ple's college-the public high school-and in order to place the high school within reach of all the people and to broaden its work to meet the needs of all the people, more money must be invested in this phase of education than it has ever yet occurred to us to put into it, a large part of which cost must be lifted from the shoulders of local communities and borne by the general State government; (6) the industrial work which the country high school will undertake will necessarily be domestic science for the girls and agriculture for the boys.

The successful operation of such departments in the country schools will give to the country districts of our land women who know how to create comfortable, beautiful homes, and men who love the soil and know how to make it fruitfulmen who will carry to their work on the farm the same type of intelligence, industry, and skill that are to be found in other lines of successful labor. All labor will be skilled labor; all work will be honorable if it has brains to direct it, and the school will have become a positive agency in equipping people with strength for their daily duties.

A TEACHERS' ADVISORY COUNCIL.

SUPT. ARTHUR LEFEVER, DALLAS, TEXAS.

[NOTE. From monthly report of the public schools of Dallas, Texas, made by Supt. Arthur Lefevre, April, 1909. Action was immediately taken by the Board of Education in accordance with the recommendation.]

THE substitution of autocratic regulation for genuine organization in the professional life and work of teachers is the worst defect in the public school systems of the United States. In the large public school systems of this country each teacher, speaking generally, feels concerned for only one very small segment of the work of the schools. Not infrequently the lack of organized cöoperation between different parts of the system engenders suspicious, repellant, or antagonistic attitudes in those who ought to be co-workers. The consequences of this universal defect are not confined to poor results in studies, but appear in the moral atmosphere of the school.

There is not, within my knowledge, a public school system in the United States in which formal arrangement has been made for requiring and for considering the counsel of those who do the actual teaching, in determining plans for directing and controlling the work they perform. It would, therefore, be expedient to institute formally provisions for securing the advice of teachers, with the main purpose of engendering a free interest in the entire scope of their joint professional work sense of individual responsibility for intelligent

initivative.

Personal invitation by the Superintendent is not enough. No matter how sincere he may be in his personal efforts to stir up those charged with such a responsibility as the intellectual and moral development of children and adolescent youths, from thoughtless subjection to or dependence upon autocratic judgment and initiative, it is practically impossible to elicit the needed response in the individuals of a large body of teachers. It is true, that a genuine organizer of workers for any sort of spiritual results must have the power of communicating his own feeling for the dignity of individuality, and that sense of personal responsibility which is essential to true success in such work, but so inveterate is the conception of "the rank and file" in public school teachers, so new and unthought of is the idea of transforming passive ranks and files of toilers into truly organized individuals aroused for intelligent initiative and to personal responsibility for wise counsels, self-criticism, and self-control, that formal recognition by the supreme authority of the existence of such duties and opportunities is needed.

The Superintendent's invitation needs to be reinforced by suitable requirements by the Executive Board. Final decisions must remain with the Board and with the Superintendent, but every teacher should be led to understand that there is a regular way by which his judgment upon any existing or proposed arrangement affecting the work of the schools will be duly considered, and that counsel in such regards is not only welcome, but the expression of deliberate opinions is expected and imposed as a duty. Such conditions ought to be established in a formal and institutional manner.

I propose that a Teachers' Advisory Council be instituted,

the Council to be constituted of teachers in the schools for white children as follows: One representative elected by the teachers of each "grade" of the elementary schools; one representative elected by the faculty of each high school; two principals of elementary schools elected by the principals. This council should meet as occasions arise to hear all teachers who may desire to present their views, and the council should be required to file with the Secretary of the Board of Education on or before the first day of June each year such report as it may choose on matters concerning the elementary schools as a whole, addressed to the Superintendent, but to remain intact in the records of the Board and to be considered by the Board in connection with the reports and recommendations of the Superintendent.

I recommend the adoption of a rule requiring that the Teachers' Advisory Council be formed each year before the end of the third month in the manner and for the purposes described.

It is a vital point in my proposal that the advice from the teachers be filed intact in the records of the Board. Even in higher educational institutions, where faculty reports are always made, they frequently never reach the Executive Board, or reach the supreme authority so revised by the President as to misrepresent by distortion or by suppression their original purport.

I beg to assure you, that if you institute the procedure I propose, the Dallas Board of Education will set notable example, and one that may in due time spread abroad incalculable benefits. If the Executive Board of any system of public schools in this country has ever taken such action, I do not know it. Of course, it is even notorious that the "Chicago Teachers' Federation" is including among other demands the establishment of educational councils such as I advocate, but the dictatorial and belligerent manner in which those demands have been urged may lead to vicious use of privileges extorted by poltical force. Such an attitude and spirit are as abnoxious to true organization as the inert and stagnant conditions they replace. It is not privileges, but duties and opportunities of high service that I would have considered. It is to arouse individual consciousness of such duties and opportunities that I would have the teachers called upon for counsel.

The cause of the universal practice, in which one supposed expert dictates to hundreds of passive teachers, has been the necessity of centering the final power and responsibility in one man. Such final decision and power of control is a real necessity, but in the work of teaching the control ought not to be an arbitrary control of a passive rank and file, nor should decisions be without advice from those who are expected to perform the delicate work for which the entire system exists. John Stuart Mill has well said, "Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it be called."

Organization means spontaneous cöoperation in a natural spirit of responsibility for mutual support. Because financiering combinations have been successfully administered without being truly organized, it has been supposed that school systems could be prospered by like administration. But in this error it has been forgotten that a dividend was the simple object of the financiering combination, whereas a system of schools should be true organism (not mere combination), and its parts can subsist healthfully only in an atmosphere of confidence and fellowship and through mutual service. The work of schools requires for true success far more than the executive ability of an autocrat. A Superintendent of schools may easily make a test of his own fitness: do his opinions receive consideration for their merit, or must they always be backed by his authority?

[ABSTRACT OF PAPER.]

A MOTHER'S ESTIMATE OF THE KINDERGARTEN.

MRS. E. C. CRONK, COLUMBIA, S. C.

THE only thing which entitles me to the attention of this Association is a five-year-old boy.

I am not a kindergartener. I have been asked to speak from the view-point of a mother.

My language will likely betray me as an alien in your midst, for I know not your technical terms. But I come to you fresh from a daily (and oftimes a nightly) "point of contact" with the object of your study.

For bringing one face to face with the real issue there is nothing like constant association with a real, flesh-and-blood, five-year-old boy. As an exploder of beautiful (but only partially) true theories he stands unexcelled.

I used to have a great many beautiful theories. Now I have a five-year-old boy. The "poor-little-helpless-child" theory was one of the first ones to go up, consumed by the marvelous perseverance of a mite of humanity, who soon reduced the entire family to a state of unconscious subjection.

The very helplessness of a child invests him with a power which is a menace to future relationships.

One of the ablest physicians in Atlanta was delivering a lecture to baby's family on the evils of the "pacifier." The baby, who was on the doctor's lap, began to cry loudly. The doctor was so much interested in her theme that, unconsciously, she reached for the reviled "pacifier" tied around the baby's neck, and, sticking it between the two little lips opened in victorious confidence, she continued her warnings to the family. Meanwhile the "poor-little-helpless-baby," who had attained his own ends in his own way, contentedly sucked in bacteria.

So, we mothers find ourselves almost unconsciously doing the things that we would not.

As strong a plea to kindergarten as the helplessness of the child is the helplessness of the average mother who knows not how to make the most of the opportunity which has come to ber. Each day brings to me a stronger realization of my own. weakness and lack of wisdom and tact and a stronger desire for genuine help in training my boy for life.

Then there is the "plastic-clay" theory. You notice I speak of it in the past tense, so far as I am concerned. It has figured largely in Sunday school addresses and in poetic literature. It has a nice sentiment in it, and then it rhymes easily with "every day," "the proper way," etc.

One soon learns, however, that a boy is not mass of inert, unresisting material, just waiting to receive impressions of kindness, truthfulness, unselfishness, and kindred virtues, to be made in a single day and set back to dry over night.

So I found as the days went by that I did not know nearly as much about the proper training of a child as I had thought