TABLE IV. The present distribution, in per cents, of 3,246 students in thirty-eight city and town high schools, and of 1,257 students in thirtyeight rural high schools, in North Carolina, in 1908-1090. indicate per cents less than one.) (Blanks [ABSTRACT OF PAPER.] WHY THERE SHOULD BE DEFINITE STANDARDS FOR ENTRANCE UPON TEACHING. SUPT. C. L. COON, WILSON, N. C. It is not necessary in this presence to make an argument for trained teachers in our schools, or to show that trained teachers is the greatest single need of modern life. So far we are all agreed. But we immediately raise more tongues than confused the air around the tower of Babel when we begin to discuss how we shall secure only trained teachers for the children. Immediately we encounter the emotionalism which tells the public that teachers do more work for less pay than any other class. You would think to hear this plaintive wail that all society and the powers that be, together with all spirits good and bad, had banded together to keep teachers poor and humble, merely because they are teachers. For one, I do not believe society has anything serious against true teachers. There is a good reason why teachers' salaries are poor everywhere, which reason is the simple one that the great majority of those who teach are unskilled laborers. This is the economic fact at the bottom of this whole question. And teachers have it in their own hands to change the conditions which make them merely unskilled hired persons, when they get ready to do so. Those who favor any real measures to secure trained teachers are also met with another class of educational doctors. This class is also numerous and influential. They are our educational Scribes and Pharisees, who proclaim that the first place to begin educational reform is not upon themselves and their own Jerusalem, but upon John Smith and the dear Gentile people like him. These modern educational preachers of the duty of the public toward teachers tell us we must get the State and the local districts to vote higher taxes first, and that the good teachers will follow such action as day follows night. Yet all of us know that the great majority of the teachers who are employed in such favored localities are raw, inexperienced young women, who do not dream of teaching longer than a few years. High school taxes are at present no specific remedy for the untrained teacher, and what the untrained teacher stands for. You cannot eradicate the hookworm by administering health tonics, as was ignorantly done for years before Dr. Stiles discovered the disease and medical science prescribed the remedy, any more than you can, by plaintive wails about poorly paid teachers and small school funds, eradicate the disease of poor teaching. But how are we to secure trained teachers? I shall try to set forth the remedy in all simplicity. First of all, we must recognize that our educational conditions must be remedied, not primarily by appeals to the general public, though there is a place for such appeals, while we remain indifferent to our collective professional advancement and the professional preparation necessary to enter upon the work of teaching. We must go boldly about the task of our own improvement. We must say to those who will not mend their professional ways, "You must give place to the man who can do a better job." The man who had one talent and improved it not was separated from even that which he had. This is not a cruel law; it is the only path to real progress. In the work of remaking our profession, we shall necessarily have to provide some State standards for entrances upon teaching, instead of the local, unsatisfactory standards which now obtain everywhere. We shall have to protect the public from pedagogical incompetence and ourselves of the profession who desire betterment from those who would use it as a temporary means of making a living. Public policy demands this much of the true teachers of this day and generation. Upon whom will the public put the odium of not leading in this glorious work of the professional advancement of teaching, except upon the real teachers of the present? Can any one give one good reason why there should not be some definite standard of mental, moral, and professional qualification for entrance upon teaching, State-wide in its application? We all know what qualifications a candidate for medical practice must have; we know what a candidate for legal practice must meet in the way of qualifications. And, when a doctor or lawyer is licensed, he is a doctor or a lawyer everywhere in North Carolina, for all time, if he behaves him self as a decent citizen should. As matters now stand in North Carolina as to the making of teachers, we have some 200 Superintendents who have absolute control of the making of purely local public school teachers for terms of one and two years only. And behind these Superintendents are the School Boards who may unmake the Superintendents at intervals of one and two years. Can any one imagine a system more fruitful of confusion, more susceptible of the whims of popular ignorance or more destructive of professional pride? Because we have endured these ills for so long we imagine there is no remedy. But there is a sure remedy. The beginning to apply the remedy is to set some standard which all who would teach must meet. This standard must be State-wide in its application, and the control of its enforcement must be in the hands of real teachers. This standard will necessarily have to be progressive and graded, because we cannot now put the standard for all teachers as high as it should be on account of the very conditions I have been describing. But you say: "How will you raise the standard for teaching and make it definite, on the present low salaries?" If you will observe, you will find low salaries equally the rule for every trade in which the great majority of those who follow that trade are unskilled and unorganized. But what would happen were we to make all teachers skilled and then control the supply? Skilled workers always command good wages, unless they must compete with unskilled labor, which is the condition which now confronts every skilled worker among us -he must sell his skill in the market with the unskilled majority. And still do you doubt the result of making all teachers skilled workers in immortal stuff? Then, think a minute! The Lord of the earth makes every human being ignorant. This means that the demand for the teaching is as great as humanity itself. Now, suppose we control the supply of skilled teachers to meet this natural demand, have we not absolute control of the demand and the supply the two economic elements which determine the price of everything? I take it, therefore, that if we resolve that all teachers shall be skilled workers, this salary question will be the smallest problem we shall have to meet along the road which leads to the goal. [ABSTRACT OF PAPER.] WHAT EQUIPMENT SHOULD A CHILD HAVE AFTER TWO YEARS OF KINDERGARTEN EXPERIENCE? LAURA E. WHITNEY. "I AM old, so old, I can write a letter, My birthday lessons are done. The lambs play always, they know no better, They are only one times one!" In this stanza from Jean Ingelow's "Song of Seven," she puts into the mouth of the child an expression of his conscious awakening and longing for a more concentrated and self-directed manifestation of his inner life. All kindergarteners are familiar with these premonitions of the child's sense of power in the closing year of his kindergarten experience; his mind might be likened to a seed potent with possibilities; at first, under fostering conditions, it sends out seeking tendrils as delicate as a breath of life, and in the sunshine of sense stimulation and emotional reaction in self-active play experience. These wax strong and vigorous, and reach out and up in the effort to attain and conquer the beyond and unseen. With development of the child's imagination comes power to understand the abstract as well as the concrete, and work becomes desirable as the mind is able to image the result of work, and see the finished product in the crude material. Self-activity is from the earliest manifestations called into greater efficacy through the resistance of an opposing force, and just as the child's physical nature grows into co-ordinated strength, through the efforts and repeated struggles of the treeping and walking period, there comes a time when the child's mind begins to hunger for something beyond its unfolding power, and through experiences and associations (many of them difficult and hard), reason and the stable mental processes are attained. If the kindergarten could always keep a chart of each child's progress, as the trained nurse records the progress of her patient, what a wonderful revelation it would be at the |