corn, cotton, and cattle is taxed to support the city school. The railroad drains the country and concentrates its rolling stock, warehouses, terminal facilities, stocks, and bonds in the cities, where they are taxed to support the city schools. The city banks collect the surplus money from the country and turn it over to finance large business concerns, which in turn pay their taxes to support the schools of the city. Mine and forest pay a like tribute, and the greatest of all natural resources, the brain of man, is turned into productive activity to pile up the wealth of the city.

For a minute note the contrast in conditions. In the United States, only one-fourth of the people live in the cities, but that one-fourth spends one-half of the nation's entire school money. In other words, the nation spends three times as much on the education of the city boy as on that of the country boy. Is that a square deal? Is it sound political economy? The city has most of the high schools, and nearly all of the libraries, museums, and laboratories. The one-fourth of the people who live in the cities own three-fourths of all the public-school property of this country. The cities pay their teachers double the rate of salary for a 30 per cent longer term. The cities also gobble up most of the available supply of professionally trained teachers. Money has enabled the cities to do these things, and to my mind we may talk about the fresh air of the country, we may "readjust the course of study," we may "fit the country school to the country needs," and do all these other good things, but until the country gets more money it will not grow fat very rapidly. Country homes must have more comforts, and country teachers must be paid better salaries.

The situation at present is not without encouragement. As a people we are getting rid of some of our local selfishness. We are learning the value of co-operation. Our cities are learning that they can't go on prospering indefinitely without prosperity in the country. We must carry that idea further. As a matter of self-defense, if for no more worthy reason, the cities must abandon the selfish policies which they have pursued, and join hands with the country for a mutual prosperity whose Americanism shall be broad enough to reach every child, whether rich or poor, black or white, in the city or in the country.

MORAL VALUES IN PUPIL SELF-GOVERNMENT

HENRY NEUMANN, LEADER, BROOKLYN SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL CULTURE, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

We have been taught by experience to fight shy of educational cure-alls. The human problems which teachers must meet are so complex, the resultant of so many and such varied forces, that we are inclined to shut our ears the moment some widely advertised device is made petitioner for our consideration. Let me assure you then that I do not begin with the assumption that the method named in the title of these remarks is our country's sole

hope. Much more than pupil self-government alone is needed for the moral equipment of our future citizens. Yet, when all is said, the fact that one agency for improvement does not exhaust our resources ought surely not blind us to the invaluable good which it may indeed accomplish.

Among the reconstructions awaiting our national life, it needs no profound insight to reckon grave changes in the sphere of government. The scope of public administration is steadily widening. The details of commerce and industry, for example, are coming increasingly to be matters of political concern. Tariff questions, rates for telephones and other public services, questions of workingmen's compensation for accident, all these are signs of the close connection between government and business; and unless we are far in error, the tasks intrusted to public administration are certain to increase in number, delicacy, and importance.

Add to this widening of governmental functions, the fact that new classes are coming into political power. It is only a question of time when the example of these western states will be followed from coast to coast and all the women of America will participate directly in citizenship. Our working classes too are astir. The years ahead of us are sure to see their political strength and their consciousness of that strength increase.

This then is the situation which we are to face-new and ever graver problems for the public to solve, new classes conscious of political power. Our civic tasks are already sufficiently complicated. The crooked and the incompetent office-holder, the ubiquitous boss, the masses of ignorant voters at one end of the line, and cliques of highly respectable moneyed interests buying legislation at the other, are even now straining our political fiber perilously. What will the future behold when the severe tug of these new ventures is added? Of this we may be sure: the stupendous task of guiding the community life will call for citizenship more intelligent and alert, more conscientious, than it has ever been.

I repeat that we must not expect pupil self-government alone to make every citizen competent. But all the more reason, since the task is so very huge, for utilizing every resource at our command. Among these instruments, not the least valuable is the one for which I am pleading this afternoon-allowing pupils to assist in the working of their school thru officers and committees of their own election, thru laws, penalties, rewards, and other efforts of their own making.

What gives such experiences their moral value? It is not that by electing their own mayors and governors they learn something of the machinery of popular sovereignty. They will acquire this fast enough when the state permits them to vote. A single week of intimate association with a ward politician will give them more insight into the actual workings of our government than the school can teach them in years. Nor is it the more or less artificial imitation of grown-ups that prepares them for the real duties of

later life. It is rather that by genuine willing help in the running of their own young community they learn the meaning of membership in a democracy. During the years when they are most open to the suggestion of certain fundamental moral requirements of group life, they get the chance to learn these by first-hand experience.

Of these demands the most obvious is respect for law. I think that we often fail to realize what an arbitrary imposition school law means to most children. The law of the school becomes less of this alien imposition, however, when he enjoys a genuine chance as a school citizen to help frame the regulations which intimately concern him. He responds readily enough to his own orders even when for the time being he must suffer a loss.

As a rule, boys cherish little resentment against the pupil community (this is less true of the girls) when their own officials are the ones to punish offenses. The general opinion among the boys is that the fellows learn to take their medicine. In answer to the question, "Suppose that your school were to vote on the proposition to abolish the school-state and go back to the old order, do you think that boys who have been punished will bear a grudge and vote in favor of the plan?" the reply of one of the lads is significant: "No. Everybody knows that you get a squarer deal from the boys than from the teachers. Sometimes a teacher blames a fellow without stopping to find out if he really did it." Well may we blush when our pupils teach justice better than we!

The most significant value is the opportunity to meet what is perhaps the deepest demand of democracy-active, willing participation in the responsibilities of one's group. The school is a community with the problems of a community. It has certain functions to perform in its corporate capacity. It must mold character, it must teach, it must safeguard the health of its members, it must protect them against injury from the indifferent and the vicious, it must bring the weakest up to normal standards, it must encourage all to reach new and higher levels. These are the tasks of a community; and they mean most for the moral development of all concerned when not the principal and teachers alone, but when every boy and girl old enough to understand the fact realizes that the school actually is such a community and that to attain its ends, it needs his ready co-operation. Two convictions on the part of the children are essential-first that there is a common aim uniting each to his fellows and to the adult authorities, and second, that in the furtherance of this aim each has a part to bear in the common responsibility. Wherever systems of pupil co-operation have been tried long and patiently enough, the testimony has accrued that they offer decided help to this end.

It is not only in matters of school routine that pupils can learn to participate in the obligations of their community. Especially in the high school their efforts can be guided to making positive contributions to the

larger life of which their school is in turn a part. I know an energetic superintendent in a small western city who has interested the collective energy of his pupils in helping their town in a number of important ways. In the course of school discussions upon their city's needs, they came to the conclusion that there were many ventures which the town should undertake. Their next step was to interest their parents and to hold a series of public meetings in the school, conducted by themselves and addressed by experts. Among other results they procured these wise measures: improvement of the city's streets and sidewalks, the starting of a municipal playground, the inauguration of a system of garbage collection, the employment of a municipal nurse, the beginning of a park system, the establishment of a public bathing beach, and the erection of bathhouses.

When civic interests such as these are trained, who can doubt the wisdom of striving for them? Here is pupil effort at its best, for here is no question of restraining petty offenders, no fear of obvious punishment to compel good behavior, but the spirit most needed to remake our communities-ready co-operative endeavor after positive creations for the common good. These are uncompelled expressions, born of genuine interest in community progress. Try to picture what America would be if every adult were so moved.

Such are among the moral values of this educational method. It is worth the labor it costs for the opportunity it gives to drive home the lesson of participation in group responsibility. Its effectiveness is due to the fact that it permits the working-out of moral experiences instead of mere listening to discourses about them. There is all the difference in the world. between "knowing" what is meant by sharing the obligations of your group and "realizing" them by practice. Whatever moral instruction on the subject of responsibility is imparted by the teacher becomes more meaningful since it interprets actual experience. When, for example, pupils discuss with their teachers the ethical issues involved in their elections, in the duties of officers, committees, and citizens, in the disciplining of offenders, in the creation of public opinion, in reconciling such conflicting loyalties as friendship for a delinquent and duty to the school-in short, in the multitude of concrete moral situations that constantly arise they are getting an ethical instruction which strikes home because it clarifies experiences in which they are sincerely interested. A lesson on the care of trust funds means something real to a class whose committee has borrowed for its own use money appropriated for a class purpose.

It is for such reasons as these that the self-government committee,' as whose representative I speak, is concerned to enlist the interest of teachers. The particular form that self-government assumes, whether it be named

* Self-Government Committee, 2 Wall Street, New York: Richard Welling, chairman; Lyman Beecher Stowe, secretary; Charles S. Fairchild, treasurer. The committee publishes a series of free pamphlets on the subject. It also employs an expert whose services may be procured for the asking by any school that wishes to introduce self-government.

republic, state, city, or anything else, is entirely secondary to the principle of active participation.

In many schools it happens that the teaching staff as a whole is not especially interested. May not one reason be that teachers themselves are not given sufficient chance for self-government? They are members of their community with gifts to contribute to the whole; but too commonly they are treated as if they had no other function than blind obedience to the orders of higher officials. They have little voice in shaping the curriculum or fashioning the other policies of the school system. The weekly conference gives an opportunity for every member of the faculty to contribute his share to the solution of the common problems; but is it always so considered? How frequent it is for so-called conferences to be only an assemblage of mute drillmasters summoned by the chief drillmaster just to listen to his orders! Can we expect teachers to appreciate what democratic living would mean for their pupils when they themselves are not permitted so to live? Can the spark of enthusiasm be kindled by those in whom it is dead?

We shall never attack the root-problems of character-building until the teaching force as a whole is aglow. America spells opportunity, we are fond of saying. Its grandest opportunity is to liberate character- democratic character, that is, in both its immense staff of teachers and its millions of boys and girls. No graver responsibility has ever rested upon a people than the task of our beloved country to show that ethically democracy is not an idle dream. To help equip all our sons and daughters in howsoever slight a degree to bear their share in that responsibility is worth every bit of effort that it takes.

THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS WILLIAM H. CAMPBELL, PRINCIPAL, D. S. WENTWORTH SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILL.

"The man behind the gun" became a popular phrase during recent military experience. It suggests that the personality of the soldier is more to be reckoned with than weapon, drill, or defensive armor. It is an epigrammatic statement of the law, as old as the human race, that man was made to dominate the material forces by which he is surrounded.

Everyone who is worth while feels this force of dominance struggling within him striving to reach a realization. It is the instinctive hunger of the soul that has created its idea of a deity and can never be satisfied until it has itself attained the stature of that ideal. There can never be rest in the world, for as the individual rises to a higher plane, his ideals rise to greater heights, luring him to more strenuous endeavor. It is this unsatisfied hunger of the soul that keeps the world constantly advancing.

We are often blinded and confused by the astonishing material accessories that gather about a great institution. The casual observer sees only