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aims as to demand a distinctive and peculiar training therefor-a training especially suited to the circumstances of the case.

In like manner the instructor in the higher departments of education has a work more especially his own, differing widely in its motives and methods, and demanding attainments and qualifications very different from those of the elementary teacher. Hence the training of those who are to occupy these higher walks of educational effort should be suited to their condition and necessities; and it follows, also, that the appliances for their preparation should be modified accordingly. In other words, the necessities of our system of public education at the present time demand not less than two grades of normal training schools-one for the preparation of elementary teachers, and another for school officers and instructors in the higher departments. And it would, in the judgment of the committee, vastly increase the efficiency of our normal school system if these two classes of institutions could be organized and conducted as separate establishments, each suited to its special work.

Fourthly. The courses of academic study in many of our existing normal schools have become expanded to such an extent as to have greatly overburdened them, and to have largely diverted them from their special work, thus diminishing their influence and usefulness as agencies for the professional training of teachers.

That this state of things has been brought about by the urgency of the public demand for teachers in the higher schools, in consequence of the withdrawal of many for more lucrative employments, is freely conceded; but the fact itself is none the less disastrous to the cause of elementary instruction. The committee beg leave to reiterate the statement that our most pressing wants, at the present time, are in the domain of elementary education. We must ever keep in view the primary school and its immediate adjuncts. We must not neglect that knotty problem, "the district school as it is." We must remember its difficulties. We must reflect that the common schools are the only "colleges for the people." We must have trained skill here, if anywhere; because failing here we shall fail altogether, and succeeding here we shall succeed altogether. It is down here where the great industrial classes, "the bone and sinew" of the land, come to take their only chance for that training which is to lift them from sensuality to rationality and clothe them with the attributes of citizenship in this land of free thought, free speech, and free suffrage. And be it remembered, too, that it is down deep in this soil where the seeds of higher culture must be sown and where they must germinate and attain their earlier stages of growth. If we plant, and water, and cultivate here as assiduously and carefully as we may and should do, we shall not only lay broad and deep the foundations of general intelligence among the people, but by these means hundreds will demand the aids to liberal culture where now, amid neglect and inefficiency, only here and there one aspiring genius rises superior to the obstacles which environ him.

In this connection the committee take the responsibility of broadly asserting that while much has been done for the improvement of elementary instruction, especially in the cities and larger towns, yet that, as a whole, the schools forming the lower parts of our system are deplorably deficient. They are mainly in the hands of ignorant, unskilled teachers. The children are fed upon the mere husks of knowledge. They leave school for the broad theater of life without discipline; without mental power or moral stamina; with minds distorted; too often with hearts corrupted, to swell the ranks of the lawless and to recruit the army of ignorant voters who are ever a menace to the peace and security of the country. And here let us refer to a fact which cannot become too soon or too widely known, and which ought to arouse the educators and the statesmen of the country to the most vigorous exertions. We allude to the fact of the great increase of the ignorant voting population in these United States. This unwelcome phenomenon has its causes. It is not due alone to the enfranchisement of the slaves. The fact of such increase remains after full allowance is made for the addition of the blacks to the ranks of those who are entitled to suffrage. And we are forced to account for it largely by the utter inefficiency of thousands of our elementary schools, and their failure to do their assigned work. Poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout the country. Multitudes of the schools are so poor that it would be as well for the country if they were closed. They add nothing to the intelligence or moral power of the country. They waste its resources. They teach nothing positively good, but much that is positively bad. They are little else than instruments for the promotion of mental and moral deformity. They repress the native aspirations of the child for knowledge. They foster habits of indifference and carelessness, which are the bane of his future life.

That eminent statesman and philosopher, Guizot, never uttered a more palpable truth than when he declared that "a bad school-master, like a bad parish-priest, is a scourge to the commune."

That the inefficient and worthless character of so many of these lower schools is a prolific cause of ignorance and its increase is proved by the fact that whenever good schools take their places a large increase of attendance at once occurs, and the "noble army" of truants and absentees is correspondingly diminished. Thus poor schools not

only fail to attract to themselves great numbers of those who are pressing forward, unprepared, to the responsibilities of citizenship, but they equally fail to qualify those whom they pretend to teach for the most simple duties of life. Hence they are blind leaders of the blind. They afford the sad spectacle of ignorance engaged in the stupendous fraud of self-perpetuation at the public expense.

We have a fitting illustration of the grave deficiencies in our system of elementary instruction in the spectacle recently afforded at our national military school, in which more than fifty per centum of the candidates for cadetships utterly failed in a preliminary examination, although that examination was of a purely elementary character. At a recent competitive examination for an appointment to a cadetship, embracing sixteen young men over seventeen years of age, from an entire congressional district in Minnesota, only one was found to be a fit candidate to become a candidate for the position. The examination was limited to the elementary subjects prescribed by the Department of War in such cases. In some of our Western States more than three-fourths of the certificates granted to teachers are third grade, which represents such a paucity of literary and professional attainments that an "expert calculator" would scarcely be able to find any sum total but zero. A majority of the candidates presenting themselves for admission to many of our normal schools are so utterly destitute of elementary knowledge, or any positive knowledge whatever, that it becomes necessary either to reject them, to establish preparatory departments, or to devote the first year to a grade of work which should have been and might have been accomplished in a good grammar school prior to the age of twelve years. In all the cases cited it should be borne in mind that these young men and women have been past the age of sixteen years. If anything can be decisive of the existence of the gravest deficiencies in our instrumentalities for elementary instruction, it is such facts as these-and their number is legion. And from the meager qualifications denoted by these cases down to the abject ignorance of the multitude of illiterate voters before alluded to there is every conceivable grade and shade, all bearing testimony to the quality of the education we are offering to the million. Among this mighty host how rare to find anything like clear, consecutive thought, leading to sound conclusions! What abuse of mother tongue! What a negation of good habits of every kind! What a deplorable lack of the very foundations upon which a useful, virtuous, and successful life may be predicated.

The first, the most potent step toward a remedy of these gigantic evils, the committee believe, is to elevate and improve these schools of the people. We do not, in the present emergency, need to trouble ourselves so much about the higher institutions. If we take care of elementary instruction, that prolific soil in which the seeds of all learning and all excellence must germinate, as we ought to do, we shall go far toward providing for what we are pleased to call higher education, on the principle that the greater includes the less. Once thoroughly awaken the dormant energies of the human soul to the higher life of intelligence-to a realizing sense of the ecstasy of a rational and virtuous existence-and no power less than that of omnipotence can arrest its progress. Where it lacks opportunities it will create them; where it encounters obstacles it will glory in them, and they will disappear like the mists before the morning sun. One of the chief hinderances to the advancement of higher education and of its institutions in this country must be sought in the inadequacy of our agencies for elementary instruction.

When young men by scores, if not by hundreds, enter the college, unable to cope successfully with the minor difficulties of the English sentence, doing daily violence to mother tongue, with no methodical plan of study, no persistent power of application, no fixed principles of action, of character, or conduct, the fact is mildly suggestive of "something rotten in Denmark." Reference is here made to the elementary school, of If the college be unsound, the defect arises largely from the admission of such candidates to its courses, instead of consigning them to the healthful probation of a good intermediate school. It must be admitted, however, that this remedy would prove ineffectual in its influence upon the unfortunate ones who might be subjected to its immediate application. For, when a young man has arrived at an age which justifies his admission into college, and is still destitute of the habits and acquirements which only a careful rudimentary training can give, it is generally too late to mend him. There are certain elements of character, personal, intellectual, and moral, that must be sought after and cultivated in childhood or never. That is the precious seedtime of the human soul. Its golden opportunities once lost can never be regained. It is this thought that invests the whole subject of early education, its character, motives, methods, and agencies with such supreme importance, whether viewed in its relations to the individual or to society, and especially to our own American society, where vox populi is so decisive in its influence upon the conduct of affairs. Perhaps no one thing would be more salutary in its effect upon our schools of lower grade than the universal and certain enforcement of a rigorous standard in respect to character and rudimentary attainments in the admission of candidates to the higher institutions. Nor could these institutions inaugurate a measure which would at the same time conduce more powerfully to their own real and permanent advantage than this.

The problem which above all others is committed to this nation is the education of the people. "The whole people must be taught and trained." What shall be the character of that training? What system of agencies is best adapted to secure the certain result?

The committee will yield to none in their profound appreciation of the claims of higher education and its institutions. They concede all that can reasonably be urged as to the value of highly educated men to society. But they feel bound also to submit that such men are not necessarily the product of higher institutions alone. They are rather the result largely of that spirit of self-culture whose germs lie in the deeper soil of early instruction. It is here that they must receive their first inspiration.

But however important to society the liberally educated man may be, it is of greater importance still that the industrial classes in this country should become the reciprents of a training befitting their condition and their weighty responsibilities. The wickedest rebellion recorded in history was inaugurated by "liberally educated" men. But the crowning victories of Appomattox and Sadowa were won not by rifled cannon and needle gun, but by intelligent masses who, comprehending the interests at stake, and appreciating the gravity of the crisis, bravely faced death that their country and civilization might live.

The education of these masses, as we have shown, must be secured in the elementary schools or it can be done nowhere, and the advancing tide of ignorance must roll on until it shall overwhelm the nation. And it can be done here. But our agencies for the work must be multiplied and perfected far beyond our past experience. The trained, skillful schoolmaster must be abroad everywhere. "It is the master that makes the school." It is the careful training that makes the master. He must be scholarly, ingenious, earnest, conscientious. He must be inspired with broad views of his work. He must love it. He must know that the lessons of the text-book are but a fraction of the means to be employed in the formation of character. He must be able to lead his pupils not only to know but to do that which is lovely and of good report. To rear a supply of teachers after this model we are aware is no easy task. But we must succeed in it at whatever cost, or our great scheme for the education of the masses is a myth and a failure. Seminaries for the training of elementary teachers must be increased in number, perfected in organization, and improved in management, until they can create and keep up a supply of skillful teachers for the whole country. A knowledge of the noble art of teaching and of training up children in the way they should go, must be made universal; for this, after all, is the chief business of a civilized society. For the weighty reasons which have thus been imperfectly sketched, then, the committee believe that our normal school system should be so graded that we shall be supplied with separate agencies for the special preparation of elementary teachers adequate to supply every school in the community. Their organization would thus be more simple, and their operation more direct and effective than on the diffused plan, which seems, in many instances, to embrace every grade from the primary school to the full collegiate course. This plan would so far localize the training system as to bring its benefits within reach of the great body of teachers. It would give greater prominence and effectiveness to the professional work of the schools by limiting the scope of their academical courses. It would in a few years create and maintain a supply of able teachers worthy of the high vocation of instructing the people. It would rapidly renovate the entire public school system, and carry the infinite blessings of knowledge and culture to every home. It would stem this advancing tide of ignorance which now threatens to imperil, if not to overwhelm, the country. It would elevate the profession of teaching in public estimation. It would lead to a far more liberal compensation of teachers, by enabling them to render a more acceptable service to the people.

The committee believe, however, that no course of study which can be committed to paper can be made adequately to represent the true worth of a training school for teachers, or of any school whatever. It is the supreme function of every school not merely to accomplish a given course of study but to develop character. A curriculum is only one of the means to a great and comprehensive end. It is too often made an end unto itself; and it must be confessed that this end, in a majority of cases, is not realized. The value of a curriculum depends, first, upon its adaptation to the special purpose for which it is designed, and still more upon the manner in which it is handled. The best course of study ever devised by the wisdom of man, in the hands of an ignorant and unskillful teacher, is no better than a string of pearls offered as a morsel to a famishing beast. Said the late Edward Everett, in a brief address to a class of teachers on a certain occasion, "In education the method, the method, is everything." So the power of a curriculum depends preeminently upon the method in which it is employed. The branches taught in our elementary schools have a power of mental discipline and expansion many-fold greater than we realize from them in the average of cases. It is this latent power that we so much need to apply in our common schools. But intelligence and skill alone can do it. While a text-book stands between an unwilling child on the one hand and a blockhead on the other, this power must remain as a light hidden under a bushel, and the poor children will see only as through a glass very darkly.

Nor is this all. There is unquestionably a choice of studies to be regarded here. The studies to be pursued in our training schools for elementary teachers ought in a measure to be determined not so much by the branches which are but which ought to be taught in the common schools. There are some things attempted to be taught, especially in the district schools, which ought to have no place there, since they exclude other studies of far greater use to the people. We might instance algebra, higher arithmetic, mental arithmetic, pursued as an independent study, and carried to the extreme of abuse in enforced logical processes beyond the apprehension of children. We may also mention surveying, natural philosophy, and astronomy, out of their proper order and connection. Of the excluded studies we will merely name the elements of the natural and physical sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and botany, in their relations to agriculture and the mechanic arts. These are studies of the first importance to the industrial classes, and as far as possible they ought either to accompany or supplement thorough instruction in the so-called common branches. With our elementary schools properly regulated; with the studies clearly defined and limited as they should be; and, above all, with a generation of teachers such as the American people need and must have, these things will be practicable. Under an organization and administration of our school system in all its parts corresponding with the necessities and the wealth of the nation; with the studies suitably selected and limited, and with a supply of teachers worthy of their high vocation, we should see the rising generations in our country better trained, better educated, better fitted to enter upon the work of life at the age of twelve years than most young men and women now are at eighteen, or ever thereafter. There are those here who believe this possible, because they have seen the truth of the statement repeatedly verified. There is a vast waste of time, treasure, and power growing out of the imperfect organization and direction of the educational forces of this country, which goes far to account for the waste in every other direction. A course of studies for the schools of the people should be wisely adapted to the condition and wants of the people. It should be such as promises them the broadest, fullest development possible within the limits of time which they can devote to it. It should be such as will, to the greatest practicable extent, aid them in their occupations, and fit them for their duties as men and citizens. It should be such as will stimulate them to the life-long duty of self culture after the temporary aids afforded by schools are withdrawn. As only the few are able to ascend so far as to claim the privileges of the higher institutions, the courses of study for the elementary schools should be selected less with reference to a preparation for the higher courses, if need be, than for the duties of life. As the common schools are for the masses, and as the masses cannot go beyond them, the interests of the higher institutions, when necessary, must yield to the interests of the masses.

The committee have suggested that a course of study is only one of the means by which the ends of school training are to be realized. Our children and youth should not only learn the right, but learn to do the right. It is essential that they practice as well as know the truth, and this is the essence of the training system. That school stops far short of its true goal which neglects the assiduous cultivation of the personal habits, manners and morals of its pupils. Carelessness slays its thousands and wastes its millions annually. Wantonness destroys more than prudence saves. Hundreds of our American schools are little less than undisciplined juvenile mobs, knowing and respecting no law save the wild passions of the hour. The representative young American is a child that neither reverences nor obeys his superiors; is impatient of restraint, and seemingly bent upon "rule or ruin." Multitudes of our school-houses and their appurtenances bear witness to this truth, resembling the sad relics of an ill-spent life. Now the committee feel compelled to suggest that this subject of discipline and the formation of character comes legitimately within the scope of the present discussion. It matters not how complete our scheme for intellectual culture may be, if we neglect the personal, social, and moral habits of our youth it is all in vain; it is worse than useless. In these evil tendencies there is a profound significance, an ominous import. Here is the key to the lawlessness, corruption, wastefulness and other wrongs which menace the peace and safety of our society. These evils have their root in the slip-shod discipline as well as in the superficial teaching of the common schools. The committee believe that it is the supreme function of every school to aim directly at the habits and character of its pupils, and not alone at the technical instruction of the text-books and the intellectual routine of the class-room.

The professional training schools afford the means whereby the work of reformation in these respects may be begun. The teacher, the teacher, is the central power and the inspirer of all reforms in education. "Whatever you would have appear in the life of a nation," say the Prussians, "you must put into its schools." And, we venture to add, that whatever you would put into its schools you must first put into its teachers through the agencies which prepare them for their great work.

In proposing an outline of a course of study and training for elementary teachers, it seems necessary to fix upon some definite standard of admission as a basis of the course. This is a somewhat perplexing task, owing to the varying standards of teach

ing in different localities. The normal school is compelled, by the necessities of its position in the system, to adjust itself to the condition and circumstances of the subordinate parts of that system. It must at first let itself down so far as to be accessible by average of those who have received their preparation in the lower schools. Otherwise its rooms would be tenantless and its occupation would be gone. Gradually, however, it can and should elevate its standard of admission, and by this means, as well as through the influence which its graduates will exert by their superior methods of teaching, it will constantly raise the character of the schools in the community. We propose a standard which is limited in the extent of its requirements. But this would be compensated for in the rigor and thoroughness of the preliminary examination. "Not how much, but how well," should be the test of admission to a training school for elementary teachers. The subjoined standard may be lowered when necessary to meet the exigencies of particular location.

Without further remark, the committee suggest the following as a suitable standard of admission to an elementary normal school:

1. The ability to spell correctly.

2. A free and legible handwriting.

3. The power to read fluently and to enunciate with distinctness all ordinary words of the language.

4. The ability to parse and analyze any common English sentence.

5. The power to perform with facility all the processes of elementary arithmetic to percentage.

6. A knowledge of the leading facts of mathematical geography, and of the political geography of the United States.

7. Satisfactory evidence of good moral character.

8. A sound, healthy body.

Assuming this as a basis, the committee suggest the following as affording an excellent course for the preparation of elementary teachers, covering a period of two years. Both the standard of admission and the course itself may be modified-either raised or lowered, to suit the necessities and circumstances of particular localities. It is impossible to lay down a course that will meet the demands of all places.

In presenting this course we assume also that one of the best methods of teaching how to teach any subject is actually to teach that subject upon the most approved plan. This method, however, is but one of many, and should never be exclusively relied upon. Special drill in the art of teaching should be a constant accompaniment of the

course.

Proposed course of study and training in a normal school for the preparation of elementary teachers. Time, two years; each year to be subdivided into two terms of twenty weeks each.

Subjects.

FIRST YEAR-FIRST TERM.

Syllabus.

English language

Parts of speech and their properties. Composition. Parsing and analysis of sentences.

Elementary arithmetic, including mental Processes and principles from the begin

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ning to percentage. Mental practice.
Methods of rapid calculation.
Theory and art of penmanship. Free draw-
ing.

United States and Europe comprehen-
sively studied. Map drawing.
Morphology of leaves. Stems. Roots.
Use of schedules.

General outlines of the subject. Hygienic
rules.

Observation and criticism of teaching exercises. Lessons in teaching primary reading and number classes.

Free calisthenic exercises. Musical notation and reading through key of C. Simple chorus practice.

Manners and morals. Formation of right habits.

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