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Journal of Education

Vol. XXVII.

JOURNAL

MADISON, WIS., MARCH, 1897.

ADDRESS ALL COMMUNICATIONS TO

OF EDUCATION, 23 East Main Street, Madison, Wis.

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SOME aspects of the teaching of American history in our schools are presented in this number of the JOURNAL. They relate to the attention given to war in our school texts, to what the real subjects of instruction ought to be, to English school histories of the Revolution, and to history as a means of perpetuating hostilities after an issue has been finally settled, as in the cases of our relations with England and of our civil war. It is too commonly assumed that any one can teach history, whereas the broadest culture and the ripest judgment are required to handle this branch in such a way that it may contribute properly to promoting good citizenship, that is, the growth of the pupils in practical wisdom and power to judge wisely in affairs of governmental policy. The mere recitation of the text of one of our present school manuals, without serious effort to understand clearly the economic, social, moral

No. 3

and legal principles involved is really of small value. We hope that these articles may give rise to careful consideration of the whole subject of history teaching on the part of some at least of our readers.

FRENCH spelling is only less atrocious than that of the English language. We therefore quote, with the added emphasis which comes of the greater enormities of our own orthography, the following effective passage from a recent petition addressed to the Minister of Public Instruction by the "Société de Réform Orthographique:" "Who does not know by experience that the study of orthogrfay, because of its complexities, to-day absorbs for itself alone at least half of the time set apart for instruction in the primary schools, and so renders impossible to the children a gaining of really useful knowledge, such, for example, as that of the French (English) language, which differs essentially from its orthografy, but which is abandoned to the profit of the latter? And the time thus expended in wasting the young minds, that is to say, the most vital force of the nation, is for nine-tenths of the children the only period of their lives reserved for instruction. Is it not indeed a wrong to oblige them to study an orthografy which they cannot understand, to put them upon the rack, to force the entrance of merely arbitrary distinctions, and this at an age when there is the utmost need of instilling ideas tending to form the judgment and to protect it from harm?"

ONE evidence of the rapid advance in technical requirements for educational service is afforded by the legislation of several states. That of California is noteworthy for its requirement that all high school teachers must have had a course in Pedagogy at least equivalent to that prescribed in the State University, which is one full year of study with six exercises per week. In carrying out the law diplomas of no university will be recognized by the state department in which a course of pedagogy is not provided, and no candidate offering a diploma from one of these will be accepted without satisfactory proof that he took the full course in Pedagogy. Experience in teaching will not in any case be taken for this preparatory theoretical training. In Bos

ton no teachers used to be employed who had not had considerable experience, but a recent act modifies the law so that college graduates who have taken a sufficient pedagogical course may be accepted without previous experience. Thus the progress in building up a profession of teaching is evidently great, and such legislation is likely to become general within a few years.

EXPERT superintendents seem likely to be in the near future the most urgent demand of our educational system. Officials holding

such positions have not been given any large authority in the past, and with reason since they had no claim whatever to be accounted experts. They have usually been simply successful principals of schools, who showed some tact in management and force of character enough to give them a sort of lead, who have therefore been placed in charge of the schools of a city but in complete subserviency to the school board. This plan answered while the schools were looked upon purely from the point of view of their "prudentials." Now that education has become more than a routine affair of school houses and "taking recitations," we need for these positions men of culture, thoro acquaintance with the theories and practices of other cities and other countries, knowledge of current educational problems and the solutions of them proposed anywhere, men of trained powers of observation and reflection, capable of finding out the needs of a school system and formulating effectively plans for meeting them-educational experts, in short, who can be given large powers with a fair degree of assurance that they will exercise them wisely and for the best interests of the schools. To form such ex

perts is an important part of the work of higher perts is an important part of the work of higher pedagogical instruction.

ILLITERACY of American Boys, the title of Mr. Godkin's suggestive article in the January Educational Review, challenges consideration at the hands of teachers. But why boys alone? One who listens to the gush of American girls, detects not only the distressing overstraining of adjectives--"awful," "I thought I should die," "just too lovely for anything," etc.-but also the radical defects which Mr. Godkin dwells upon. He writes, "I speak with deliberation when I say that there is no civilized country in which, outside the colleges, so little of this (cultivation of correct usage in language) is done as in ours; in which the people at large, tho their average speech is better than usual, pay so little attention to their manner of speaking and choice of words; in

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which so much havoc is made with the language in daily use.. I meet every day with men whom we call educated, who do not seem to care how they speak or how they write. Their speech is full of solecisms, and their letters and notes are unpunctuated scrawls, and in their pronunciation the vowel sounds are summarily got rid of. . This indifference to our tongue is fostered by the belief among many people that, as long as they know what is right, they may speak as they please. But I hold this to be a gross error, and have often they cannot drop slang and speak pure Engpointed out to young men talking slang, that lish when they choose. Of all our habits there is no habit so tenacious, so difficult to change or get rid of, as our habit of speech."

WAR IN SCHOOL HISTORIES.

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We have before us six of the manuals of United States History in common in our public schools, and have sought to ascertain what portion of their space is devoted to accounts of war, and what is the leading idea in the war narratives.

The chief difficulty encountered in the first inquiry arises from the multitude of minor conflicts of early colonial times and with the Indians. We have met it by leaving these out of the account, so that the record of them for the most part appears in the pages which we credit to peaceful history. We have, howbeginning our accounting with the outbreak ever, slipped the bond of many of them by

of the French and Indian War. Thus we

reckon the number of pages devoted to the story of five, great wars-the French and Indian, the Revolutionary, the Second war with England, the Mexican and the Civil war. We have counted the number of pages devoted to these conflicts and compared them with the whole number in the volume from the point of departure, and find in the different books. very little variation in the proportion. Onehalf of the space is devoted to these wars, which have occupied, in round numbers, twenty-seven out of the one hundred and fifty years of the period. In most of the books the actual number of pages given to these struggles is somewhat more than one-half, but in two of them it is a trifle less.

Turning to the other question we find also a striking accord in the books. They are all after one pattern. What they show is not the display of character in war; heroism, endurance, devotion to principle can hardly be exhibited on a canvas so meager as that allowed in most of them. More detail would be neces

sary than accords with the general view at which they aim. War history of this sort might have a high ethical value by awakening enthusiasm for nobility of character. Neither is it the business of war with which they concern themselves, obtaining transportation and supplies, raising money for the war, settling principles for its conduct as to treatment of prisoners, destruction of property, marauding, etc., or negotiations for exchange of prisoners, for peace, and so on. These themes might be fruitful in profitable considerations as to the conduct of great affairs, but they receive hardly a word of attention in these narratives. The industrial relations of the war; the discussions in politics and religion which it causes; its effects upon the morals and life of the people; the inventions and discoveries to which it gives rise; the legal and constitutional questions started by it-themes such as these are hardly glanced at. It is the strategy of war that they are mainly concerned with, the movements and countermovements of armies, the battles, the popular emotions of exultation or despair. The passions of the conflict kindle and glow in the mind of the youthful reader. He sees "the pomp and circumstance of glorious war," but not its miseries and hardships, its routine business aspects, its problems, its products, its rationality or irrationality. Every one who

has ever listened to a school recitation in history knows how vague and confused are the pupils' notions as to the legal and moral points at issue, and how intense his emotional partisanship is. He does not reflect upon the right and wrong in the "Boston tea party;" the Mexican war is for him not a moral question. The other half of the books is usually inorganic. Pupils will generally vote it dull and hard. It has the aspect rather of a chronicle than a history--a list of things that happened, God knows why. The makers of the later texts realize that a marvelous national growth has been going on, and give us notes upon it, hit-and-miss selections of facts, annals of administrations. The truth is that the "purple patches" of war strategy in these school texts are so large that they kill down the steady ongoings of national life. In fact our wars have been but incidents in our national upbuilding, -volcanic upheavals as it were, due to temporary blockages in the way of our development. When this is rightly conceived, and a narrative constructed to show it clearly, the story of them will no longer occupy half the sum total of pages. We need to ask the question, For what should our children study the history of their country? Surely not to make generals of them all-boys and girls. We have

passed to a new and larger life-to new and larger ways of doing business, to fuller knowledge of contemporary conditions given us by a teeming press, to broader interests, to more perplexing problems involving the possibility of gigantic upheavals, to a powerful, on-rushing national life, exposed to dangers in municipal, state and national affairs. Our young people need to understand something of this and how it has come about. They need to know what our experience has been as to currency, tariff, education, municipal management, political forces, social and industrial progress, legal and moral rights-a thousand practical matters to which history rightly constructed might properly introduce them, and upon which it might give them both some clear, fundamental notions and the habit of reflecting rationally. These and such as these seem to us the ends for which they should study history, and we need books which bring out these things, and teachers who understand their nature and importance. But of the teaching of history, we must speak on another occasion, and shall be satisfied at present if we have led some of our readers seriously to consider the question:

For what should our children study the history of this country? S.

CIGARETTES.

War is being made upon the cigarette habit among school children in several state legislatures this winter. Among them is Wisconsin. We hope every teacher in the state will write to or personally interview his or her assemblyman and senator in favor of some bill prohibiting the use of cigarettes by school children. To do so is clearly within their province as teachers. Many of them have had occasion to know the evil effects of the use of tobacco by some of their own pupils, and can speak from personal knowledge. Very few teachers are liable to the counter charge that they themselves use tobacco, and in this case it is easy to reply that tobacco is specially harmful to children, much more so than to adults. It can also be said that the ordinary cigarettes are more harmful than other forms of tobacco, because they are doctored up with drugs, including opiates, which are far worse than ordinary smoking or chewing tobacco. As to the effects of cigarettes upon school children we quote from a Chicago teacher's address reported in a recent "Tribune:"

"It is only within the last five or six years that the habit of cigarette smoking has made its appearance among the boys of the public schools; but during that brief period it has in

creased to such an extent that several thousand have become addicted to the habit, while the majority of these boys are so affected, mentally and physically, they are unable to make further progress in their studies. That these are facts I am fully prepared to prove, not only through my own observation and the testimony of the boys themselves, but by the statements of many teachers and more than half the principals of Chicago, who I am confident are better able to judge of the effects of cigarette smoking on growing children than any other class of people-the parents not excepted.

"As to my personal knowledge of the effect of this habit on school boys, I have carefully observed it for the last three years, during which period at least 125 boys addicted to this habit have been at one time and another under my charge. These boys smoked from two to twenty cigarettes a day, and not more than ten of them were able to keep pace with their class; yet nine-tenths belong to educated, intelligent families. Among these 125 boys were found nearly all of those pupils who were from two to five years older than the average age of children for the grade, as well as ninety per cent. of those boys especially hard to discipline, and all of those who were in the habit of playing truant. An Anti-Tobacco Society, which most of the boys joined, was organized.

"From frank and friendly conversations with these boys many of their temptations and difficulties were made clear. Twenty-five stated that the reason they failed to learn their lessons was because most of the time they were too sleepy to study; thirty said they were always dizzy after smoking; twenty-two could not write neatly because their hands trembled; several, to use their own words, 'felt shaky' when they walked. A large number were unable to run any distance, some not more than a block, although before they began to smoke they could run as far and as fast as any one. Nearly all of these boys told me they had headaches almost constantly. With scarcely an exception they stated that they were unable to learn their lessons, although kept night after night for that purpose.

"After a careful investigation of the cases of ten boys, who were four or five years too old for their grades, I found that each one had begun school at six years of age, and had made a grade or more a year up to the time he began smoking, when all progress stopped. Several of these boys had even dropped back a grade or two. A number of those who had joined the Anti-Tobacco Society succeeded in

breaking off the habit entirely, and a few of these, formerly the poorest in the class, became the best."

It was also stated that out of all the sixtyseven grammar schools of the city only fortysix cigarette smokers had been able to graduate during the last two years. The teachers of Chicago have been making a vigorous effort to cure the cigarette evil by organizing antitobacco societies among their pupils. They now feel that they need the aid of a law to forbid the sale of cigarettes to children.

Doubtless there is more temptation to school children in a great city like Chicago than in the country. The little "school supply stores" sell candy and cigarettes, and would sell liquor except for the high license required, and of course the children tempt one another. But smaller cities and large villages have almost as great temptations proportionately, while even country children can easily get tobacco, though cigarettes are not yet fashionable for farmers.

Teachers should oppose the tobacco habit as being bad for any one, but as specially harmful to growing children, and they should fight the use of cigarettes by the pupils in every reasonable way, because it is a complication of the tobacco habit with the far more fatal opium habit. We have no doubt, if the facts could be secured, that the loss of physical and mental power by many pupils and the absolute breakdown of some, will be found to be caused by cigarettes or tobacco in other forms, to an extent that would astonish parents and teachers alike.

Fifteen years ago the writer had charge of a large temperance society for children. In the course of that work he found that the immediate practical work needed was far more against tobacco than against liquor. From the statements of the children themselves and of the teachers in the public schools, several of whom assisted him in the society. he learned that quite a few boys and some girls under ten years of age were acquiring the tobacco habit, and that between ten and fifteen a frightfully large number of boys began to smoke and chew, and a considerable number of girls, and that most of them showed a decided falling off in school work, and quite a number were already at about fifteen years old physical and mental wrecks from the use of tobacco, and this was before the days of cigarettes, and when it was difficult for boys in small cities to purchase tobacco.

A few years later the writer being in San Francisco visited many of the remarkable systems of free kindergartens established by the

late Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper. The kindergartens were supported by several societies to the number of over sixty in all, and retained children only up to the school age of six years. The writer was informed that a very large portion of the boys and many of the girls of that tender age were already using tobacco to an extent that was noticeably inju

rious to them. This was one. of the worst evils the managers of the kindergarten had to contend with. W.

THE MONTH.

WISCONSIN NEWS AND NOTES.

Marinette has increased its teaching force from 45 teachers to 61, in three years. The school enrollment for last year reached 3,375. -Supt. Nattrass issues the questions used in the examinations for graduation from the rural schools of Lafayette county in a neat pamphlet of six pages.

-Supt. Burlingame, of Columbia county, prints in his program of teachers' meetings in the county, a very attractive picture of the Dells at the Narrows.

-The first number of the Monthly Dispatch is before us, issued by the pupils of the Neillsville high school. It contains eight double column pages and presents an attractive appearance.

-The enrollment at the Stevens Point normal school to the close of the second quarter ending January 22nd, was 469. Of these 262 are in the normal department and 43 in the preparatory class.

-The total enrollment at the Platteville normal school up to the end of the second quarter, January 22nd, was 656, of whom 463 were in the normal department and 64 in the preparatory school.

-The report of the Oshkosh normal school shows an enrollment up to Jan. 22nd, the close of the second quarter, of 758, of whom 533 are in the normal department. Besides there are 81 in the preparatory academy.

—W. D. Rice, a graduate of the Michigan state normal, and for several years conductor

amount to 36,024 pages, including the annual report, the bulletins, the Farm Institute bulletin and the Hand Book of Northern Wisconsin.

-The following correction to the list of officers of the Wisconsin Teachers' Association

has been furnished us by Pres. Williams: First vice-president, J. T. Edwards, Marinette; second vice-president, Anna E. Schaffer, Chippewa Falls; third vice-president, A. R. Jolly, Mineral Point.

-Superintendent Viebahn, of Watertown, has been again afflicted in the death of his son, Gustav C. Viebahn, who died at his home Feb. 17th. He was a member of the law school at Madison, and went home a short time before his death with an indisposition which developed into typhoid fever.

-An eight room building was provided in Marinette in 1895, and was then thought to be ample for some time; but there are now over 500 children under ten teachers attending school in churches, stores, halls, etc. During

the past three years the high school enrollment has increased from 93 to 160, and the teaching force from two to five.

-Of the six school buildings of Marinette all but one are provided with a regularly equipped kindergarten. The public kindergarten supported at public expense has gained a firm hold upon the good will of the people, and with reason. The school age beginning at four, the children must be provided for. It has been shown that the kindergarten does this in the best way and at no greater expense.

-Among the resolutions of the Illinois. Teachers' Association at its last session we note the following: "That we also gratefully recognize the generosity of the state in providing 116 scholarships in the state university whereby young men and young women who are desirous of pursuing the studies beyond the high school, and are prepared therefor, may attend the university without expense for tuition or incidentals."

-A circular from the committee of one hundred appointed by the Wisconsin Teachers' Association to look after the interests of the session of the N. E. A. in Milwaukee next summer, says: "We are pledged to a mem

of the mathematical department of the Mich-bership of 2,000 from this state, and in order igan School Moderator, has charge of the mathematics in the Marinette high school.

-Of the publications of the college of agriculture at the university during the past year, the report of the president shows that they

to bring that number to the meeting it will be necessary for each member of the committee. to use every available means to give needed information as to its time, place, character and advantages. The state of New York last year

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