The Eleventh Census came in a period of peculiarly intense and sensitive feeling regarding religious instruction. Marked manifestations of this feeling have attracted general attention, though some have considered them temporary and due to local causes.

Numerous special institutions are maintained for instruction in theology. Missionary and education societies in most of the great religious bodies look after the training of remote negro, Indian, and white children, contracting to give instruction for the state and utilizing appropriations from national and state treasuries with general readiness. When the ques

tion of religion in daily elementary instruction bears upon the citizen's own neighborhood, sharply defined differences of view develop, though some are indifferent to the religious question. Hebrews and many Christians look to the state for so-called secular instruction, and to the church to extend the religious training of home. The Hebrews have strong educational organizations in great cities, maintaining some technical schools, and to an extent requiring attendance at the public schools as a prerequisite for admission to the Hebrew schools.

The Sunday-school partly satisfies the demand for elementary religious training by the church, but very large numbers of Christian people regard it as inadequate. Some strong supporters of the common schools, demanding additional definite religious instruction, are content to have the children called together in confirmation classes, or brief parochial schools, at hours or on days or in weeks that will not interfere with attendance at public schools. Others desire to have religious instruction united with intellectual training and physical development in all school life. On this view are based permanent parochial schools, diocesan schools, synodical schools, and private schools under church auspices. Parochial schools, for the first time distinctively noted in a census, now closely equal all other private schools, for which latter the religious idea is also the strongest motive.

There is a confusion of law and practice in the United States in marked contrast with the British "Grant in Aid"

plan, under which a government allowance has been made to any school, showing that it was helpful in general education, without discriminating between Mohammedan, Brahmin, Episcopal, Scotch Presbyterian, or American missionary schools. This system is most closely paralleled in this country by the plan of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, whose grants are not based on religious tests, but upon the scholarly character of the work.

The northwestern states were deeply agitated in the Census year by the parochial school question, centering in Wisconsin, and national results are already manifest from a heated contest which needs to be studied without bias and with the respect for the convictions of others which we demand for

our own.

A decision of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, published early in 1890, treated the King James version of the Bible as a sectarian book, and granted a mandamus against a district to discontinue its use. A Nevada decision had been adverse to the Catholic version. The sacred books of other faiths are liable to a like judgment. The Mormon Bible would hardly receive judicial favor. There is a movement to secure an amendment to the national constitution prohibiting appropriations of public money for sectarian uses. The rigid enforcement of such an amendment might affect not only humble districts where religious exercises are conducted in harmony with the views of patrons united in one faith, but it might cut away the financial reliance of superior institutions in which there are religious exercises.

The adherents of a form of faith often constitute whole districts, and their teachers, when of the same faith, conduct religious exercises in the school without offense to the patrons, greatly increasing the popular estimate of the strength of certian church organizations.

In illustration we may take the Mormons. The secretary of the Church Board of Education made a detailed statement, showing ninety-six teachers and 5092 pupils in the church schools, small numbers to those who have counted public

schools, in certain states and territories, with Mormon pupils and Mormon teachers, as church schools. On a broader scale the same applies to schools known by other names. The school is permanent, its daily exercises suit the present patrons, and when "Gentiles," or other dissenters from the dominant faith, make a change in the patronage, religious exercises undergo more or less modification or are omitted.

The reports of the census year indicate that a constitutional amendment forbidding appropriations of public money to sectarian schools, combined with decisions that Bibles are sectarian books, would produce effects not yet measured. Enormous additions must be forthcoming from private sources in the relinquishment of public moneys if religious exercises are retained, or a change in numerous schools must be made if the public aid is continued, whether in the extremes of the country or at the seat of government.

The Board of Education of Massachusetts, in a report for 1890, recognizes a gain in private schools. Private school enrollment in other states as well as in Massachusetts has evidently grown at the expense of public school enrollment. The official school reports of the decade have been debating the completeness of the public school and the motives that prompt the establishment of private schools. It behooves us to treat the questions that arise with generous candor and to remember that neither a public school nor a private school in itself has any quality of influence which can be determined by its name.

There are useful private schools. The school system of the city has its office. The graded school of the town has its work. The log schoolhouse of the woods trains men. The sod house of the prairie makes its record of the best school in a Nebraska county in 1890, and inspires confidence in the builders who preferred to use sod houses rather than bond their districts, a refreshing reminder that the school financiering of the day is not all reckless.

WASHINGTON, D. C.

JAMES H. BLodgett.

V.
DISCUSSIONS.

THE NEW DEPARTMENT OF PEDAGOGY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

The establishment of courses for the instruction of teachers at Harvard University is another recognition of the necessity for trained teachers for secondary schools, and for the higher places in the public schools generally. It is not strange that the demand for such teachers has lately become more pronounced, and that the opinions upon which it is based have been urged with greater emphasis. Experience has proved that we have failed to achieve results which could reasonably be expected from the great general interest in education and the money expended upon it. One of the causes of these inadequate achievements is found in the meager professional equip ment of teachers and of influential school officers. We lack men whose professional attitude is rational and whose assumption of leadership in education is justified by a knowledge of principles. Men who, in addition to a liberal general training, possess professional culture and insight. We need more men who can and will study their work philosophically; who are fitted to be leaders because they are able to lead.

All higher schools for the training of teachers, and the establishment of departments for such training in the great educational centers, aim directly at developing such ability, so far as training can do it. In the same sense in which we can make men by education, we can make teachers. No training can, of course, make good native poverty of mind and heart. But no one doubts the effect of training upon persons capable of profiting by it. No doubt professional training of itself can never produce a finished artist. But it can and does develop a permanent professional attitude; it develops a thoughtful student of his profession and confirms that far-reaching and general interest in the study of mind and nature, of men and affairs, without which growth is impossible, and the intelligent solution of educational problems either very difficult and haphazard, or quite out of the question. Professional training

does this by making the learner distinctly conscious of his needs, his possibilities, and the means he may employ to realize his aspirations.

The study of any art naturally involves the recognition of its principles and processes. The courses offered at Harvard University, in 1891-92, to teachers, and to men who wish to become teachers, thus naturally fall into two groups. One group deals with the history and the theory of teaching, and the other group deals with management, supervision, and organization, and with the methods of teaching the several academic subjects, Greek, Latin, English, German, French, History, Mathematics (Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Elementary Analytical Geometry), Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology, Geology, Geography. The instruction in each of these courses is in charge of one or more of the instructors belonging to the corresponding department. Special requirements, designed to aid in securing the best results, are made of students taking these courses. The additional work thus required is especially determined for each course, but consists in general of prescribed attendance upon other college exercises, of conferences, of exercises suggested by the needs of the students, and of the observation of teaching in schools in the vicinity of the University, with reports of such observations. In addition to these courses, Professor William James will give twelve lectures on "Topics in Psychology of Interest to Teachers." All of these courses are “ open to men who are graduates of colleges, or scientific schools, or who are otherwise known to be of suitable age and attainments, under the same conditions as those which govern admission to the graduate school."

It will be noticed that the instruction of teachers at Harvard University differs from that offered elsewhere, among other things, in the extent to which students study methods of teaching the subjects of a high school or academic course of study, and observe, under direction, the actual teaching of those subjects. The same plan will also be followed, so far as possible, in teaching methods of management, supervision, and government. The tendency to mere imitation is controlled. by the courses in Psychology and the Theory of Teaching, which enable the student to realize the rational basis of the methods presented. The instruction throughout will be by lectures and discussions, with frequent opportunities for con

1