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OLTING THE HEADS.—Across the street and in good view from the window of this house in this quiet village is the salesman of a "general store." He fills a chair which, standing on its two hind legs, leans against a shady wall. shady wall. He has been there an hour without disturbance. If anyone wishes to buy anything this hired man will lead the way into the store, find the goods, wrap them, enter the sales in a book and will return to his comfortable and sanitary seat. He also serves who only sits and waits. He typifies the school man and woman of a few years back. Teachers were born, not made. Having been born there was no making obligated upon us schoolmasters. We went to school; we waited upon those who came to us. We gave them what they wanted. There was no Compulsory Attendance law. We shut shop at three o'clock. We were through. George Allen, one of the most charming Latin teachers I ever met, told me in 1897 that he had never, since he left college twenty-five years earlier, read any Latin book outside of school hours. The only Latin he read anywhere was the limited portions of Cæsar, Cicero, and Virgil which his classes had to have. He read those in the schoolhouse only as the children were reciting. In the same year I heard Truman J. Backus, President of the Packer Collegiate Institute, win almost universal handclapping from teachers for exclaiming: "I never have read a book on teaching in my life; thank God!"

Behold the change! There come to the office of this magazine and are turned over

to Professor Rose and his club of twenty reviewers 182 books a year devoted to the profession of teaching and supervision. In 1897 the number of principals and superintendents of my acquaintance whose reading of professional books amounted to the zero of Dr. Backus was notable. Now I don't know one who would dare confess to such a record. The school manager of the type who is satisfied to let the school run while he tilts in the chair seems to be disappearing.

There has been a violent jolt for some of us from the repeated insistence of book writers that school supervision means securing production. How much? How good? How does it compare with other school systems? How much better shall I make it next year? These are the questions forced upon us by the Thorndikes, Morrisons, Strayers, and Buckinghams who are training

our successors.

Readiness for September. This is the time to be thinking seriously about the Fall term. The first September meeting ought to be devoted to the high points of the superintendent's annual report. The contents of it have already been blocked out and much of it written by the efficient superintendent. There is little use of writing the traditional report. William H. Allen, in this magazine, more than twenty-five years ago, exposed the dreadful waste of a typical school report made up of statistics uninterpreted, financial bookkeeping of dead accounts, self-praise, generalities, and everything issued too late to affect the opening year. Benezet by

statistical measurements has proved that board members, citizens, and newspaper editors do not read school reports. Why bother with these people? Principals and supervisors will read an annual report if it is a definite statement of the accomplishments due to the work of them and the teachers, if it specifies plans for the coming year. Prepare it, therefore, with that intent. Finish it now. Put in the required statistics at the end as soon as the June tabulations are made up. Get it off the press by the end of July. Have it ready for those who use it by the time they come back. That's business. If you let it out, piece by piece, to the newspapers during the summer and release your most important message on the day schools open, the newspapers will give the schools ten times the space secured if you send the whole report to the editor at one time.

The war is over; the building program has caught up fairly well. The head man needs to get back to his function of supervising instruction. What is your standard? What schools need follow-up? What schools are above standard? Four squares apart are two schools serving the same sorts of children. The teachers are selected from the same list. One school is alive, productive, efficient. The other is obsolescent. What's the reason? The usual cause: the principals. One is a school master. He knows what the results of good teaching are. He knows how they are secured. His standards are well defined. His teachers know them. They know that he knows day by day how the business is running. The captain of the steamship, the superintendent of the hospital, cannot depise him. He knows that he knows.

The other has ossified his gray matter and is run by the base of his brain. He knows the attendance per cent and the tardiness. He knows that every class is supplied with a teacher. He keeps the school well stocked with supplies.

He is considerate of teachers, courteous to visitors. But he is of 1870. His theory that if teachers and children are present the world

will be served has been disproved by all the thousand measurements that have come to plague us good-natured school men during the last few years. the last few years. The proof of the pudding is not the cook's declaration, nor is it a report upon an inspection of the cook at work. We have reached a stage when Jim Rice's proposal of a generation ago—that a systematic appraisal be made of what the children can do-is an inevitable and essential duty of the head of a school system.

Compendium Wanted.-Henry Harap of the Cleveland School of Education wishes the REVIEW to keep alive the idea of an educational digest. Who got the best results in spelling? How did he get it? How many periods a week of how many minutes each were devoted to it? Nobody knows this except Mr. Horn of Iowa and the Lippincotts of Philadelphia. But Mr. Harap needs to know and so do I. Judge Righeimer can find out what the truth is about the powers of common councils to disestablish positions in the street-cleaning departments of cities. Doctor Dickinson can find what thyroid extract is likely to do to the overfat, but I don't know the effect of opening every Latin recitation with a ten minute written exercise. I think the effect would be excellent. That is the mushy basis upon which many opponents and advocates of junior colleges, visual instruction, and platoon schools argue themselves into a fever.

Dr. Harap writes to this REVIEW: "The editorial in February is admirable. Chemistry, metallurgy, medicine, law, architecture, agriculture, have their digests. Ours is now a pressing need. I wish I had a million dollars. I'd like to put it into a work of this sort."

The History Disease.-The famous attack on school histories in New York City which fizzled out badly was paralleled by one in Chicago. The newspapers were furnished much copy alleging indignities offered by school histories to the memory of Washington and the patriots. Fighters of Polish,

German, and Irish lineage were said to have been purposely slighted. The storm broke during an election campaign for the mayoralty. The superintendent of schools elected by board members appointed by Mayor Dever was charged with substituting a later edition of a school history in which President Washington's portrait was supplanted as frontispiece by a representation of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Deverites replied by showing that the change was made by the board appointed by Mayor Thompson on whose behalf the attack was started. This battle of the books may reach your school system. If so the reply of a committee of Chicago school people will suggest one line of defense. Facts appertaining to the matter are these:

1. Our Course is not Based on Textbooks.The law requires that the public schools shall teach patriotism, the principles of representative government as laid down in the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution, and the constitution of the State. The fundamental law of the territory from which these states were formed (the ordinance of 1787, certain of whose provisions are perpetual and have never been repealed) requires that schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged because they are the agencies whereby that knowledge which is necessary to good government shall be imparted. The purposes indicated in these instruments have been the accepted guides for the teaching of history in your schools for years. For more than a generation your schools have repudiated any teaching of history which depended upon the text-book as the main guide for instruction. On the contrary the official pronouncements of the Education Department have constituted and directed the teaching of history. Textbooks from the open market have, here as elsewhere, been available for selection and use by principals of schools, but the purposes and procedure in the teaching of history have been and are independent of the line followed by any particular author of any textbook.

2. Our Teaching is Preponderatingly Patriotic. -In the Annual Report, June 30, 1924, and in each subsequent Annual since then, these reports being official directions to the principals for the conduct of the schools, the patriotic purposes of public instruction, with quotations, bearing thereupon, taken from the national and state

documents above referred to have been repeated and emphasized. In the last syllabus for the teaching of history, the TOPICS which constitute the historical teaching of the Chicago schools are given in detail and the OBJECTIVES of this teaching emphasized: "Our social progress; our retual inheritance which has come down to us; sponsibility to conserve and improve the spiriunderstanding of the toils, privations, and sacrifices of those who have given us our legacy; ideals, civic control, and orderly progress; the real duties and responsibilities obligated by the rights and privileges of democracy; development of character by getting from pupils a response to the inspiring examples from the past; and training pupils to compare conflicting statements and to have respect for the opinion of others."

3. The New Course Still Further Escapes the Sort of Criticism Referred to.-As is shown in the last Annual Report of this Department the sixteen teachers whom you released from classroom duty for a complete revision and simplification of your courses of study, base all of their suggestions, content, and purposes of the various exercises in the school on community service as the main aim of public-school instruction. The purposes of public schools and of democratic government are identical. The new curriculum is based upon the officially defined aims of the Republic as laid down in the Declaration and in the Constitution.

4. Textbooks not the Controlling Factor.-For purposes of individual study by the pupils, your principals and your history teachers put into the children's hands such textbooks as are selected by a large committee of representative principals and teachers, such textbooks being chosen from such as are in print and commonly used in the best school systems of the country. That a committee of citizens should criticise textbooks used throughout the United States, some of which books are also in use in the Chicago Schools, shows an interest in the training of coming citizens, an interest not to be condemned. That the committee, however, failed to recommend any textbooks which meet with their approval, must leave school boards in various cities in some perplexity. But the fact that, in your Chicago public school system the textbook used has for years been a secondary matter, and the official syllabus in history has been the preponderating consideration, and the fact that the textbooks criticised were adopted precedent to your appointment as trustees of the public schools and have not until within a few weeks been subject to any criticism,