when the model school with model equipment would mean most to their future lives. Yet it has been my far too common experience to go from a beautiful modern high school, thru which I have been conducted by a proud school board, into grade buildings with not only the defects indicated above, but with such palpable fire dangers that I wonder their use is tolerated for a single day; buildings with defective furnaces and flues and defective wiring; with closets under the wooden stairs for storage of brooms, oiled rags, waste paper, and gasoline cans; no direct exits from basement schoolrooms and toilets; no fire escapes, or such as are never cleaned in winter nor used in fire drill; buildings to which an extra story has been added above inelastic walls and stairways and exits; buildings that know no fire drill that would measure up to efficiency in case of fire; buildings that shake most alarmingly in every high wind; buildings that, by example of the manufacturer who aims at efficient production of mere merchandise, should have been thrown on the scrap heap long ago! If there is no better way, let us issue long-time bonds, and make these very children pay, thirty years hence, for decent schools now. I venture to say it will not cost them more than a "tithing" of their added efficiency.

But there are many school buildings which, while far from "model," need not be thrown upon the scrap heap. They constitute an inspiriting challenge to the right kind of teacher. Altogether the highest sanitary average I have found in inspections of public-school buildings in some fifty cities was in a city in my own state where a teacher, having risen from a desk in the primary grade to the superintendency of the city schools, secured effective filtration for the polluted public water in each of the buildings; took all the toilets out of the basements, put in more windows and fully utilized them for ventilation as well as light; secured the laying of new hall floors and stairs; made floors, walls, windows, desks, and the farthest corner of the cellar an eloquent, even fascinating, exposition of the beauty and uses of cleanness, and elevated hygienic habits to a position of priority above everything else in the curriculum, tho in academic standing his schools rank equal to any in the state. True, there was the help of a non-political school board with women on it; but I almost regret to have to say that this wonderful superintendent is a man, and foreign born: Superintendent Phil Huber of Saginaw, West Side.

There is surely an inspiring call to every public-school teacher in America-whether at a city superintendent's desk or as head of the forlornest one-room country schoolhouse. As the school becomes the social center, so the teacher must become the social leader in those things which make for improved civic and domestic life. It is obviously the duty of training schools to bestow far more time and emphasis upon school planning and school housekeeping. Then, the properly informed and trained teacher will assuredly not take what is set before him (or her) in school plant and equipment, and ask no questions; nor fear to open a window under the

frown of an ignorant janitor. But then the janitors, too, will be trained to their highly important work. Teachers, and teachers' associations, will forever be proposing better things to parents and boards of education; and we will have the "model city" of childhood everywhere laying the foundations of the model cities which today have their blest foundations chiefly in our dreams.

EDUCATION FOR FREEDOM

CHARLES ZUEBLIN, PUBLICIST, BOSTON, MASS.

The legacy of the nineteenth century was threefold: industrial organization, the democratic spirit, and the cosmic sense. The nineteenth century was appropriately called by Alfred Russell Wallace "the wonderful century"; yet its greatest wonders were not its verities but its vistas. Modern industrial organization has multiplied creature comforts beyond the dream of earlier times; it has united workers on a scale before unknown, but it has not made them happy; it has tried to exploit science, but it has not become scientific. It has increased material wealth and sacrificed spiritual value by compelling uniformity.

The second factor in the heritage of today is the democratic spirit. This has not yet expressed itself so fully in liberty and fraternity as in equality. Despite the shameful extremes of luxury and poverty a superficial equality pervades contemporary life. Everybody reads; everybody travels; everybody does what everybody else does because everybody else is doing it. More people read than ever before in history. Most of them cannot yet want good things; hence the taste of the cultivated surrenders to the popular demand. Journalism is extravagant; fiction is journalistic; the drama is sensational. The democratic spirit holds latent the larger life. It is momentarily sacrificed to mediocrity. Audacity is required to rise above the commonplace.

It is just beginning to dawn upon us that an even greater factor than the democratic spirit for the life of tomorrow is the cosmic sense. The fifteenth century knew a great deal about the remote heavens and nothing about man. The nineteenth century has taught us about the man who is at hand, and thru knowledge of him we are beginning to get a vastly larger grasp of the universe. Philosophical, religious, and other speculations of the nineteenth century have steadily enlarged the bounds of human vision. Positivism, socialism, anarchism, new thought, Christian Science, theosophy, and pantheism-each suggests an endeavor to be all-inclusive, to present a vision of the fullness of life.

Education cannot be adequate unless it takes account of this threefold legacy, which indeed is rudely done in the familiar educational trinity: education for occupation, for citizenship, and for character. Mediæval culture is no longer sufficient. The college-entrance examinations will

not do as a standard of life. We cannot train free men and women for the functions of tomorrow by a system of education designed for sequestered monks nearly a thousand years ago. We shall use our industrial organization, democratic spirit, and cosmic sense in preparation for occupation, citizenship, and character when we give the pupil his trinity of creation, service, and harmony.

The child cannot be fitted for occupation in the ever-bigger world if we merely teach him a trade or a profession. He must have not only a dexterous hand and a trained eye, but the power of incorporating his imagination in the work of his hands. Most of us need fewer and better things; all of us will benefit by knowing how to make better if not fewer things, whether we make pottery or poetry. The pupil must be taught service that his occupation may have some other goal than money-making and that citizenship may be a serious accomplishment. Hence the school must be co-operative, not competitive. The examination that reveals the conventional mind of the teacher must be surrendered to the discovery of the unconventional mind of the child. The school must become a workshop and a playroom instead of a prison or a hospital. Training for character will be secured not so much by catechism and discipline as by the exposition of the meaning of harmony.

The whole nature of the child must expand by reaching out for the whole content of the universe. He must get a world-philosophy. He must come into harmony with nature, man, and God. He will reach nature thru science, man thru art, and God thru life. Science will mean to him not the laboratory but the world. He will live and learn and work out of doors. He will come into assured harmony with nature if he has health, taken in its whole meaning: physical, mental, and spiritual. Man is revealed by the work of his hands; the history of civilization is written in architecture. The pupil will come into harmony with God, not by theological instruction, but by entering into the universal and comprehensive, even if too young to grasp the riddle of the universe. He will not be content with the knowledge of his own accomplishments or those of others; he will desire to penetrate the mystery of the cosmos and discover the unity of all things.

Thus the heritage of the twentieth century will become the possession of all children, and they will be fitted in occupation, citizenship, and character to be conscious agents in the extension of the benefits of industrial organization, the democratic spirit, and the cosmic sense. Then we shall have a society of free men and free women.

THE TEACHING OF CIVICS IN ELEMENTARY AND
SECONDARY SCHOOLS

J. LYNN BARNARD, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND GOVERNMENT, SCHOOL OF PEDAGOGY, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

The term "civics," which the Century Dictionary inadequately defines as "the science of civil government," has come much into disrepute these latter days. And no wonder, when one thinks of the dry-as-dust stuff that has so long masqueraded under that name in public and private schools alike. The emphasis has usually been placed on the organization and legal powers of government, principally national, with no live discussion of what even the federal government really does, and still less as to state or local government. In fact, the pupil in the elementary school has been lucky if he has escaped penal servitude for one awful winter, while he memorized the federal Constitution. And when the secondary school was reached he probably received another indeterminate sentence in the form of an encounter with an appalling array of juiceless facts about how we are governed, sacredly removed from practical application and carefully smuggled in with an equally uninspiring survey of United States history. And was this utterly unpedagogical performance supposed to help make good citizens? Not at all! It was supposed to be education-discipline. Whatever it was, we are fast outgrowing it. And this leaves us free to fill up this fine old word "civics" with a splendid new content.

To do this intelligently, let us first ask ourselves, frankly, this question: Why are we teaching any subject whatever in the elementary or the secondary school? Is it for the sake of acquainting our pupils with a given number of facts, both new and strange? Is it with the forlorn hope of cultivating a so-called "faculty," or of instilling a special type of "mental discipline," or of imparting a new flavor of "culture"? Or, are we content to do the thing which Froebel told us to do, nearly a century ago, and which thoughtful parents are coming to demand of us as educators, namely, to acquaint the children with their varied environment during those impressionable years of childhood and early adolescence?

If the latter, how delightful our task! And all of us may contribute. Relationships of time and space, rightly developed, will make mathematics a feast-but most of the present textbooks will have to "go a-glimmering"! Similarly, the possibilities of self-expression thru language and literature will render the class in English a joy-but the "factative complement" and the "adverbial objective" will lie beyond the reach of Gabriel's bugle-call! And when the wonderful world of nature lying all about us is revealed to the enchanted eye and ear of the young explorer, who can picture his delight --but the bones of the human body will go uncataloged, and the Strait of Bab el Mandeb will connect Great Salt Lake with Puget Sound-for all the happy youngster knows or cares! And when, finally, children's eyes are

opened to their social environment-which in the cities and towns means well-paved streets, police and fire protection, schools, libraries, parks, and playgrounds-they will experience equal pleasure and uplift-but good old Uncle Sam's vigorous Constitution will no longer be solicitously inquired after: in fact, it will almost be forgotten that he has one!

If, then, we can agree that the immediate end of teaching boys and girls is to relate them to their environment, can we come into like agreement as to the ultimate end of all our teaching below college grade? Mr. Arthur W. Dunn, in the preface to his remarkable little textbook in civics, has given us the only answer that we shall dare to stand for. Says Mr. Dunn:

The function of the public school is to produce a good type of citizenship. There is no other sanction for the existence of the public school. The entire course of study and the whole round of school life should be directed to this end.

The very title of Mr. Dunn's book-The Community and the Citizen-is suggestive of the newer viewpoint. By "community" he means a group of people bound together by common interests and subject to common rules or laws. And any person, young or old, who shares in community benefits and is subject to community responsibilities is a "citizen." The home, the school, the church, the shop, the township, village, or city, the commonwealth, the nation-all are types of the community, and all who participate in the life of each community are its citizens.

Once the child comes to grasp this idea of citizenship in the large, he can easily be carried over to one particular type which we may term political citizenship, and the study of which we term civics. Somewhat crudely defined, civics is the study of man in his relation to his political environment -the state; and it includes both what the government does for him and what he may do in return, either individually or in organized groups.

Nature's gifts are free and unerring, while the community's gifts are the result of social sacrifice and are often blundering and faulty. Therefore, it is all the more important and difficult to teach the boy and girl to appraise these latter blessings rightly, and to be willing to contribute their share toward securing them. And we may add that one who is both willing and able so to contribute is the good citizen.

The qualities of good

But now comes the vital point of this paper. citizenship cannot come from a mere accumulation of dry and more or less unrelated facts, nor from abstract generalizing about these facts: they must arise from a live, intelligent interest, which can be cultivated only by direct contact with community action-by enriching and capitalizing the child's own social experience.

Let us now consider a fairly definite program, especially for the elementary school, where the foundations must be laid for a structure that is to take a lifetime in the building of it. And this carries us back to the great master-builder, Froebel, and that wonderful educational tool, the kindergarten. Here a splendid start is made in bringing the child into a