the young person who had spent but a year in the Secondary Transition Department, in his fourteenth or fifteenth year; and here he might remain from one to five years or longer, according to his plans for life, taking such a course as might suit him.

Every effort should be made by the public and school authorities, as well as by the parents, to give the youth or maiden at least the first year of the Adolescent Department, or High School course, before allowing him or her to leave school. If the law should provide that admission to the Secondary Transition Department should be granted to every child who had attained the age of thirteen at the beginning of the school year, in case the parent should demand it (regardless of the young person's definite attainments in scholarship at that time), and should provide further that, after attending for a year the classes provided for in the Secondary Transition Department, the youth should be granted admission to the first year classes of the Adolescent Department, it would be perfectly feasible to make one year's work in the high school, or Adolescent Department, the minimum limit of compulsory education for all young persons not excused therefrom by reason of physical or mental inferiority as determined by a competent physician's certificate. (In any case the completion of the Secondary

Transition year should be required.) Let me add that I do not shrink from any necessary corollary of what I have just proposed, such as providing at public expense the necessary food or clothing or shelter for orphans or the children of parents too poor to keep their children at school until the completion of their fifteenth year. The poverty or illiberality of parents should not be allowed to deprive the men and women of tomorrow of a sufficient introduction to the rudiments of art and science to make them capable workers and intelligent citizens of the world. I am sure that a careful statistical investigation of the subject will convince the most skeptical that the state that allowed no person of normal, physical or mental health to enter upon his or her life work with less education than I have suggested as a minimum, would from the economic standpoint find itself amply compensated for the requisite outlay by reason of the increased wealth and tax-paying power of the community as a whole and of the individual citizens.

I would add, however, with reference to the question of expense, that a little intelligent co-operation between the school authorities and employers of labor in a given community would make it possible to relieve the parents (as well as the public) of all expense for the support of their children after they had completed the Secondary Transition year (at about fourteen years of age) and yet cnable the latter to carry their secondary education as far as they might wish to carry it. This would simply require, on the one hand, both morning and afternoon sessions of classes of the same grade in the Adolescent Department of the schools, and on the other hand that employers of labor who could make use of the services of adolescents should, instead of employing one person for eight or ten hours a day, employ two persons for four or five hours a day each. The employers would probably get more work done for the same outlay of time and money, by thus making use of two sets of workers, than they could get from one set of persons working all day long at the same job and more or less worn out during the latter part of the day. A ten-hour industrial day, would, in this way, work less hardship upon the individuals doing the labor than now results from an eight-hour day. It goes without saying, of course, that the pupil thus working his way through high school should not go as fast, take so many studies a day, as the youth who has nothing but his school and a few light home duties; but the

former could probably complete the same course in a period onethird longer than would be taken by the rich man's son, although it is doubtful if the latter would have as valuable a preparation for life as the schoolmate who had meanwhile been learning to take care of himself.*

This is perhaps the place to say a word as to night schools and continuation schools. Every city, however small, having a foreign population or an unschooled native population, should maintain a night school, and it would be well if every city of any size had night sessions for the more elementary and practical courses of the school for adolescents and the Secondary Transition Department. Large cities should regularly have three sessions of their Secondary Transition and High School departments; and although the afternoon session might normally have a somewhat smaller attendance than the morning session, and the evening session a still smaller attendance, it would be desirable to have at least one evening, as well as afternoon class, somewhere in the city, in every subject offered in the morning sessions of the Secondary Transition Department and the School for Adolescents. This would give the same chance that the rich man's son possesses to the young man who had regularly entered the industrial world, and it would be a stimulus to higher self development in the community at large.

As the practical and the elementary courses would of course be the most numerous in the night schools, this plan would provide the opportunity for practical self improvement given by the European continuation schools.

I have spoken of all night schools as secondary or secondary transition schools. This they always are, or at least should be, for even though they teach reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic, the method must be that of the secondary school, not that of the elementary school.

Which!

Which is the more heroic, pray,
He who doth gird his sword on
To enter midst the thickest fray,
Or she who bravely dares to don

The smile that speeds him on his way?

Which is the greater martyr, tell,
He who yields his valiant breath
'Mid din of flying shot and shell
Or she who bides the living death

When war has sounded her heart's knell?

When time has measured all their tears,
And Truth's discernment has revealed
The tragic pain of two careers,
Shall she point to a bloody field,

Or a lone struggle with the years?

-Eleanor Robbins Wilson.

The Pupil who Fails in Secondary School

English; How to Teach Him.

BY HAROLD W. GAMMANS, HOLYOKE HIGH SCHOOL,

T

HOLYOKE, MASS.

HE pupil first, the one who has repeatedly been called hopeless! He has supposedly been taught penmanship, spelling, and grammar in the Elementary Schools; he has written compositions of some sort since he was in the primary grades; he has had various sorts of language work. In the Secondary Schools he has studied rhetoric, sentence-structure, and has written compositions which have been duly corrected. His errors have been pointed out to him. At the end of the first, second, third, or even in his graduating year, he is unable to write a sentence. I do not mean a good sentence or even a grammatical sentence, but I mean that he will write as complete sentences, in his compositions, phrases, such as "of beautiful trees"; clauses, such as "although he came"; and still more frequently will he put several unconnected sentences, simple or otherwise, into one mess; or have his whole composition an incoherent string of words beginning with a capital letter, and ending with a period, if he does not forget it.

I think the schools are few, indeed, where such pupils do not exist in considerable numbers, and that the kind of pupil who does this sort of writing is unmistakable to any earnest teacher of English. Of course, the inability of the pupil does not stop here. His writing can hardly be deciphered. He has no apparent ability to spell, punctuate, to dot his "i's" and cross his "t's", not to mention logical sentence order and paragraphing. Finally, he cannot seem to avoid making errors where he really knows the right thing, such as writing the singular of a noun when he means to use the plural.

How to teach him was my problem. It was given to me in the following form:-Eight of these pupils - I will borrow an adjec

tive to describe them, from a colored cook, who, when asked what she thought of a friend of her mistress who was attractive but not pretty, said she was "out-of-the-ordinary". Eight of these out-ofthe-ordinary pupils in English were given me in a special class. Five had failed distinctly in their first year of Secondary School English, the other three in their second year. They could do nothing passable in the way of a page of plain writing about any subject they had studied carefully. I was to teach them to write fairly in two months, so that they might be promoted if possible. If they failed under me, they would be obliged to take their previous year's work over again.

I taught these pupils four one-hour periods a week for three weeks. Then I recommended that they be given a test by the head of the English Department and be allowed to enter regular second and third year classes if they passed this test. The test consisted of two compositions written in class, one on a subject chosen from some book they had read in class the previous year, the other from scmething in their own experience. The head of the English department chose the subjects, conducted the examination alone, and corrected the papers. Every one of these eight pupils was able to pass this test. Eight pupils saved themselves a year's discouraging work of repetition, from which they would probably have gained nothing.

I will try to tell as clearly and definitely as possible how this work was accomplished, for I know it is an important work which might be done in every secondary school of fair numbers. It means bringing success out of desolate failure. It means learning that the number of incompetent pupils is very small if we can really get at the minds of these boys and girls. The schools and colleges have been shown so often to have been in the wrong in calling many pupils mentally incompetent who have proved to be decidedly competent, mentally, in after life, and sometimes mentally superior. Personally, I believe the fault is as often with the school as with the pupil.

The faults of these pupils were rather similar, although in one some particular fault was much more serious than in another. I taught them almost entirely as a class and made my teaching of the correction of these faults the same for all. So my work is entirely applicable to class teaching and not to individual teaching.