to true manhood, which deserve especial attention in school. The first is prompt, cheerful obedience to rightful authority. This element is a foundation stone in character building, and in the progress and safety of society and government. Thou shalt is written on every page of nature, as well as in the Decalogue. The whole universe exists and moves in obedience to the laws of the Creator; and mankind, in physical, mental and moral growth, forms no exception. Obedience to Nature's laws yields success in every department of life; disobedience, failure. One would be in a pitiable condition who had no control of the motions of his body; much more is he to be pitied who has no control over his appetites and passions. He is unfit for any of the duties of life. The great tide of vice and crime rising all about us, is the result of slavery to passion, which constant law-making and an army of police cannot abate. Only the growth of a better manhood can, and it must begin in childhood. Therefore never should the teacher fail to secure prompt obedience. Any teacher who permits continued disobedience, disorder, or bad habits, is doing pupils a great wrong and making bad citizens. But ready, cheerful obedience is not best obtained by use of the rod. In extreme cases, fear of the rod may be the necessary beginning of wisdom, but love of the right casteth out fear, and is the only thing that makes a truly good child or citizen. If the teacher, by his own deportment, will make the child feel that he is a friend-that he really desires the pupil's welfare and happiness; that he knows what is best and will gladly help the pupil to it, there will be little difficulty in government. The aim of the teacher, however, should be, not merely to govern the pupil, but to make him self governing. A second element of growth is a habit of well-directed industry. God works, and he made all nature for work. Every atom in the universe has its appointed place and work. Every material good, every intellectual and moral good, he has placed within the reach of man; but if man gets it he must reach for it. Work, not drudgery, is the God-ordained means for developing manhood, and without it there is no excellence. It is one of the great blessings of life. The only way to obtain physical and intellectual strength and power to do, is by labor. The only way to obtain moral strength is by resisting evil and practicing virtue. Official statistics show that seven-eighths of the occupants of our prisons grew up in idleness, never gained industrious habits in youth. As the Hon. E. R. Willetts says: "Take the city boys off the streets, give them good work with appropriate reward, and the number in prison will be diminished one-half." But no child or man works willingly, nor will he do his best, without hope of reward. It is the duty of the teacher not only to give the pupil work, suitable in kind and quantity, but to set before him its double reward -personal discipline and applied value. In all study, pupils should keep as close to nature as possible. Nature is the original book; all others are mere transcripts and are only valuable as they lead us to the truth in nature, and assist in the study of it. Words, definitions, or rules that convey no meaning to the pupil are worse than useless. Abstract knowledge has little value. It is the knowledge of what to do joined with the power to do that the pupil needs. It is not the physician's knowledge alone, but his applied knowledge, his skill, that cures the patient. "No person can be called educated," says Whipple, "until he has organized his knowledge into faculty, and can wield it as a useful instrument." The teacher should study the pupil as thoroughly as the pupil should study the lesson, that he may know what kind of work is best for the pupil, and how much he can do and understand; not making it so hard as to discourage him, nor so easy that he has nothing to do. The school room should be a mental gymnasium requiring full exercise of the pupil's powers, not a playhouse. It is work that makes the man. The teacher may examine himself as well as the pupils when they do not find both interest and apparent value in their work. But a disgrace to the profession are they who merely keep school to draw pay; who have no love for childhood, no knowledge of the true work of a teacher; who cram pupils with indigestible rocks and chaff merely to keep them busy, or to make them pass, especially if accompanied with bitter words for sauce. No wonder pupils spew out such stuff as soon as possible, and hate school. Thousands of pupils leave school every year disgusted, nauseated, confirmed mental dyspeptics, and go through life diseased or mental dwarfs, robbed of their birthright, because of ill treatment. It is not true that children do not desire to learn. They are not only ready but eager to learn, and when suitable mental food is not given at home or school they go out into the highways and byways and eat, even though it be poison. This accounts for much of the evil in the world. If wholesome food is served with intelligent kindness at home and school, before children's appetites are spoiled with forbidden fruit, they will grow up in the way they ought, and when they are old they will not depart from it. The third element of growth is a loving spirit of helpfulness which supplements and makes useful all the others. "He went about doing good," is said of the great Master. This spirit is the crowning glory of character, the very essence of manfulness. In this spirit is no selfishness, dishonesty, oppression, crime, but the fruits are honesty, truthfulness, justice, peace, love, kindness, gentleness, goodness. Against such there is no law. And the teacher should be an example, a leader. A warm heart, a genial nature, an even temper, a beaming eye, a cheerful countenance, an earnest manner, supplemented by loving words and helpful deeds, are the potential agencies that can win and control pupils. Nowhere can this crowning virtue be more appropriately inculcated and practiced than in school among the children, nor with more lasting and beneficent effect. Place high in the school-room the motto: "I live for those who love me, Who know my spirit true, For the heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my spirit too; For all human ties that bind me, For the bright hopes which cheer me, And the good that I can do." When this shall be the teaching of home and school there will come a reign of "Peace on earth, good will to men," but not before. PSYCHIC STUDIES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. READ BY W. S. PERRY, ANN ARBOR. In the evolution of the modern school nothing of recent date has been so conspicuous and so assertive as psychology. The New Education, socalled, was hailed by thousands as the deliverer from the educational tread-mill, and waste of the past century, because its philosophy and its processes were based upon the everlasting laws of the human mind. Under its banner, education has seemed about to pass from a reign of distraction and empiricism to a reign of science and harmony. But the science of education has not been enthroned; and, although some progress has been made at a few educational centers, along the line of organization and courses of study, as a whole but slight impression has been made upon methods of instruction. The millenium of education is not yet in sight. To say that psychology has altogether failed of its mission in the schools. would be extravagant; but to say that it has borne its expected fruit would be the language of hyperbole. Some of the reasons for this state of things ought to be patent to students of educational systems and methods. And. first, it may be observed that the psychology and pedagogy prescribed for teachers by writers and lecturers of the period have mainly concerned the intellect to the neglect and distortion of character. Our schools are chiefly occupied with the movements of the intellect. One might suppose that American society has little use for a trained will and trained feelings, or, in other words, for a rounded character. The truth is but feebly recognized that the chief end of education is character building, and that character building is mainly will building. The children come to us with intense emotions, and untamed wills, which appeal to us for discipline, but we set them aside for the "word method" or Grube's numbers. Occasionally we repress emotions and will, and flatter ourselves that we are training them. But in education repression and training are antipodes. There seems to be ground for fear that the psychology most induential in the schools has begun at the wrong point of the child's development. It is certain that high aims and ideals can spring only from moral and religious motives, and if these be wanting in the school it will fail in its most vital function. How the word religion in connection with schools makes some of us shudder! Yes, the schools are prohibited by civil law from every form of ecclesiasticism, but they are more sternly forbidden by the constitution of the child-soul, as well as by the need of society, from being atheistic or morally agnostic. I venture the opinion that at this point we need a new deliverance of psychology, one that shall set character above mental agility, that shall seek power through a trained will and sensibilities. When this reversal of practice shall have been fully effected, there will result, we may believe, even a more rapid and complete intellectual progress than by the present order. Secondly, psychology has been studied too much from books, as a theory, with too little verification; too much by introspection, too little by observation. And it is to be feared that sometimes the teacher accepts the dictum of his author as better authority than even his own consciousness. A French psychologist (Ribot) utters a plain truth when he says: "One of two things is the case: either psychology is limited to interior observations, and these being individual it has no scientific value; or else it is extended to other men, it practices induction, it searches out laws, it reasons, and then it is susceptible of progress; but its methods are to a great extent objective. Interior observation alore is not sufficient for the weakest psychology.' Who can wonder at the failure of psychology in modifying school instruction, especially primary instruction, when in so many cases the instructor's knowledge of mind consists in a schedule of faculties and summaries of definitions? Or, when the more evident facts of the teacher's consciousness, in their bald literalness, are imputed to the children under his care? Admitting that introspection may establish some general laws of the adult mind, where can a passage way be found to the child mind? We cannot trace back our own mind biography into childhood. Probably many of us could duplicate the experience of E. E. Hale in not remembering the time when he could not read. If now the condition of a child's mind differs materially from that of an adult, as analogy with his body suggests and some signs of mental states confirm, the mental life of a child is to us a sealed book, unless it can be opened by observation. Apparently there is such a thing as knowing considerable about mind and very little about minds. The generic faculties may be studied, located in the mental geography, properly labeled, and laid away in the memory on the supposition that they represent a certain amount of pedagogical power. It does not require a vivid imagination to see how modern psychology, as often employed, may even lower the efficiency of both teacher and school. When the reading of a volume of psychology leaves the impression with the teacher that the subject has been exhausted, and, as in chemistry, all the simples and their combinations have been committed to memory, and that he carries with him a model with which every pupil's mind must be made to square as nearly as possible, that teacher will be more hampered than helped by his psychological acquisitions. Strange as it may seem, the very means we have used to extricate ourselves from perfunctory processes have resulted in fastening upon us a Pharisaic formalism, which is usually the end of intelligent progress. Superintendents have declared to me that the most conspicuous failures among their corps of teachers were often of those who laid some claim to normal training, and had read psychology. They know exactly how every section of a boy's brain operates, just what kind and how much mental pabulum to administer, and just what intellectual movement to expect under a given treatment. Every duty of both teacher and pupil has been provided for. But in all such mechanical schemes of pedagogy there is likely to be one weak spot. Too little account is taken of human nature --its chameleon possibilities. And in the practical business of the schoolroom the unexpected is what is very likely to happen. We are evidently passing the book stage of educational philosophy. We are reading largely upon the subject. We are cramming our minds with other people's opinions and elaborated theories. The psychologists who are doing our thinking for us are trying to shape out principles that we can use, are keeping up our courage and employing our energies by spring ing upon us on occasion some psychological novelty like apperception, which probably has wrapped up in its secret chambers some remarkable educational energy. That psychology is the only basis of a scientific pedagogy has been clearly perceived for at least a score of years; and we were content to look to the professional psychologist for an explanation of mental phenomena; but the present widespread demand for the article has developed a style of thinking in teachers, and of instruction before teachers, that comprehends. neither the methods nor ends of what is to be done. Our present danger springs from the trammels of formalism. The human mind more readily accepts symbols and formulas than it does the spiritual and real. It is so in science, so in religion, and we ought to have expected it in education. This may be the pioneer work that has to be done in every line of social development before the era of analysis and application of principles. We certainly cannot be content with what psychology is doing for education today. If it has exhausted its resources, if it cannot answer more of our questions, we must abandon it and strike out a new path, a path that may compel us to question anew our guiding doctrines, and to re-examine with greater diligence the phenomena that underlie our theories. Thus far in this discussion the assumption has been that the pedagogy accepted in the schools has been manufactured too remotely from its object, and has no direct application to the individual minds that are daily testing the teacher's power to teach. The tendency of all inductive science is to trace back to original factsto beginnings. The biologist will go to the embryo to begin his unraveling of the laws of life; the ethnologist will seek for the earliest typical races; the geologist bores the earth to find the first stratum and the law of deposits, and the philologist searches for the earliest root forms. In education the nursery should be the laboratory for the study of psychological beginnings, and similar methods should be continued during the earlier years of school life if we would discover the laws of a child's mental and physical growth, for the two are most intimately blended. Again, all great teachers have done their best work in closest contact with their pupils. Even the great Master would not have been the great teacher that he was without his complete individual knowledge of his pupils, and when he said, "I have many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now," he was as truly pedagogical as he was divine. Froebel's library contained no treatises on pedagogy or psychology of the present day type, but he was in daily touch with the most genuine psychological manifestations; and few would be rash enough to deny that he possessed an insight into child nature and needs far beyond most teachers of the present time. Second-hand knowledge of principles in any science is secondary in value. Theory may be got from books or the lecturer, but the practical, that which pilots effort to its largest results, will be wrought out by original investigation. Hence the reaction in our day from formal psychology to Fræbelism and the kindergarten. For the teacher, nothing is serviceable that does not well up from his own mental crucible, and the best material for his studies will be drawn from the mind phenomena amid which he lives. The science of teaching is not so far removed from other sciences as might at first appear. The physicist, the geologist, or the zoologist, |