THE NEW GENERATION By ELLA FLAGG YOUNG PRESIDENT NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION TH HE great point with the educator is to discover the elements of strength in each child. His extreme weakness should also be searched out, not to use as a club to correct him, but in order to break it up. The best way to do that is by appealing to his best, not by criticising his worst. I have seen the hands of children fall almost mechanically on the rulers and pencils which the teacher was charging them not to touch. The situation to be met is to make the child think of what he can do, not what he cannot do. This new point of view of the teacher's duty makes the work of the classroom less wearing. Every child is to be made captain of his soul, instead of there being one conscience, and that the teacher's. You will see that with the new generation of teachers the corners of the mouth are turned up instead of down. NEAOGRAMS TEACHERS of America, go forth to your work of lifting humanity into finger touch with the Almighty, unawed by fear, unrestrained by pessimism, sustained by faith in the holiness of your mission, assured that you hold the strategic point in education, which ever must be the strategic point in civilization.-JAMES Y. JOYNER. IT T is against the men of prejudices that the fight for introducing our work of industrial training must be made. We must overcome the prejudice that culture is confined to the classical course at college. Some of the most cultured men I have ever known have been scientists, and some of the greatest boors have been teachers of Latin and Greek.-JAMES C. MONAGHAN. OUR present system of teaching has produced a luxuriant crop of spineless and animated nobodies in our country because our children are not taught to work. Clearness, distinctness and persistence in knowing and thinking are lost attributes in our methods of study and discipline.-JAMES M. GREENWOOD. IN N cities and large towns the summer vacation should be much reduced. This lengthening of the weekly school time has already begun in day schools which make much of manual training and industrial teaching, and the vacation schools, summer camps and summer sessions are making head against the evils of the long vacation.-CHARLES W. ELIOT. HE most interesting and vital topic for educators is the question as to whether the capacity acquired in one study can be transferred to another. It would seem from the experiments that have been observed that so far as the subject matter is concerned it cannot be transferred, but so far as capacity is dependant upon the method pursued in the study, it is transferable to a considerable extent to studies in which the same method is used. So far as it is concerned with the amount of intensive work put into a subject, the capacity acquired is transferable to an indefinite amount.-A. LAWRENCE LOWELL. COLLEGES with their narrow and false ideals of culture, with their ideas of educational values subject to direct utility, insist on their college methods in secondary schools and on filling the teaching positions in those schools with their own graduates and specialists. Their domination has reached a degree of intolerable impertinence. We are on the ground and know the needs of our pupils and are in a position to accept or reject suggestions from the colleges as may seem desirable. -SUPERINTENDENT C. P. CARY. THE AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL REVIEW VOL. XXXI AUGUST 1910 NO. 11 THE MONTH'S REVIEW WHAT EDUCATIONAL PEOPLE ARE DOING AND SAYING The forty-eighth annual convention of the National Education Association held The National Education Convention in Boston in July, bids fair to be chiefly remembered, first: for the election of a woman for the first time in the history of the organization as its president; and second, for the many denunciations of colleges for alleged inefficiency, for usurping the functions of the normal school in the training of teachers, for subserviency to the requirements of the Carnegie foundation, for arbitrarily establishing senseless entrance requirements, and thus forcing undesirable courses of study into high-school curricula, and for other sins of omission and commission which have been widely commented on in the columns of the press. Much editorial comment has been devoted to the election of Mrs. Ella Flagg Young as president of the Association. The Outlook considers this the most noteworthy feature of the convention, but says in comment: "The office was not given to Mrs. Young as a tribute to her rare powers, fitting as such a dis tinction would have been. Instead, this first woman president was put in only after a hard struggle in the course of which rather too much was made of her sex by over-zealous supporters." The result at any rate emphasizes the great advance that is being made by women in the educational field. The Boston Transcript thus editorially commented upon the result of the election: "It was a triumph for an element which desired a more democratic representation in the management, and also to some extent a victory for the women members, though a large proportion of the men helped them to achieve it. The conditions of the contest inclined the sympathies of the local public toward the choice that was made. The burdens of teaching are largely borne by the women of the country and the honors of the profession, in fair proportion, should also be theirs, when, as in this instance, they are worthy to wear them. The effect of the election of a woman upon the interests of this great association is yet to be shown, but it is the general belief that it will be healthy. We |