SCOUT leaders go through special courses in preparation. These captains are in a class at Great Hall, Edith Macy Training Camp, Westchester County, New York.

AND store the mind of youth with memories of beautiful ceremonies. Atlanta Scouts plant a tree at the scout rally in Macon. See Mrs. Rippin's article, "Girl Scouts in Schools."

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N IOWA Idea.-Waterloo is a thriving Iowa town of over 40,000 lively inhabitants. It is in a beautiful rolling country of pretty streams with green ribbons of forest on each bank, with tufts of woods on the crowns of the hills. The Cedar River runs through the middle of Waterloo; a handsome park is beside the stream. The Rotary Club, seeking to give a civic festival, hit upon the idea of a banquet to the teachers of the public, private, and parochial schools of the city. President Graham, of the club, is also president of a big department store, atop of which is a dining hall which seats a thousand. The Rotarians decorated it with flags and flowers, with brilliant branches of autumn leaves, and with the blue and gold wheels of Rotary. Thither went the men of the club and the men and women of the schools. A merrier, jollier, heartier company would be hard to find. There was singing: "America the Beautiful," "My Country," and, over and over, now by the men, now by the women, "School days, school days, dear old golden-rule days." There was a luscious dinner, piping hot, with ice cream at the end. Then came the toast: "Our Teachers," by Captain Sias, lawyer, scholar, wit: a gem of a speech. "There is no influence on the civic life of our city finer, cleaner, more lasting, than that which you men and women exert. The law recognizes the teacher in loco parentis. With the tender affection of a mother; with the ambitious hope of a father, you gentlemen and gentlewomen lead and guide in their plastic, formative ages, these

most precious treasures of our homes, the promising assets of the future, the hope of the world. You have created a trust and confidence in the hearts of our children which is carried to our firesides so that no man is foolhardy enough to attempt the losing game of trying to controvert what his child reports his teacher to have said. By your patience, by your skill, by your distinctly exalted aims, you have established and maintained our sincere respect. It is our duty and our privilege to say this to your faces and to express our obligation to you for honoring and brightening our assembly with your cheery presence. The applause from the Rotarians was loud and long. The two Waterloo superintendents, Charles Kline and Charles Kitrell responded for the teachers, each declaring his belief that nothing in the history of Waterloo had ever demonstrated more delightfully the fact that education is prized and respected by the solid citizens of the town. An imported school man patted hosts and guests upon the back. "This is a unique and gracious recognition of a group of civic servants than whom there are none so potent for keeping your municipal life clean and sweet. only are they the lighters of the lamps of learning, refinement, and culture within your walls, but they are the makers of your prosperity. Should I press these successful men who are hosts here and get the true answer to the question, 'What has brought your good fortune?' each would ultimately answer, 'My brains.' answer, 'My brains.' Who got you to use 'em? Who led you to store 'em with

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selected facts and principles such as the experience of generations has shown are of the most worth? Who gave you the tools of civilization: reading, which opens the door to the stored treasures of past and present; writing, the preserver of knowledge and the transmitter of it; mathematics, the measurer, the conserver of precision? Who gave you that without which each of you must needs spend a lifetime to gain what you luckily got in a short youth? Who has chiefly made your rapid progress possible? Teachers! Let them stop their service for a generation and this prosperous world of yours would grope in a black fog of ignorance. It is gracious of you publicly to honor them. It is fitting. They are worth it. Their exploits are marvelous. We cannot realize it fully, they have done their tasks so long and do them in such large numbers. But let any one of you attempt to take upon yourself the job of holding and advantaging forty wriggling boys and girls and you will realize the amazing skill these men and women exercise. They're worth all the praise and compliment you are bestowing. To express this to them makes their success the greater. Gratitude to teachers has not been overdone in the United States. Ridicule and contempt has come to them aplenty. From the days when vagabonds were good enough to put to teaching, through the period when any girl who wanted pin-money was accepted as instructor, we school folks have inherited a disregard which, even yet, at times, chills ambition and depletes success. But these men and women are not of the sort your fathers knew. In normal schools, in universities, nowhere more progressively than in your Iowa-patient and precise researchers have been perfecting a technic of teaching and imparting it to the young practitioners who come into our schools. There is a science of teaching how to read; there is a certainty of training how to figure; there is a sure and wasteless method of making an accurate speller; writing has its inevitable and economical acquirement; every subject of instruction is undergoing the process of

reduction to an exact process without guessing or blind hope. We are rapidly moving into an era in which a teacher can be none other than one who knows how to develop definitely required abilities in the learner and who knows that he positively knows how to do it. Already the percentages of successful practice are higher than those of the preacher, the lawyer, the doctor. It is only the persistence of the doubts and low regard of the last century that prevents universal recognition of the fact that the number of persons who are entitled to be recognized as having made their teaching an exact science, and therefore a profession, total into thousands.

"A supercilious and stupid ignorance shown by the general public, has delayed the progress of teaching as once it obstructed the perfection of medicine and surgery. Pasteur was ridiculed by the most noted men of science; Lister was a joke to the British surgeons, and we have in our own ranks our share of lazy and indifferent instructors who pooh-pooh at Horn and Thorndike and Gray and Judd and other asserters of the importance of specific details in training the youthful mind. But these men have the figures. Their doctrines are not guesses but facts. Where, still, unknowing school boards block the introduction of practices they do not understand, they can find enough teachers in a rut who praise their schoolboard's 'common sense.' But let such happy events as this of yours become common, such attention will be bestowed upon us, such a sense of the real importance of our calling will get into our consciousness, that the professional spirit which all our leaders are urging us to get will be indubitably advanced. The public admiration for nurses did so for their art. American sculpture and painting grows from the same cause. Aviation thrives under the adulation shown to flyers. Nelson drove himself forward with the vision of 'a peerage or Westminster Abbey.' We have such sense of the proprieties that we do not want to own up to a desire for praise. But honest recognition that our mission is respectable does really keep to