on elimination and retardation that have been presented to the public have done much to create an impetus toward the changing of the content of the curriculum from the practical, utilitarian point of view. Vocational education is coming rapidly to the fore, because it is becoming more and more apparent that the big problem at the present time is the lack of adjustment between the elements in our society. James Munroe, in his book, The Human Factor in Education, shows the influence of this conception upon his attitude toward the problem of education.

The ordinary parent or teacher is very apt to be under the delusion that education is "going to school." "In the true sense, real education is simply the sum total of the physical, intellectual, and moral forces which, acting and re-acting upon you and me and our neighbors, thereby create what we call our characters." From this point of view, it is not only the schools that are responsible for the education of the child. The schools in the last analysis reflect the demands of society. "That being the case, the final responsibility for the real efficiency of the public schools, lies not with the teachers, but with the citizens." Society, as now organized, is highly industrial and technical. In addition to the broad cultural phases of education, definite provision must be made for vocational training and the understanding of the relation of the individual to the group.

Manufacturers, professional men, and others outside of the narrow field of education itself are struggling to assist in making adjustments. And as Munroe points out, it is the schools that are making the fewest advances toward the other agencies of education. He speaks of society as "The World of the Penny Wise," and insists that it is a legitimate duty of the schools to educate the parents, the industries, and the community in general, as to what they can do, and ought to do, to help in this most important of all social duties: the preparation of boys and girls for an effective adult life. That there has been a general awakening in this line is evidenced by the Smith-Hughes law for the promotion of vocational education.

Munroe proposes a system of industrial high schools and, for those who cannot reach such a school, a part-time school, which is similar to that which has been established in Michigan.

One finishes the book with a broadened conception of education and a feeling of the size of the problem still before us. One must also feel encouraged by the progress that has been made. Munroe gives one the conviction that he understands the problem of vocational and industrial education and sees its implications.

LEO J. BRUECKNER.

"MODERN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

PRACTICE "1

By George E. Freeland

Much of our educational theory is developed at universities and colleges. These institutions are not always prepared to demonstrate the practical application of their views. Among normal schools and other teacher-training institutions, there have developed experimental schools where it is possible for intelligent effort to work out the theories that have been proposed. The recent pressure that has been brought to bear on the socializing and vitalizing of the curriculum has led to scattered attempts in the public schools to bring this about. The inevitable result has been variety of opinion and method.

Freeland, in his Modern Elementary School Practice, presents what he calls the "vital elements of modern practice in the elementary school." His emphasis is upon the doctrine of interest as the factor in the learning process, and the socialization of instruction. His purpose is quite clearly to show the relation between the theoretical and

practical phases of instruction. As he says, "Theory must lie dormant until it falls into the hands of some one who can apply it or illustrate it in such a way that cthers can use it. On the other hand, experience without theory is blind." With this helpful attitude, he takes up the problem and the project as a means of instruction. He makes them vital and real by showing, from the background of his experience as supervisor, superintendent, and head of an elementary school in a teacher-training institution, numerous applications of the theory in actual classroom teaching. The book abounds in types of carefully worked out projects in all subjects. It should be a most interesting and helpful addition to the library of a teacher attempting to interpret the newer educational theory.

LEO J. BRUECKNER.

"THE PROJECT METHOD IN TEACHING”2

By Mendel Branom.

Since the leading exponents of the project method do not agree as to what a project is, a project problem, or a project exercise, Mr. Branom quotes such authorities as Kellogg, Snedden, and Kilpatrick to show that this word "project" is not always used to identify one particular concept, but that the specific concepts adopted by the different leaders vary somewhat. Misunderstandings, however, may be avoided by

1Macmillan Co.

2C. A. McMurray, Publisher.

trying to associate the word with a definite educational idea.

The project as an educational concept did not evolve very quickly. At least, it was not recognized until recently as a definite method. Some great masters, as Farraday, Pasteur, illustrated the method in their work and lives.

The project method is really based upon fundamental instincts and tendencies. Those utilized in this method are: 1. The desire to possess; 2. The desire to collect; 3. The desire to construct; 4. The desire to entertain; 5. The desire to help others; 6. The desire to protect others; 7. The desire to compete; 8. The desire to acquire; 9. The desire to stand high in the esteem of others; 10. The desire to amount to something.

Through the correct application of such instincts as these, each child may be developed into a person of some consequence. The project method if wisely used will make better and more useful citizens. The better schools of the past have used project-questions and they were content if the child showed ability in the use of the project exercise.

It is only within recent years that the significance of the project problem has been emphasized. The value of the project exercise should not be underestimated but rather magnified.

The project problem is a problem of considerable difficulty. It should not be below the mental grasp of the children, but carefully graded. The author warns against any attempt to organize all of the school work about project problems. A course of study consisting exclusively of such would mean that the children are placed in situations which do not dominantly prevail in adult life.

Project problems may be stated in many forms but these forms are immaterial so long as the problems become personal to the pupil. Since history and geography are quite well adapted to the application of the project method, the author goes into considerable detail in showing how these subjects may be successfully treated. He impresses upon the reader the fact that it does make a differenece how the subject matter is "brought home" to the pupil.

A comprehensive view of the book may be gained from the following titles from the table of contents: The Nature of the Project Method, Evolution of the Method as an Educational Concept, Relation of the Method to Instincts, Social Basis, Significance of Motivation, Teaching and Learning by Projects-forms and kinds, method applied to history and geography, Reorganization of the Course of Study, and Preparation of the Teachers.

W. G. BRAUN,

RECENT FICTION

Alice L. Marsh, Nordstrum High School* "Potterism" by Rose Macaulay.

Potterism, a clever, amusing satire on smug self-satisfaction, is heralded as "a London best seller" and has had equal vogue on this side of the Atlantic. The author, who is said to have a dozen novels to her credit, defines Potterism as a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. The name is taken from the Potter family, whose father is the proprietor of a chain of "popular" newspapers, his wife being a prolific novel writer, blissfully unaware of her intellectual limitations. There are an older son and daughter who are too colorless to really count, and the twins, Jane and Johnny, who graduate as "firsts" from Oxford and set out to found an "Anti-Potter League," to down cant and hypocrisy of the sort represented in the literary world by their father and mother. The amusing denouement is that even the members of the League, who so openly congratulate themselves on "not being as other men are," find, from time to time, what has always been true, that we are all more or less Potterites.

"Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis.

Sinclair Lewis, who has many notable short stories to his credit and has attracted much favorable comment on Free Air, has written, in Main Street, what reliable critics regard as the novel of the year. Carol Milford is a product of Blodgett College, a co-educational institution on the outskirts of Minneapolis. On graduation, she drifts to Chicago,. has a touch-and-go contact with the artist colony and imbibes, at the same time, a taste for "uplift" work. While in this state of pseudo-intellectuality, she consents, after a whirlwind courtship, to marry Doctor Kennicott, the only physician in a small Minnesota town called Gopher Prairie.

The "gritty" train, as she mentally styles it, stops at one after another of the small, drearylooking towns, as she nears the end of the wedding journey. She turns to her husband, alluding to the crowd on the platform:

"These poor people! Why doesn't someone wake them up?"

"These people? Wake 'em up? What for?" "But they're so provincial. No, that isn't what I mean. They're-oh, so sunk in the mud."

"Look here, Carrie, you want to get over your city idea that because a man's pants aren't pressed he's a fool. These farmers are mighty keen and up and coming."

In her new life she finds herself a woman with a working brain and no work to do. She tries to graft a taste for Shaw on a stock that is satisfied with Harold Bell Wright.

It is a fine bit of American realism. Main Street is the continuation of the Main Streets one finds everywhere. The conversations are like phonograph records and the characterswell, one simply can't afford to miss knowing them all, from Ole Jenson, the grocer, to Ezra Stowbody, the banker.

Boni and Liveright.

"Harcourt, Brace and Howe.

*Acknowledgment is made to Miss Stark of Burnham's, Mr. Labelle of Macaulay's, and Miss Hill of the Main Library, through whose courtesy these reviews were made possible.

"She Who Was Helena Cass"-by Lawrence Rising.

A first novel which, while crude in spots, is nevertheless gripping, reveals a prominent young New York woman who has become engaged to a man of whom neither parent approves, and who disappears mysteriously from an out-of-theway Spanish inn where mother and daughter have engaged rooms, while the latter is on a sketching tour. The mother says "Good night" to the daughter and that is the last seen of her. In the morning, distracted, the mother bursts into the room occupied by her daughter, only to find that it bears no resemblance to the one she saw the night before. Moreover, it is occupied by a rough mountaineer who declares he has had it for weeks. The quest is taken up by a young New York journalist whose success ends the tale.

"The Captives"-by Hugh Walpole.

narrow

The captives are Maggie Cardinal, aged nineteen, and Martin Warlock, twenty-four, and their chains are forged by a sect in London called the Kingscote Brethren. Maggie, who longs to be a free soul, is well looked after by Aunt Ann, a member of the sect, while Martin is dominated by his father, the minister of the church. The story lies, as the author says, in the tempestuous history of Maggie's youth, the young man with whom she fell in love, and the man whom she eventually married, including his friends and relations. Both Maggie and Martin are trying to escape from the bonds of habit, each in his or her own fashion. And the result? That is for the reader to determine. Walpole himself considers it a happy ending.

"Blind" by Ernest Poole.

"The long thin splinter of German steel which struck in behind my eyes did no more to me than the war has done to the vision of humanity." It is thus that the hero, blinded in France, disThe cusses the world's intellectual darkness. story centers about two young men, college mates-Steve, who becomes a doctor, and Larry, the newspaper man, who reviews his life after he has become totally blind. The book is interesting and well worth-while.

"An Old Chester Secret"-by Margaret Deland.

Miss Lydia Sampson takes to her heart the unacknowledged son of Mary, daughter of the rich Mr. Smith. Then a change comes to the father and mother and the growing boy has to decide between the foster mother and his cowardly parents.

"Spendthrift Town" by Henry Hudson, Jr.

Here one has the story of a modern New York family, the Nicholsons, almost as vivid and quite as life-like as Galsworthy's Forsythes in A Man of Property. Entertaining but not exciting.

"In Chancery" by John Galsworthy.

A story woven about the same family we learned to know so well in The Man of Property.

1George H. Doran.

2George H. Doran.

3Macmillan Co.

"Harper and Brothers.

Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston.

"Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York.

This book gives quite as close sex-analysis as Old Wives' Tales. Those who are fond of these annals of the Five Towns have another treat in store for them.

Helen St. John, Northwestern High School "Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan".

translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell.

All three of these diaries, written in the early part of the eleventh century, breathe the delicate perfume and native charm of old Japan. Their quaintness and charm reflect a civilization in which women held ascendancy in rank, and to be a poet was a matter of course. One was casually handed an exquisite poem written on the spur of the moment, and was expected to, and did, reply immediately in similar verse. We discern an unusual appreciation of nature, and a very highly cultivated aesthetic sense. The costumes are symphonies in color. When one lady appeared in court with a faulty color scheme at her wrist, "the nobles and high officials noticed it." three diaries are as totally different as the diaries of three women highly gifted in different ways are bound to be. Murasake Shikilu is famous as the writer of the first realistic novel of Japan, Genje Monogat ri. Izumi Shikibu is the greatest woman poet that Japan has ever had. The name of the writer of the third diary is unknown, but we have bits of eventful years beginning when the author is twelve years old and ending when she is over fifty, in which a beautiful and gifted personality gleams forth.

The

"Life" by Johan Bojer. Translated from the Norwegian by Jessie Muir.

Those who have read The Great Hunger by this famous Norwegian writer need not be told of the masterful manner in which the reader is made to breathe the very breath of sturdy, sunshiny, colorful Norway in Life. The story concerns itself with two families whose life histories have been strangely interwoven for more than a generation, and the way in which the son of one house and the daughter of the other work out their destinies, under the menace of this unknown background, makes a story full of dramatic interest. The ambitious title is satisfactorily justified, for the story is a true epitome of human emotions, and of the subtle influences which play so great a part in the working out of each human destiny.

"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun. Translated from the Norwegian by George Egerton. With an introduction by Edwin Björkman. A novel conceded to be one of the greatest, written by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Knut 1920, is bound to be of unusual interest.

1George H. Doran, New York. "Houghton Mifflin Co.

3Moffat, Yard and Co.

Alfred A. Knopf.

Hamsun's first great novel, Hunger, is a compelling study. The author lived for some time in the United States earning his living in various humble ways, even serving as a street car conductor in New York City. He wrote during this time occasional bits of poetry, but this only proved to his fellow workmen that he was a "queer sort." He finally returned to his native city, Christiania, where, unable to find work, he roamed the streets with his mind made up to starve himself to death. Unable to accomplish this, he wrote a minute account of those strange weeks, in which sensibilities and mind were keenly alert to all impressions. This searching analysis of the working of his own soul brought him an immediate and well-deserved fame and added another title to the list of the world's great novels.

"The Dragoon"-A Wonder Play-by Lady

Gregory.

In the author's note at the end of this fantastic comedy we are told that The Dragon was begun in 1917 as a serious play to be called "The Awakening of a Soul," but was later changed into a comedy, at first named "A Change of Heart," and later "The Dragon." This bit of history may help us to understand the baffling feeling that the end of the play fails to carry out the promise of the beginning.

Nothing can be commonplace in the glorified atmosphere in which the rollicking imagination and gay fantasy of Lady Gregory envelop the characters. There are the old king, whose chief pleasures in life are meats and drinks and a nap after dinner; the capable queen step-mother, eagerly engaged in managing the king and hastening her troublesome young step-daughter into marriage; the self-willed, mischievous princess, seventeen, beautiful, and bewitching, but not at all disposed to marry; numerous disappointed suitors, who have won their several ways into 1G. P. Putnam's Sons.

the good will of the king by timely gifts of food; a terrible green dragon destined to devour the princess; and the disguised prince who saves the princess' life. When the madcap princess learns of her impending doom, she becomes a serious, thoughtful maiden. "What memory would be left of me and of my life gone by, but of a headstrong, unruly child with no thought but of myself." Later when she thinks the prince has been killed by the dragon, she says: "There is a man that gave his life for me, and he young and all his days before him, and shut his eyes on the white world for my sake. The

man that died for me whether he is of the noble or the simple of the world, it is to him I have given the love of my soul." The little princess has become a woman.

"Crowding Memories"-by

we

Bailey Aldrich.

Mrs. Thomas

A more suggestive title than Crowding Memories could scarcely be imagined for this exceedingly readable account, brimming full as it is with interesting glimpses of famous men and women and places. We become acquainted with Edwin Booth and his charming bride, and through their eyes and those of the grief-stricken mother see intimately the terrible tragedy of the murder of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. We attend a brilliant dinner given in Boston by Charles Dickens, at which Charles Eliot Norton, James Russel Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other distinguished people are present. We listen to amusing incidents in which Mark Twain plays a leading role, and catch familiar glimpses of the eccentric Julia Ward Howe and the breezy Bret Harte. A six months' sojourn in London and on the Continent teems with delightful experiences. Then there is a fascinating glimpse of Whistler, a most amusing account of the visit of Oscar Wilde to this country, and much

more.

2Houghton-Mifflin Co.

A REAL POET OF THE HOME The Path to Home. By Edgar A. Guest. The Reilly & Lee Company, Chicago. This is the fourth delightful bunch of lyrics from this Detroit lover of mankind; already he has given us Just Folks, Over There, and A Heap o' Livin'. There is no need for Mr. Guest to seek the charm of naturalism by unconventional spelling, for he senses the idealistic hungerings in the everyday man, woman, and child. Moreover, he has a wonderful gift of rhythm. Among the gems scattered through the slim volume, "His Example," is particularly worth quoting. It begins:

*From The Los Angeles School Journal.

*

"There are little eyes upon you, and they're watching night and day;

There are little ears that quickly take in every word you say;

There are little hands all eager to do everything you do,

And a little boy that's dreaming of the day he'll be like you."

The other three stanzas are equally catching.

For a pathetic insight into dog nature at its best, it will be difficult to beat the lyric on page 157, "His Dog"; every one should read it.

JAMES MAIN DIXON.