he may unlock every closed door upon his life's journey, to bring forth treasures new and old, for himself and for his community. From its portals a few climb to higher schools, offering larger opportunities and ampler returns; but many more turn at once to their tasks in the world's great workshop, carrying with them in their newly developed powers and freshly kindled aspirations-even more surely than in their actual attainments-the seeds of countless blessings to ripen as need shall arise.

CONCLUSION.

I believe, therefore, that the American High Schools are among the noblest of our public institutions. Every influence tending to withdraw support from them, or to weaken public confidence in their value, or to confuse the public mind as to the justice of maintaining them at public expense, is hostile to the best interests of all classes. They are the main reliance of the State in providing its future directive power. There are hands in plenty; but it is not hands that rule. It is brains, and education makes brains. The American people, in their unbounded freedom of thought and action, need the strong beneficent grasp of moral and intellectual culture. Therefore multiply the public High Schools, enrich their courses, and summon to them from every quarter the youth of the land. For in no other way can we so surely lay broad and deep and durable the foundations of true republican liberty and advanced civilization. "Remember," says Bacon, "that the learning of the few is despotism-the learning of the many is liberty; and that intelligent and principled liberty is fame, wisdom, and power."

RAY GREENE HULING.

HIGH SCHOOL,

NEW BEDFORd, Mass.

III.

THE FUNCTION OF LITERATURE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

The average citizen of this great republic is familiar with the statements that "the public school system is the bulwark of our American liberties," as well as "the palladium of our national existence." He has come to regard the public schools as possessing a sacrosanct character peculiarly their own. It is not surprising, therefore, that he is more disposed to construe any criticism of the system as a covert attack upon our popular institutions, than to inquire seriously into the justice, or the injustice, of the criticism itself.

And yet, side by side with this self-congratulatory estimate of the worth of the schools, there has existed, as far back as any of us care to remember, a widespread dissatisfaction with the schools and their work. We have been variously told that the reasons for this are to be found in the one-sidedness of the schools; in their lack of unity of aim; in their overcrowded curriculum; in the superficial quality of their instruction. Our educational censors have not been unmindful of the importance of their discoveries to the community, and as a remedy for these evils they have advocated from time to time the adoption of certain panaceas of their own. Many of these measures have secured a trial in the schools, but as in the end they proved to be but little more than mere changes in method, they have one and all failed conspicuously to allay the restless discontent which to-day is more pronounced than ever before.

But of late years other voices, preaching a different gospel, have been making themselves heard; thoughtful critics have arisen who are loudly protesting against existing standards. and methods. They tell us that our costly school systems are failing to do their proper work; that while our children are

to a great degree ignorant of what they ought to know, they have become accomplished in ways that are vain, and skilled in things that are worthless. In their protests against the present practice of the schools, which makes the end of education either purely intellectual, or else utilitarian, and the child little more than a mere recipient of knowledge, our courageous critics go even further, and tell us that it is character, not knowledge, that the school should ever keep in view in its work of education; that we are trying to make bricks without straw when we blindly attempt to make the good citizen without making first the good man. They remind us again of that which to-day so many of us have forgotten, that "the knowledge which is not woven into the life and conduct of man is so far from being wisdom that it is often an enemy of wisdom and an obstructor of wise counsel."

When the time has come that our people shall be forced to listen; when the Zeitgeist shall move them as but the other day it moved the German emperor to give utterance to the significant statement that hereafter greater attention must be given in the Prussian schools to the teaching of the German language and literature, then one of the most powerful instruments of regeneration will be restored to American schools in the proper study of our own vigorous English speech, with its noblest of literatures.

Already forces are at work that will at no distant day rescue the study of our vernacular language from shameful neglect, and give to it its rightful place in our elementary schools; and witnesses are not wanting to testify to the vigor and the reality of these forces. From across the sea have come the words of one of the wisest and most conservative of educational critics, Prof. Laurie, of Edinburgh, who thus sums up the whole case for the study of the English language and the teaching of its literature: "Whether we regard the discipline of intellect, the substance of morality and wisdom, or the growth of the distinctly spiritual life, language as a formal or logical study, as a real study, and as a literary or art study, is and must always be the supreme subject in the education of a human

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being, the center around which all other educational agencies ought to range themselves in due subordination."

Aside from its supreme importance as a training in language, the study of literature may be made for children the beginning of an acquaintanceship with the best and noblest thoughts of mankind. The Germans have a proverb to the. effect that whatever you wish to have appear in the life of a nation, you must first put into its schools. At present our schools can offer no better means of inculcating in the child a love for the noble, and a reverence for the good, than in the reading and the study of a literature which records the deeds of the one, and perpetuates the thoughts of the other. In tracing the close relationship which exists between the study of literature and the moral development of the child, Prof. Laurie has asked, "If we wish to train a boy in the true, or the good, or the beautiful, how are we to do it?" And he has answered his own question thus: "There is no way but by introducing him to the utterances of the wise and good on these questions, so vital to all, and a right answer to which alone makes humanity worth preserving. Through the perusal of literature alone can man enter into the possession of the hard won victories of the past, and make himself the fellow and companion of the greatest and noblest of his race, the prophets of all time."

The experience of mankind has proved that the possession of intelligence does not necessarily denote the coexistence of virtue; and more than once it has unpleasantly emphasized the fact, that a purely mental training often results in the production of an intellectual Frankenstein, a monster whose moral nature has been overshadowed and dwarfed by his intellectual qualities. This phase of one-sided development is met with not infrequently in our schools. The thoughtful teacher recognizes that of all the multifarious charges hurled against the schools, the accusation which merits the most serious attention is the one which declares that the State, in prac tice at least, has neglected to make adequate provision for the moral training of the children committed to its care.

With the question of teaching morals, per se, the present

paper is not concerned, beyond noting that, in the judgment of the writer, their formal teaching in the public schools would, like the formal teaching of patriotism, be barren in its influences and colorless in its results. Such has been the invariable consequence wherever the scheme has been tried, , notably so in the extended experiments carried on until recently in the colonial schools of Victoria. While deploring that in the present condition of public opinion the true solution of the difficulty seems as distant as ever, I am far from believing that our present condition is altogether hopeless. On the contrary, I am convinced that the school, by utilizing means already in its possession, can do much more effective work in the building of character than it is now doing; and not the least important agency for the performance of this great work will be found in the rehabilitation of that sorry and emasculated text-book, the modern school reader.

I am not of those who claim that in the reading and study of literature will be found the restoration of man's moral excellence, and the future regeneration of the world; yet, with Prof. Laurie, I believe that in the proper reading of literature by children we have the means not only of cultivating their taste and uplifting their imagination, but, what is vastly more important, of inculcating in them the precepts of morality, and of disposing their minds toward the contemplation of a higher and more spiritual life. This I conceive to be, to-day, the true function of literature in our elementary schools.

It has been amply demonstrated that the cultivation of the reading habit and the development of a correct literary taste in children may be commenced at a much earlier age than most teachers are prepared to admit, and that the foundation of such work can be profitably begun in the lower classes of our elementary schools. Fortunately neither the commencement nor the promotion of this important work will entail any radical change in existing methods, nor need it burden the already overladen backs of our teachers with more than they are carrying at present. The essence of the change consists simply in following the Biblical injunction of giving the child.