child is most largely dependent upon his doing the planning. Some short-sightedly practical people think that the objective value of the plan is the sole or principal desideratum, and accordingly stand ready to furnish the child with an adult-made plan. This is generally to defeat the education of the child. If it is product we wish and care nothing or little about the humanity involved the plan-furnishing scheme can be defended. But if we seek the education of the child, we must let him assume some responsibility of thinking out for himself the plan to be followed. Of course, if the material to be used is costly, we may have to step in to check up or improve the plan. But under ordinary conditions, if a failure of result points clearly to the weak spot in the planning, it may be well to let the children learn by their own errors. It is, of course, quite true that discouragement may follow failure, and this we should probably avoid at almost any cost. It is

further true that we can by questioning and other indirect ways help the children to higher standards of planning, and with profit. All of these considerations, the wise teacher will keep in mind, and step in to help only where it seems clear that the child will actually gain thereby in progress towards effective planning and confidence in himself thereto.

Practically the same considerations hold of executing and judging. In the case of the latter, it may well be pointed out that the young child cannot be expected to pass very clear judgment upon his output. Our aim here is rather that he gain in judging; that is, in the develcpment and application of standards of excellence. Almost nowhere else is so much skill and wisdom required in the teacher. Unless the objective results of success or failure are very evident (as they are in roller skating, for instance), the teacher must take great care that the growing child shall be brought in

creasingly to consciousness of the excellence, or lack of excellence, of his work; but this must be done with such tact as to keep the child feeling that he himself sees the differences, and himself prefers the better. Many a parent has done incalculable harm just here. How to hold up standards and yet at the same time both encourage further effort and bring about the personal acceptance of the yet unattained standards-these are indeed difficult for fallible mortals. To sketch the demands made upon the teacher in all of this relationship is far easier than to meet the demands with children of actual flesh and blood.

What after all is feasible in regard to project-teaching? The method it would displace has been in process of perfecting since Aristotle reduced to form the extant knowledge of the world. It may well take us some time to perfect a substitute technique. In the first place, I should advise caution and moderation.

Don't be misled by my enthusiasm into concluding to make over your schoolroom procedure all at once. You cannot do it. So hasty an effort at wholesale transformation would bring failure and discouragement to you and arouse the contempt of our critics. You must go slowly. There are three places where I think you can begin simultaneously to try out your ideas. First, there are many extra-curricula activities, differing according to the age of the children-a party planned and conducted by the children, a school magazine published by the other children, a debating society, a play given by the third grade to the second grade. These and many more you can encourage. They are almost ideal group projects, and much of good educational output of various kinds can readily be derived from them. Second, in your geography or your history you can be on the lookout for a question. (problem) which the class can accept as

its own to solve. If you are alert and persistent, you will find yourself more and more teaching your geography or history on a problem-project basis. You need not begin with any flourish of trumpets nor feel bound to reach at any early day, if ever, a one hundred per cent project basis. You can experiment and grow only as your success warrants, no faster. A third line: Get from your principal or superintendent permission to set aside a half-hour a week for individual projects. Again feel your way carefully along. Tell the children that this half-hour is for those who can use it wisely, that anyone who can propose a worth-while way of spending the half-hour may, with your

approval, be free to prosecute the approved scheme (project). Your approval being necessary, there need be nothing wrong or even foolish attempted. For those who cannot propose any acceptable projects, you can have some useful taski ready. As the plan succeeds, you can extend the half-hour to a greater length or to every day in the week. By encouraging group projects here, this period will form a kind of seed bed for the other two lines of attack. In these and such ways you can introduce the project method only so fast as you feel that it proves useful. My prophecy is that it will, upon trial, prove to you a most alluring personal project.

Education in the United States should be guided by a clear conception of the meaning of democracy. It is the ideal of democracy that the individual and society may find fulfillment each in the other. Democracy sanctions neither the exploitation of the individual by society, nor the disregard of the interests of society by the individual. More explicitly

The purpose of democracy is so to organize society that each member may develop his personality primarily through activities designed for the well-being of his fellow members, and of society as a whole.

This ideal demands that human activities be placed upon a high level of efficiency; that to this efficiency be added an appreciation of the sig

nificance of these activities and loyalty to the best ideals involved; and that the individual choose that vocation and those forms of social service in which his personality may develop and become most effective. For the achievement of these ends democracy must place chief reliance upon education.

Consequently, education in a democracy, both within and without the school, should develop in each individual the knowledge, interest, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever nobler ends.-From the Report of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Bulletin, 1918, Number 35, National Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.

in precision because teachers are not trained to make sharp distinctions between the methods of teaching which are appropriate to different levels of mental development. There is need in the teaching of Latin, for example, of a careful discrimination between the needs of second-year pupils and those of pupils of the third year. That this discrimination and its consequent readjustment of methods of teaching are lacking appears from the results of recent tests which have been made. These tests show that the difference between pupils who have studied for two years is sufficiently marked to justify the assertion that the class as a whole has made progress. The members of the class can get the meaning of a Latin passage so much better at the end of the second year than at the end of the first year that it is fair to say that, in general, instruction has been successful. The same kind of a test applied at the end of the third and fourth years gives very discouraging results. For most of the class there has been no progress whatsoever, or, at most, progress of so slight a degree as to throw into doubt the validity and usefulness of the effort of these later years.

Such results as these in Latin have been secured also in the modern languages. They evidently mean that the problem of carrying pupils beyond the introductory stages of language-study is a difficult problem which has not been seriously or successfully attacked by the ordinary teacher. The change in methods of instruction necessary in the third year in order to take advantage of the

*Copyright, 1920, by Charles H. Judd.

matter which the ordinary teacher has not thought of as important. The common practice seems to be that of giving assignments of much the same kind of work in the third year as in the second. As a result, the pupil merely marks time or moves in an unprogressive circle.

The difficulty brought out by the Latin tests can be stated in another way. The pupil apparently gets into certain fixed habits of attack which are only moderately successful. Take, for example, the vocabulary method of translating sentences. The pupil has no method at the beginning of his study other than that of looking up each word in the selected vocabulary at the end of the book. This method is confessedly a clumsy method, but in the first two years it is better than nothing and results in moderate improvement in ability to get meaning. The trouble comes when the method is persisted in: The pupil accepts it as the only method, with perfect complaisance and without thought of change. In the third year the pupil has grown so accustomed to thumbing the vocabulary that it begins to hinder his mental development rather than promote it, and stagnation or retrogression results.

It is highly desirable that the various subjects of instruction should be re-examined with a view to discovering the points at which progress slows up or stops in order that at these points new methods of teaching may be introduced. This re-examination calls for a type of detailed analysis which will make it impossible for any teacher to fall into the

routine which now follows on the loose method of thinking of school subjects in the gross. We must stop thinking of

Latin as a single subject. It is rather a succession of subjects. As the pupil makes progress in his first year of work he becomes a new individual and his attitude changes so that the mental processes which the Latin class is intended to call out are wholly different in the second year. The same statements can be made for the third year and for all subsequent periods.

A second type of analysis which highschool teachers will have to make if they are to be effective in their work can be illustrated by reference to the reading tests which at a number of centers have been given to the entering classes in English.

Tests of the ability of the members of a freshman class to read bring out astonishing differences. There are some pupils who read fluently and show a rate four or five times as rapid as others in the same class. Such a difference proves to be of importance not only in the subsequent work in English, but also in all the other subjects pursued by the pupil. One high-school teacher who has given tests in reading finds it possible to prognosticate with great precision who will have difficulty in his or her other subjects. Even a subject so remote from English as algebra depends for its success on ability to read fluently.

The discovery of marked differences in reading ability ought to be followed at once by readjustments in the teaching of English. There is no justification whatsoever for the uniform treatment of all freshmen which is now practiced in most. courses in freshman English. These beginning classes are too often turned over to relatively immature teachers who believe that the course of study can be followed with assurance and can be administered without modification to all com

ers.

On the contrary, there should be one treatment for the poor readers and an

other wholly different program for those who are more proficient. The method should follow the findings of the test. It would be a poor physician who insisted. on a uniform treatment of all patients. It would be folly for the physician to attempt to unload on his patient responsibility for the reaction, favorable or otherwise, to unintelligent and stereotyped treatment.

A favorite excuse of high-school teachers, when faced with the fact that their pupils differ, is to unload on the lower schools all the blame for unsuccessful preparation. It must be admitted at once that there has been in the past, and is now, much ineffective teaching in the lower schools, but the teachers in these schools have made much more of an effort to study their problems in detail than have high-school teachers. They have been infinitely more interested in definite quantitative analysis of their results.

The time is at hand when the highschool teachers of this country will have

to become more careful students of their methods and results. We are trying in this country the serious experiment of offering a high-school education, paid for by the community, to every boy or girl who wants it. No other nation has ventured to try this enormously expensive experiment. No other nation has exhibited a desire for higher schooling as has ours. The Commissioner of Education tells us that thirty per cent of all the young people of high-school age in the United States are in these schools. All of us know that school systems are hard put to it to provide for the great numbers of pupils in school. The problem of providing the funds for maintenance of high schools is one of the major problems of school finance. It is not possible under these conditions to evade the responsibility of making a careful, detailed study of high-school teaching

methods. The pupils are in the schools. It is of little avail for highschool teachers to cry out against the lower school or quote traditional practices. The present-day urgent fact is that we must have an effective school adapted to the needs of real pupils. This is a social demand which can not be evaded. It is a call to close analytical study of pupils and of methods of dealing with pupils.

A generation ago when high-school pupils belonged to a highly selected and fairly exclusive group, drawn chiefly from the professional classes, there may have been some justification for a stereotyped procedure. Since 1890 the highschool population has been multiplied by five, while the population of the country has a little less than doubled. All classes of young people are in these schools. Their antecedent training has been varied and often interrupted. It shows little insight into social conditions for any high-school teacher to attempt routine. uniformity in his or her work with this great body of heterogeneous pupils.

Another example of analysis may be drawn from the field of science-teaching. A study was made last year by a teacher of chemistry and physics of the relative merits of the individual-laboratory method of teaching these subjects and the leclecture-demonstration method. It is interesting to note the fact that the author of this experiment expected, when he began his work, that his results would favor one or the other method in the gross. His investigation led him, however, into more detailed analyses than he had anticipated and what he found was that there are some conditions under which one method is the more successful, others under which the reverse relation obtains.

His experiment was performed with due regard to the demands for quantitative exactness. He tested two divisions at the outset in order to determine their

relative abilities. He then administered a number of lessons by the laboratory method to the first division and the same lessons by the lecture-demonstration to the other. After a time he reversed the procedure with the two divisions. As indicated above, it was found that there are lessons in which the pupil learns more by being freed from the necessity of giving attention to the distracting demands of laboratory manipulation, and there are other cases where direct personal manipulation is an advantage.

Such a series of experiments calls into question the indiscriminate use in science classes of laboratory exercises. It has long been known that such exercises are expensive in point of time consumed and they are also expensive in equipment required. If they are not more effective than other means of instruction, they ought to be regulated.

The three examples of analyses reported are typical of the studies which ought to be made in every high-school field. The reason why such studies have not been more common is undoubtedly to be found in the fact that high-school teachers are, in the main, specialists who are trained in the particular subjects which they teach, but little concerned with the minute analysis of the results which their teaching produces. The first step in the direction of reform will be to secure the attention of teachers to the importance of such analysis. The methods of making studies of the kind advocated will develop rapidly once their importance is clearly apprehended.

A plea to high-school teachers to make. investigations can be justified by reference to what has been accomplished in recent years in elementary education. A number of sweeping reforms have resulted directly from careful analytical studies of the results of teaching. One of these, for example, is the emphasis which is being laid on instruction in oral read