By reason of these limitations we have not been able to provide proper teaching for some of the subjects. In certain grades we have been obliged to give all the musical instruction in assemblies. Formal gymnastics have also suffered on account of the overcrowding of the gymnasium. By reconstructing the program we can provide for classroom music in the departmental system; but I fear gymnastics will suffer in certain grades until our new gymnasium shall have been completed. EXPECTATIONS But if our limitations are annoying our expectations are correspondingly encouraging. Money has been appropriated for additional land and the erection of an annex to our present building. The new structure is to provide adequate quarters for the domestic arts department, including sewing, millinery, and cooking; also a forge, a foundry, a gymnasium, pools, showers, and a number of studios and academic classrooms. EVALUATIONS Manifestly the time has not arrived for an evaluation of the work of P. S. 45 under its new organization. In the first place, the school itself is only two years old; and any new school, gathering its teachers and pupils from many quarters, is relatively crude. Traditions must be established, standards set up, plans made, new teachers trained, a thousand details of organization perfected, before a new school can do its best work. P. S. 45 had been in existence but eighteen months when it was called upon to Garyize itself. Under the new régime it has worked four months. For a number of weeks after reorganization we had no sort of equipment for special activities. Structural changes were required in the shops, raw material, tools, and machinery had to be secured. For many months to come we shall have to limp along as best we may until our annex is completed. I estimate that it will be four years at least before a fair attempt can be made to measure the value of the new type of school. To undertake such a thing now is to imitate the child who plants a seed in the morning and digs it up at night to see whether it has sprouted. DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS JOSEPH S. TAYLOR III THE AMERICAN STATE UNIVERSITY1 In attempting today to follow from afar the usage which allots to the president of the year the pleasant honor of presenting an address at the opening of the Association's annual meeting, may I be excused or at least be dealt gently with, if instead of unfolding a definite topic I undertake to sweep together a wide variety of scattered and mostly commonplace items which taken in the mass may help to characterize the present status within its evolving fate of the American State University. It is an utterly unique type of educational institution, representing a crude blend of the American privately endowed college and the European state university in process of vigorous adjustment to the expansive needs and imagination of the central and western communities of the United States. As a stellar phenomenon it may well appear to the vision of the lay observer more as orbit than as matter, and seem likely unless subjected to frequent "surveys" to wander out of reach like some of the asteroids. It is far removed in machinery and temper from the European, say, e. g., the German state university. The latter, is shaped to the uses of the upper classes and is not, like the former, based upon the free public high school, but upon the fee-charging, aristocratic gymnasium. It does not include in its body the technological schools. It is a place of learned rendezvous, rather than a body of requirements and ordered curriculums. It knows nothing of prerequisites and units, and still less of credits for dramatics, physical culture, and dancing. It knows nothing of studious constraints distributed thru the years, but relies for formal test and spur solely upon the black cloud 1 President's address delivered before the National Association of State Universities at Berkeley, Cal., August 30, 1915. of thesis and examination impending from the end of the course. Even this affects scarcely more than one in four of the students, and he must pay a hundred dollars for the privilege of the risk. For each lecture course the student pays a fee to the professor and he is presumed to take such courses either for information and stimulus he hopes to gain or directly to prepare himself for the final examination. In the chilly facts of practise all this turns out far less ideal than it promises in sound, and European professors are often found wishing they might introduce some features of the American definiteness to relieve them of the wasteful idling which their system entails; but they find no place at which to begin without overturning all, and the benefits of their simplicity and freedom are too plain to set at risk. The plain fact is the two systems are so wide apart in manner and spirit as not to be comparable. For the initiation of our university scheme and type we borrowed much stimulus and some machinery from Europe, but we are well past borrowing now. In plain mechanism such as the equipment of laboratories and the handling of libraries and in practical devices for keeping large bodies of students at work we are now well ahead. If there is borrowing in the future it will proceed in the reversed direction, by Europe from America. But it is enough for our present purpose to note that the American state university is now a thoroly American institution shapen on American needs. Neither can it be denied that our older type of privately endowed universities is distinctly and thoroly American. These institutions have had indeed their roots longer in American soil. They have shared longer the vicissitudes of American life and history; they have longer memories. Their studies, their policy, and their method are less likely to correspond to the temporary enthusiasms of this or that recent period of the nation's experience. They are less disturbed by the dust-whirls of fad. It might indeed in argument be contended that they represent better than their counter-parts a cross section in time of the totality of American life. Be that as it may, it is presumable that the two types can never drift widely apart; they are naturally held together by the fact of their common service to American society; they are both engaged in educating young Americans. Should it, however, at any time grow to be the usage for the sons of the wealthy to attend prevailingly the privately endowed universities and to receive their preparation therefor prevailingly in expensive private schools, then the gap will widen rapidly and the privately endowed universities will render a great and very sad contribution to the development of a caste line within American society. Tho the two university types are today not widely differentiated they are apparently not approximating. One who has had occasion to pass as a teacher from one to the other has noted a marked difference in atmosphere, even tho he could not connect it with personnel of teachers or students or with specific methods or appliances. There are certain features which are bound to contribute regularly, even tho they are externals, to the differentiation of the state university. (a) There is first and foremost coeducation which always lends an air of painful dutifulness to the scene, as well as of gentle sentiment. (b) Then come the technical disciplines in engineering which help to raise standards of hard work and to crucify imagination. (c) Agriculture leaves the door open and lets the cold air in, and presenting a cheese or some other real thing as a thesis brings pain to the metaphysicians. (d) So long as religious worship is confused with religious theories we shall not be able to administer peaceably and hence profitably church or chapel in the state university. This is deplorable, but the loss we experience will probably soon be more than offset by the work which the different religious bodies thru our lack will be stimulated to do each for its own. (e) The emergence of compulsory military drill in the midst of a presumptively educational institution where otherwise everybody, except the president, does pretty much what he wants to, is really a blessing and a relief to teacher and taught. (f) The absence of a robust and frank tuition fee, such an one as would meet, for instance, one-half the cost of edu |