and teachers; and probably this is as far as any one can venture in this tragic business.' -Medical Journal and Record.

FEAR SUICIDE EPIDEMIC HAS SPREAD TO PUPILS

"With one student dead and a second recovering from a self-inflicted wound at the Palatine Hospital, the authorities of Cook County were alarmed to-day at the suicide epidemic which has swept through American colleges apparently spread to secondary schools.

"J. L. Marks, foreman for the Pennsylvania Railroad and father of Harold Marks, 17 years old, a pupil of the Lindbloom High School, who was found dead in the garage back of his home at 8517 South Hermitage Avenue, insisted that the tragedy was an accident.

"He had been shot over the left eye. A German rifle about seventy-five years old, which had been discharged, was lying across his chest. The father said the boy had become interested in military training and firearms and no doubt was experimenting with modern ammunition in the old rifle when he accidentally discharged it.

"The other youth is John Brasel, Jr., 18 years old, a senior at the Barrington High School, who stabbed himself three times after driving his father's car to the forest preserve two miles north of his home. He was found staggering along Rand Road at Northwest highway, three-quarters of a mile away, by classmates. He had recently been suspended from school and was worried

over his studies, according to his father, who is employed in the National Boiler Works at Barrington."-Chicago Journal.

Jones in the N. Y. Times

That general philosopher, Robinson G. Jones, who directs the public schools of Cleveland, Ohio, is no layman and doesn't belong here, but as this is the place for extracts from the lay periodicals here is where we note that the New York Times found itself printing two and a half columns of good talk by the Clevelander telling what public school service now-a-days is. Education, he says, is no longer intent on the form and content of learning. It seeks objectives. The business of education lays emphasis on duty, the duty of service, the duty of advancing civilization. Doing is the paramount thing. We learn to read, now, by doing things. As children grow older they are given more responsibility to run a great many activities which used to be the sole function of the teacher. There is an amazing amount of self-government, student councils, honor study halls and similar things. The schools are consciously giving exercises in self control, courage, honesty, loyalty, and responsibility.

School Uniforms

Complete regulation uniforms are required of every girl attending the San Diego, California, high school with the opening of the new school term.-School Board Journal.

To Mark or Not to Mark?

RATING PROBLEM IS ACUTE IN ENGLAND AS HERE A SUBSTITUTE SUGGESTED

Tradition dies as hard in the schools as elsewhere, and no tradition is clinging more tenaciously to life than that of assessing the value of a pupil's class and home work by means of a system of numerical marks.

A public school master has recently declared from the platform that he considers it possible that the whole of the mark system is false and harmful. This, says a writer in the London Times Educational Supplement, is a charge of the utmost gravity, and in view of the fact that throughout the country the mark system is being almost universally applied, it may be well to examine in some detail its virtues and its defects, and to inquire why tradition so persistently retains it to the exclusion of other systems of assessment.

POPULARITY EXPLAINED

The virtues of the mark system are its simplicity and its definiteness. Let ten marks be the maximum obtainable in a lesson; let there be in a term fifty lessons for which marks are given. At the end of the term nothing can be easier than to add up A's marks and, since he has gained 334, to place him above B, who has only gained 324; A takes the fifth place and B the sixth on the term's work.

If there is a terminal (final) examination. these positions may or may not be altered, but in any case it is possible, by adding together the term and the examination marks, to arrive at a definite final position, and to class A above B or B above A. The margin may be a small one between the two, but the figures declare it definite.

But is it possible to decide so definitely

between the merits of two boys in this manner? Does a difference of three, or thirty, or even three hundred marks declare A without doubt to be better than B? Are we safe in drawing any but general conclusions from numerical marks?

WHAT PRICE MARKS?

And if not, is a system which pretends to but cannot supply precision worth retaining? For the mark system though simple to handle, involves a great deal of time and energy on the part of those applying it. If one were to reckon up the minutes spent in allotting marks, in entering them in registers, in adding them at the end of the week and of the term a truly appalling total of hours would be discovered.

Were it possible to rely in any degree upon the accuracy of the impression conveyed by the results of all this labor no teacher would grudge it. But there is a reason to believe that the totals arrived at convey in most cases an inaccurate and in many a false impression.

Undoubtedly the most accurate results are to be obtained from standardized tests objectively marked. But, strangely enough, the authors of these tests are most insistent that their use can but furnish the teacher with an approximate result. They refuse to be tempted into a pretense of precision.

If, then, so much modesty is displayed as to the value of the results of standardized tests, how can unstandardized tests, subjectively marked, pretend to any degree of precision? Yet the vast majority of marks awarded in the schools of this country are awarded on unstandardized tests subjectively marked. It does not need funny stories of examiners' model answers marked by mistake and given low marks, nor of the same piece of Latin prose awarded 23 marks.

by one examiner and 81 by another to convince any thoughtful critic of the hollowness of such pretensions.

BEYOND MERE RATINGS

It is well known that there is much work done in school that cannot be marked and much of this is among the most valuable that is there performed. It is equally well known that there is much work done the worth of which it is impossible to appraise in marks yet for which marks have to be awarded. The English essay is a case in point. A method has yet to be devised which will deal fairly with the problem of marking oral work. It is impossible for marks to give any credit for energy or effort on the part of the pupil; nor can individual idiosyncrasies or relative values be taken into account.

All that a system of numerical marks can give is a rough and ready approximate estimate, based on limited and inadequate data, of a boy's progress.

A SUBSTITUTE PROPOSED

Trifles are very precious to children, and their scale of values is entirely different from that of an adult. In schools where a persistent mark system is established, they attach a great, an overwhelming importance to their marks. I have known a boy jump for joy because he obtained one mark more than in the previous lesson. That mark was for him the outward and visible sign of an inward and intellectual progress, though as a matter of cold fact it may have been due to nothing more than an improvement in the teacher's digestion.

The question remains, if marks are to be abandoned, what is to be put in their place? Let it be said at once that there is no system at present known to the human race that can assess with mathematical accuracy the value of a child's work in school. Any system which pretends to rank children in a list, first, second, third, is a fraud and a delusion; the work that would be necessary to complete one such list moderately free from suspicion would hardly be finished before the death from old age of the children concerned.

The best we can attain to is an approximation.

To place children in relative gradations is as far as we can with accuracy get. It is impossible to say that A is fifth in his form and B is sixth, and to have any faith in the placing; but it is moderately safe to say that A is in group one and M in group three, provided we are postulating only a very limited number of groups within the class. How many groups it is possible to establish is for research work to decide, but in all probability three, or, at the very outside, five is the limit.-Jacob Jackowitz in New York Sun.

The League of Nations and Traffic in Wo

men

A report issued by a special body of expert investigators appointed by the League of Nations on the international traffic in women and children reveals a condition of affairs which is a disgrace to modern civilization. The second part of the report, says the London Daily Mail, contains details of such a deplorable character that it has been considered advisable not to issue it to the general public, but to have it communicated privately to the different Governments.

When the latter have had time to digest its contents the League will make an effort to call a general conference and establish a convention whereby this ignoble trade, if not entirely wiped out, may be so regulated that it will be shorn of its worst evils.

According to the report South America is the worst offender, largely due to the facility with which it is possible for the traffickers to transport their human wares from one country to another. The danger is particularly present in the case of British cabaret and dancing girls, who, it is shown, are frequently taken out there on the strength of specious promises only to find on arrival that the establishments to which they have engaged themselves are nothing more than thinly camouflaged dens of vice, from which the victim seldom escapes.

Investigations in the Argentine, which is considered by traffickers as a sort of Gol

conda, revealed the fact that despite rigid police restrictions there is a constant stream of girls and women from Europe, the majority being Poles.

"They keep on going as if they expected to find gold in the streets," said one witness engaged in the traffic.

A vivid picture is given of the activities of one particular procurer in Europe who boasted of the number of girls he could secure on any night with the aid of his little car. He showed the ease with which dance-mad girls were procured at night clubs and cabarets, where they will "pick up with anybody who will treat them to a pretty dress."

Although the vigilance of the police and the passport authorities have closed the British ports against the international traffickers in women and girls, risks are still run by girls abroad.

The theatrical organizations work in close coöperation with the Foreign Office, and when there is any doubt as to the character of the employment offered to girls abroad visas are refused.

Mr. Monte Bayly, national organizer of the Variety Artists Federation, said to a Daily Mail reporter:

"These girls are engaged, perhaps in Paris, on a genuine contract at good salaries, and an agent of the traffickers offers them much higher terms to go to Malta or Portugal. Malta is one of the blackest spots in the world, and has been responsible for many girls being caught in the net of the white slave organization.

"When they arrive they find that they have to go to Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro. There they are among wealthy people with money to spend. They want clothes, which are bought by the management, and then a week or two later, having put themselves in pawn, they are thrown out of a job and handed over to the traffickers.

"Only this week a troup of fifteen girls had been lured from Paris to a South American city on the promise of payment of £13 a week. As soon as we heard of the engagement we tried to stop them, but it was too

late. The cabaret to which they have gone is the worst in that city and the consequences are inevitable.

"The greatest safeguard for the protection of the women and girls of this country is the passport system, and if a similar safeguard were in force in other countries the traffic would be wiped out."

This view is indorsed by the National Vigilance Association, an organization for the protection of women and girls. The secretary, F. Sempkins, said:

"This traffic could be stopped if consuls of other countries refused to give visas except after reference to the consul of the country of origin and the registration of theatrical agencies and managements were made compulsory in all countries."

Oxford Honors Whom She Once Expelled

An Associated Press correspondent sends this to American newspapers:

"Almost as many famous men have been expelled or quit Oxford University prematurely as have been graduated in the regular

manner.

"One who was expelled outright, a fellow called William Penn, later went to America and founded one of its most important States

Pennsylvania. Another, the Prince of Wales, who left prematurely at his parents' request, probably will be the King of England.

"Among those whom the university first disowned, and later claimed with pride, are Shelley, John Locke, Edward Gibbon and Walter Savage Landor. Among the crimes for which they were exiled were sedition, atheism, duel fighting and attempted manslaughter.

"The undergraduate career of Percy Bysshe Shelley is perhaps the best known. He entered Oxford in 1810 and lived for eleven months in rooms at University College. It was here that Shelley conceived and wrote his pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism,' which, on its publication, resulted in both Shelley and his friend, James Hogg, being instantly expelled in disgrace.

A Shelley memorial now occupies a large corner of the main quadrangle of University College. A copy of the very pamphlet on "The Necessity of Atheism,' for which he had originally been expelled, is on view at the Bodleian Library.

"William Penn entered Christ Church in 1661, and was promptly expelled for nonconformity. But now in the great dining hall of Christ Church hangs his portrait.

"Close by Penn's portrait hangs the portrait of John Locke, the famous philosopher, who was expelled soon after, in 1784, on charges of sedition against the government of Charles II.

"Walter Savage Landor, the author, was a student at Trinity College in the days following the American Revolution. And he was an ardent partisan of the revolutionary forces, to the disgust of Tory aristocrats in the college. He was an admirer of George Waton, and his earliest writings include an ode written to him.

"The climax of the young democrat's feud with his aristocrat neighbors came in

1793, when, as he said, an 'obnoxious Tory' was giving a dinner to a group of 'servitors and other raff.' In the midst of the dinner, Landor was overtaken with a burst of revolutionary ardor, and he attempted to conduct a little revolution of his own. Burnishing up an old pistol, he fired a series of shots across the hall at the door of the obnoxious Tory. Luckily the door was a stout one, and of English oak, so no fatalities resulted. Nevertheless, the college authorities expelled Landor from their midst immediately.

"Sir Richard Burton, later famous in English political life, was promptly dismissed in 1840 after attempting to fight a duel with one of his classmates.

"The Prince of Wales left Magdalen College prematurely rather at the instance of his royal parents than of the college authorities. But Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who entered Magdalen in 1752 at the age of 15, was expelled fourteen months later for joining the Roman Catholic Church.”

William Stevenson's brother left teaching early and went into the manufacture of furniture. Stevie holds the chair of manual training in a city high school. Brother has thousands of chairs made in his own factory. Therefore he owns a country seat on the shore of the lake north of town. He gave it to the Bibliologoi for their closing get-to-gether for the season. Stevie and Martin went up in the morning after gathering from the homes of each member hampers of good things. They brought a basket of books for the monthly raffle so that the Fall

program might be ready when we return to the Rose garden on the Boulevard.

In little clusters the Bibliologoi came up by the North-Shore trains. By four o'clock we were disposed under the trees on various perfections of the chairmaker's art, each guest according to the contours of his figure. The host and hostess announced themselves as hungry for book talk. So beneath an elm so lovely that the hardest-hearted woodman would spare it, Papa Rose stood up and said:

"To the gentlewoman and her handsome