tional prerogative to insist that every State should secure to every child the opportunity of a free elementary education; else an invasion of barbarism more deadly than the horde of ancient Gauls that stormed into the Roman senate, in an hour we know not, may astonish the world.

And, finally, the national government should amplify its present Bureau of Instruction and make it the educational Clearing-House of the Republic; the place where every man can go to learn the actual state of Education in America and be put at once in contact with the educational systems and authorities abroad. And instead of another half-endowed and struggling college at Washington, the government should make haste to repair the grievous injustice that for seventy years has refused to the National Capital the grant of public school lands bestowed on the most remote and barren Territory. With such timely aid we might behold in Washington the real National University;-a system of model schools, of every grade, from primary to collegiate, technical and artistic, each the best of its kind, a perpetual instructor to the South and the far West, where every observer from foreign lands might behold, in miniature, the American way of making American citizens out of "all orders and conditions of men." Then, when the nation has fully assured the education of every child, will the brow of the statue of Liberty that crowns the capitol kindle with the flush of a new sunrise that shall chase the darkness from every hiding-place of ignorance, superstition, and sin and and reveal the new Republic as that blessed na

tion whose God is the Lord."

The HON. NEIL GILMOUR of New York opened the discussion of Mr. MAYO's paper. He said he would present and emphasize two or three truths. Little boys are good to make men of, and people in all ages have regarded the educational problem as of the gravest importance. Our children must be educated; if our free government is to stand. Popular ignorance is the direst peril, and from their immoralities nations perish. We have attained a high and worthy position; but this beginning of our second century is an auspicious time to begin wholesome reforms. He dwelt at length upon the necessity of trained teachers, and the means of securing them. Communities must be educated as well as the children.

The Hon. J. H. SMART, of Indiana, said:-The purpose of the school is to ennoble the man to realize the highest purpose of life, to become a good neighbor a good citizen-a free man. The present time specially demands -1st. That those who are called to teach should understand that character is of more importance than arithmetic and grammar. 2nd. That we understand that our financial prosperity depends upon skilful labor and the ability to use knowledge. 3d. Just now is the right time to redefine liberty. There is a false notion among boys and girls. It means protection and restraint.

Adjourned to meet at 9 o'clock, a. m.

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 11th.

Association met at 9 o'clock. President PHELPS in the chair. Prof. EDWARD OLNEY, of the University of Michigan, read the following paper

on

Mr. President:

THE COUNTRY-SCHOOL PROBLEM.

My apology for appearing before this body with a paper having the same title as one presented by yourself last year at Minneapolis, is that you asked me to do it. What your motive could have been I can only guess. Perhaps it may have been that, judging from some remarks which I made at that meeting, you deemed it desirable that I should give more careful study and thought to the subject, and took this as the best method to induce me to "study up." At any rate, I have added to a life-long interest in our public schools, and abundant opportunity to observe the workings of our system in the rural districts, a careful re-study of their present condition and needs, and the best reflection I have been able to give to the question how to meet these needs.

I believe, Sir, that you considered your paper of last year as little more than a statement of the problem, the limits of a single paper forbidding any considerable attention to its solution. It is, therefore, to offer hints upon methods of solution, that I am summoned. Allow me, however, briefly to

reproduce the statement, and offer a remark or two upon it.

By our Country Schools we mean those schools situated in the more sparsely-settled districts, where a single teacher is required to conduct the entire school, thus precluding the idea of grading. These schools are usually intensely local, being the creatures of the particular school district, which, in extent, is but a small part of a township, though not infrequently lying in two or more contiguous townships. The limited resources of such districts, and the directness with which whatever is spent upon the school beyond what the public fund supplies, comes from the pockets of the citizens, makes the available revenue for sustaining the school so small that the appliances in the way of building and apparatus will usually be quite meagre, and the qualifications of the teacher, and the length of time the schools continue will be reduced to near the minimum. Again, the intense, and ultra-democratic idea which is at the foundation of the system, and which seems to be an acknowledgment that in this matter of education every parent is to have his own will and way to the fullest extent, becomes the source of endless strifes and jealousies which often sadly cripple, if they do not entirely destroy, the usefulness of the school. So also, the lack of permanency in teachers or methods which this scheme entails, is utterly incompatible with a high order of excellence and efficiency. To these points so fully elaborated in the paper of last year, I would add an influence of our fine graded schools in the larger villages and cities. While in many respects the influence of these schools is exceedingly helpful to the cause of education, there is at least one way in which they tend to cripple the rural schools. The fact that they can and do supply a wider range of instruction, with better methods and appliances, draws from the rural schools the more ambitious and advanced pupils, thus taking from them the very elements

of a higher life, and reducing them of necessity to primary or secondary schools. Such being the conditions under which these schools exist, it is not strange that the results are painfully unsatisfactory to any one who realizes the demand of the times for a trained, intelligent, and virtuous citizenship, and the feeble influence of these schools in supplying it. Nevertheless, I am not of those who think our common-school system a failure, even in this its weakest point. I can not allow the justice of the method which inventories all the ills from which the body politic suffers, and then charges them over to the common schools. The family, society, the church, the press, the court, the legislature, the rostrums, have each and all their share in the responsibility of developing good citizenship, the school coming in simply as one of many factors, and that not the largest one, in producing the result. Nor is the school-room more the parent than the child of the results deplored. It is a fallacy to suppose that radical reform can be gotten in the school and from hence revolutionize the whole. The reform sought must be developed all along the line, in order that it be possible anywhere. With society superficial and false, and goverment corrupt, it is simply impossible that the school should be in wholesome condition. The teacher, who is the chief factor in the school, is but a member of society, and an element in the State. Let the press and the rostrum which declaim so loudly against the inefficiency of the schools to purify society, but reform themselves, and they will find the schools become fountains of health. Let us understand, that, especially with our social and civil constitution, all departments sink or rise together. We cannot have a corrupt legislature, and a pure judiciary;—we cannot have piety in pulpit and pews, and peculation and fraud in politics;—we cannot have false ideals, and vicious practices characterizing society, and pure and lofty aims with wise and efficient methods in our schools. The organization of our society is not upon the principle of guild and caste. The legislator of to-day may be the judge or the preacher of to-morrow. The man who is on the political rostrum to-day, may be at the teacher's desk to-morrow. All grades, all classes, all occupations, are so intimately related, and so habitually interwoven, that virtue in one member is quickly felt in all the body; and corruption in one, speedily infects the whole.

I think, Mr. President, that I dare claim, that of all the agencies which conspire in the production of American citizenship, the purest, the best and most efficient in its sphere, next to the church, is the school; and in this statement I include the rural or common school. We do not need to be told that the results which we this year celebrate are in good part the product of our common schools. These results speak not so much of the grand achievements of a few, as the wonderfully-intelligent and fruitful activity of the many. The marvellous exhibition of American intelligence and skill now being made in the adjoining city is not an exhibit of what has been done by a special class, but is only a specimen of the product of American art and civilization, and might, in most of its features, be many times duplicated without repeating the names of exhibitors. Nor am I dealing in glittering and irrelevant generalities. Let there be made a list of our effective men in politics, education, religion, art, manufactures, commerce, agriculture, and there will be found an astonishing number who were made what

they are, so far as schools are concerned, by the common school alone, and the foundation in the case of all was laid in these common schools, and very largely in the rural school. There is, and ever has been, a spirit of independent self-reliance begotten in these rural schools which is a wonderful germ. Why, Sir, you cannot find a rural school in the land but what is fully confident that most of its members are nascent presidents, judges, generals, or princes in art, literature or wealth; and the parents are as calmly confident as are the children. With such assurance of capability, and such conviction of "manifest destiny," many of the defects in the details of the preparation are readily supplemented by the inherent force of their ideals.

But I would by no means be understood as saying that we have nothing to desire in regard to our rural schools. I quite agree with the paper of last year that the improvement of these schools is the most imperative, and most difficult part of our work as American Educators. Nor do I believe that the end desired can be attained without radical changes. We have rung about all the changes on the old ideas, of which they are capable. the decadence of these schools has long occupied our thought; but when we have attempted to remedy the case, we have declaimed upon the apathy of public sentiment, the utter incompetency of teachers, the insufficiency of Normal-school work, or attempted new permutations on the district or township system, county or town superintendency, or no superintendency at all, or cried out for compulsory education, until these ideas have lost their force, if they have not been demonstrated to be inadequate. We need to preach a new crusade with new ideas, if we would arouse the public sentiment and set the machinery of our common schools to a more effective motion. We need a new generation of Manns, Searses, Pages, Wickershams, Andrewses, and Gregorys to preach not a new gospel, but the old gospel by new methods. Our first reliance must be upon arousing the people. But they can not be aroused by a rehash of the old ideas. It must come to pass that a lecture on Education will call out the people, as in other days. It may be as then, that at first, they will come out largely to criticise or to oppose; but they must be made to feel, and to care for what we as educators are saying and doing. They must be made to feel that there is practical power in our ideas, and not to look upon a brigade of schoolmasters as a parade of good, inefficient, impracticable, or superannuated men with wooden guns. They must know that we propose to do something that they will feel, that there is positive character in the methods we propose, and an energy in pushing them which they will either invoke or dread. In short, the people must be aroused from their self-complacent lethargy. They have come to think that our system has reached perfection, and to rest satisfied in what we have attained. They must be jostled out of these ruts even if the road be found less comfortable both for team and passengers.

Such being the attitude of the question it is fortunate that the germinal ideas having in them "the promise and potency of the new life have already been discovered; although as yet they have lain like many another most useful engine for a long time in the philosopher's laboratory awaiting the favorable concurrence of events to bring them into practical operation. I will call your attention to four of these ideas:

1. Hereafter let the elective franchise be granted to our youth upon com

ing to age only on condition of their passing a satisfactory examination before a properly-constituted Board. Let this examination cover Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, the Constitution of our Government, and American History. Having passed such an examination and given evidence of good moral character, let the name be registered among the voters of the land. Such a requisition as this will at once give the rural school a new function, and so deepen the interest in it, that all needed improvements will be readily effected. We may not deprive any who have exercised the franchise from continuing to do so, but the imperative necessity of guarding this sacred trust in some such way, in the future, is too apparent to need argument; and well would it have been for some portions of our land if we had years ago entered upon the measure. The circumstances making this a necessity to our political well-being, this is not the place to discuss at length, yet we shall do well to remember that already the great mass of illiterate, uncultured, un-Americanized voters are controlling the destinies of great cities in New England, of whole States in the South, and threatens to overrun our entire Pacific coast. Let us not start back from these sentiments, fellow-laborers. This is pre-eminently our work. Politicians will never do it. The movement must begin and be carried forward by the educators of the land, by those collected and represented in this room, by this Association, by the Teachers' Associations of our several States. When we come to understand that our work in the common school has such immediate and essential connection as this with the nation's political life, and begin to assert it in the ears of the people, we shall not lack for an audience, and people will not slumber under our preaching. Of course, we shall be stigmatized as meddling with politics; but who has a better right—who a more sacred obligation to meddle with politics than we? If now, the mere generally-acknowledged connection which schools sustain to good order in society, to efficiency in business life, and position in social life, if these vaguely-defined, and imperfectly-apprehended functions of our schools give them the life and dignity they have, let them be put thus in immediate, organic connection with the very foundations of our political fabric-let them be acknowledged as the legitimate and indispensable trainers of our citizen sovereignty, and what may we not hope for them? Parents will foster them as the only means of fitting their children for citizenship, pupils will seek and reverence them as the fountains of their correct political life, politicians will court them and be wonderfully complaisant toward all measures which look to their development.

2. Having thus put the common school into its proper place in our political organism, we shall next need to provide the means by which to insure the performance of its functions. Here we are met at once by the axiom, "As is the teacher, so is the school." But, having recognized the responsibility of the school in preparing for citizenship and thus laying the foundation of the State, the reciprocal obligation of the State to provide the school with competent teachers, follows as a necessary corollary; and further, if the State is bound to afford the means for fitting teachers for their work, and is dependent for its well-being on the manner in which these teachers do their work, it has the unquestionable right to require them to use the means provided. Hence our second suggestion is, that, allowing all who