the apparent standstill. While the silk-worm in the chrysalis seems dormant, structural modifications are being made, which finally become manifest. So it is with the learner. When the cerebral modifications necessary to a higher way of grasping the subject are completed, measurable growth becomes manifest. The apparent lesson to teachers is that of the pressing necessity of consistent and painstaking effort as a means of realizing the potentiality of the individual. The tendency too often is to depend much on the selective activities of the child to determine the amount of work necessary to be done. Too much may be demanded of the child, but he can not get something worth having without corresponding effort. In short, it is supreme effort that educates. This paper was accompanied by charts, illustrating the "Curve of Educational Advancement." The paper showed the writer to be a keen observer and an original investigator. The second paper, "EFFECTS OF PHYSIOLOGICAL CHANGES ON CHILDREN'S ABILITIES," was read by John M. Culver, Indianapolis Manual Training School. Subject: Bodily Changes.-1. Development of nerve cells.-There is a gradual increase until eleven years, then there is rapid increase, followed by gradual increase until thirty-three years. 2. Variation in death rate differs for boys and girls. 3. Variation in ability to resist disease is greatest in the twelfth year for girls, and thirteenth for boys. 4. Variation in the growth in height. It is most rapid for girls at eleven and twelve; for boys at thirteen and fourteen. 5. Variation in the rate of growth in weight. It is most rapid for girls from twelve to thirteen. Children's abilities to reason as determined from a study of tests on common problems show the same variations between boys and girls as the variations in bodily changes. The paper was practical and well received. was the subject of a paper presented by Mrs. A. R. Hornbrook of Evansville. Among other interesting things she said: "Human conduct is motived by impulse and reason. Our educational system is the outcome of noble impulses. Certain opinions concerning the nature of the child and of his needs form premises of the reasonings which have led to our own present educational arrangements. It is a matter of encouragement that these opinions are to be replaced or re-inforced by the results of scientific observation and deduction. "The child study movement will improve the status of teachers by placing their occupation in the list of those which are based upon scientific research and insight. "Men and women of wider culture are thus attracted to the profession. It arouses the interest of parents and secures their co-operation. It creates a demand for teachers who have special professional knowledge and enthu siasm and secures a recognition of their services. The recognition of the various personal abilities and disabilities of children will result in more reasonable and better adjusted requirements for teachers' work on the part of parents and supervision. The sympathetic insight into child nature which results from child study and the more intelligent adaptation of work to the needs and abilities of pupils will sweeten and enliven the mental and moral atmosphere of our school-rooms. "The child study activity is one of those modern movements which are encouraging to all because they show that society is coming to a knowledge of what it needs and is trying to find a rational basis upon which to work towards its ideals of human perfection. It is an attempt to come into line with the eternal verities, for in dealing with child nature, the purest and most delicate material with which it ever works society is throwing away the pattern furnished by more or less distorted adult consciouness, and humbly, patiently and sympathetically trying to learn the Divine purpose working out in each individual child." "How CAN CHILD STUDY BE MADE MOST USEFUL TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER?" was discussed by Dr. W. L. Bryan, Vice-President State University. As Dr. Bryan came forward to speak he was greeted with hearty applause. He said: "In the twenty minutes that fall to me, I wish to suggest a few things which I hope may prove immediately practical. I shall, therefore, take no time to defend child study, or even to state my own faith in it. "If any one is yet unconscious of the necessity for child study, scientific and unscientific, I will make to him, at present, only the answer which Mr. Moody made the other day to a club of infidels who challenged him to a debate upon the merits of Christianity. Mr. Moody replied in substanceWhen tens of thousands are going down every week to the grave of the drunkard and the harlot, I have not time for disputation. If your club has some better gospel than mine for men, follow me into the slums.' "In like manner, I say, if any man has something better to propose for the saving of the children than to get accurately acquainted with them, set your proposition to work and may the blessing of Heaven be with you. I for one will want to be one of your disciples. "To-day, I have simply to propose two or three questions, which common sense and the progress of science show to be important and which an individual teacher or a group of teachers may use in the work of the school. "Let one of these questions be: Are the purely physical conditions in my school right? Is the heat right; just enough and even? Is the ventilation good? Are many of the children having colds and headaches? Does the school grow drowsy and stupid with the day? When you come back to school after dinner, does the air strike you as church air that has been kept sacredly since dedication day? If these things are not right, suppose you try this Have some bright, bad boy help save his own soul by keeping a temperature record several times a day for a week or so, and, if your wealthy superintendent will buy for you one of those little affairs for measuring the carbonic acid gas in the air, get a record of that also. If these records are unsatisfactory, have them framed and presented to the school board. If the school board will do nothing, the lives of the children will be upon their heads not yours. If an outcome of your attention to the matter is any degree of improvement in these conditions, the whole life of your school will be every way better. "The second question I have to propose is this: Does anything that I am doing in my school attack the nervous capital of the children? In dealing with the question, a few simple physiological facts should be knownthat every man has in his brain and spinal cord a bank, where the forces that build up life are constantly making deposits of force; every motion, every pulse beat, every thought helps spend that force; that the most important thing for any soul on this planet is that his account in that bank of nervous energy shall be on the right side of the ledger; that the greatest disaster which can happen to any one is the establishment of habits, which become sluice-ways for the waste of the precious capital of life and so far remediless bankruptcy. Now, what is going on in my school that may establish such habits? Do I fail to hold the reasonable attention of my pupils, and am I establishing in them the habit of mind wandering? Am I, on the other hand, one of those hypnotic teachers who keep the attention of the children with mesmeric intensity? Is it my pride to see and to show visitors how the little ones will wriggle and squirm with interest? Are the children catching my nervous habit, my restlessness, my noisiness, my sourness, or are they taking from me charms and graces that will bless men when I am dead or-married? "What is the effect of all the machinery I use to stimulate work-grades, the roll of honor and all that? What is the effect of all these things upon the few who are striving to be first? Does all this apparatus leave the majority untouched and overwork a few? Are there some who sit up late, drink tea to keep awake; have mother hold the spelling book? Read McClaren's 'A Broken Bow.' "Right here, I wish to express the wish that the superintendents would have a meeting for prayer and the confession of their sins. I have no time to discuss the matter, but I should like to put it thus: I am a superintendent. I have in charge twenty teachers. There is a great work for these teachers to do. There is no way to make that work easy and also good. The birth of a child through the school cannot come without travail. It costs life. But just because there is so much to do, and because these teachers have only mental power, let us consider well every requirement I make of them. My twenty teachers have just so much strength and no more. Let us save every ounce of that strength for real uses, as a general saves the strength of his soldiers for the battle. Let me bring my whole precious outfit of rules, regulations and reports together, and considering well, first, which of them are so really useful that they must be kept and which of them are mere flummery and vain glory, let ine offer them up in the office stove—a holy sacrifice before God. "The third and last question I propose is this: Do I know what my children are thinking about? No more important thing has been said in psychology in twenty-five years than what Mr. Dewey is now saying about the imagination. Mr. Dewey says that the stream of thought, percepts, memories, reasonings, what not, is in fact a stream of images. The most essential condition for speaking to any soul in the jury box, in the church pew, or in the school, is to know by sympathetic imagination the actual character and course of the imagery going on in that soul. To know the laws of the soul as Kant knew them with the understanding is excellent. But to know the ways of the soul as Shakespeare knew them with the imagination is to be an artist-master. I say, on psychological ground, that to have Riley's power to divine the child soul is worth more to a teacher than to know all the theoretical psychology, scientific or philosophic, in the world. "Now have you got the power in any degree? Do you know with any accuracy just how your children think about the things they are doing in school? How can you become better acquainted with them? "But of all be sure that you cannot come to be best acquainted with any child by any perfunctory process. You must want to get acquainted with them, with something of the same intensity that you want to get acquainted with your lover. ་་ But there are some devices. For one thing, you can learn a great deal from the children. Don't get over-vexed at mistakes. A mistake generally means that your stream of thought and the child's stream of thought are not just then moving the same way. A mistake is a revelation. Don't be overvexed. Con over the thing to see what the matter is. "What do the children remember? Mr. Clark, of Boston, asked about 2,000 children to write a little essay on what they remember and what they prefer of the last year readers. "In each of our State readers there are a good many selections which no child out of hundreds remembers. In most cases, these pieces that no child remembers moralize. They are very good in themselves, but for the children they are good for nothing. "Give the children every chance to do original work and consider well what they achieve. My colleague, Mr. Weatherly, is suggesting questions in history such as this: What reason have you to believe that the Indian ever lived in your country? Or, if you should find upon a desert island, a a cabin, a canoe and a broken arrow, what would you think of the people who had lived there? I have been suggesting this, that instead of reading to children the whole of a new story, read part of it and let them try to finish it. Let them in this manner, so far as possible, study literature, not to pick it to pieces but to create as the artists do, and then do you consider well what they can achieve. And let me say in passing, I believe this an excellent exercise for the teacher. "I have tried to make this talk as practical as possible by suggesting concrete questions for study. Short as my talk has been, you will probably not remember much of it. Forget it all if you please but this: If you are going to do any sort of child study that is worth while, you must have some wise question in your head. "A divine question is just as precious and just as hard to find as a gold mine. It is easy to get worthless questions, particular questions: What color is Johnny's hair? Or general questions: What is the nature of Johnny's intelligence? But to get questions that are both general and particular-questions that will make the Sphynx open her lips is not easy. Get some such question from whatever source, from science, or philosophy, or poetry, or from your own soul and live with it. When you have looked at the children for a year and a day, with a divine question in your eyes, the day will come when your eyes will be opened and in the face of the child you will see the face of God." In the discussion which followed these papers, Miss Belle Thomas, of Chicago, spoke enthusiastically on the subject, and urged that interest be taken in the association for child study, which is to be formed this afternoon. She said the School of Child Study of Illinois had done more for the education of Illinois than any other one thing. After a short recess, Supt. W. P. Shannon, of Greensburg, in a carefully prepared paper, discussed "NATURE STUDY IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS." Nature study cultivates the power of observation. It gratifies the child's curiosity. It makes friends of child and teacher. It improves the child's language. It makes geography and physiology less book studies. It gives real knowledge about nature. How shall we introduce nature study into the schools? Gradually, not all at once. R. Ellsworth Call, Superintendent of the Aurora schools, opened the discussion. In the course of his remarks he said: "It is assumed at the outset that Nature Study, in at least two of its forms, is now recognized as an essential part of the work of the elementary school. Just what part must be determined by the needs and opportunities of the various communities. "It is generally assumed as a principle of good pedagogy that no one should attempt to give instruction in subjects he does not himself know. Especially true is this in nature work. Not only should the teacher know the general subject far beyond the possible limits within which he is to give instruction, but the particular item for the lesson of the day or the week should be carefully thought out and developed. "I do not wish to seem controversial or to precipitate useless debate, but it does appear to me that the nature work outlined in the proposed uniform course of study for the schools of our State departs as widely as possible from what such a course should really provide. It can not be successfully pursued in Indiana schools. The course errs in assuming an amount of information in the teacher which our teachers do not and can not possess. It errs in the sequence and importance of the subjects selected. It errs in making uniform the work required, which must always be determined by the environments of the schools. Rather than being in any case specific, the work proposed should be the most general possible. For the most part its observational side, so far as gross structure and the unit relations are concerned, should have been more greatly emphasized. It does not answer the objections nor cancel the errors to say that the proposed course is suggestive rather than definitive; that it is not mandatory. If such be the position taken, the uniformity at which it professedly aims is not only not attained, but each instructor or supervisor becomes a judge of both matter and method and we had as well have no course at all. "Nature work should proceed along the simplest lines possible, and concern itself with intelligent study of common phenomena. "It should confine itself to a few only of the plants to be studied, and these should be carefully made the basis of work which may later assume definite shape in the child's mind and lead to independent observation. Nature work is not necessarily science. It is not classified knowledge. It is simply intelligent observation and carefully directed questioning. Ani "It is quite immaterial what particular line of work commences your course so long as that course begins with botanical matters as being facts within the ability of the child to see, and about which he can reason. mals should be last and least in the whole scheme of work. It is not because children know most about them that this course is urged, but because they know least. On motion of W. A. Bell, Mr. A. C. Shortridge, a charter member of the Association, and the first Superintendent of the Indianapolis schools, having paid his dues for forty-two years, was made a life honorary member of this association without dues. On motion of R. A. Ogg, of Greencastle, the President was instructed to send congratulatory telegrams to all the State Teachers' Associations now in session. Adjournment. WEDNESDAY EVENING, DEC. 30. The program opened with a vocal solo by Mrs. A. Van den Ende, of Columbus. The annual address was delivered by Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones of Chicago, "THE VALUE OF AN IDEA.” "Travelers in Wisconsin have named a towering barren rock, resting on a narrow ledge of sandstone, 'The Stand Rock.' Out of the center of this rock", said he, "there is growing a solitary pine tree, a tree that has grown very old in reaching a height of about four feet-a poor dwarf whose life has been a conflict and a battle. Poor little pine hunchback! Rain does not stop with you, but hurries on to the glades below. The heats of August have blistered you. Poor hermit, we sigh, fit symbol of many lives-of all lives." "Life is once and forever a struggle. The most important and the most difficult lesson of life to learn, is that everything has its price, that everything has its high price and that every best thing has its highest price. "The infinite never sells his wares below cost. He offers no chromos to tempt subscribers for the journal of knowledge. All worth is won by suff |
