One other general fact of historic significance the optimist knows as a basis of social education. Modern civilization is still firmly founded and maintained in power on the essential family unit. Stray individuals outside such unit, no matter how powerful, wealthy, or wise they may be, have little if any influence in propagating or maintaining the standards of our social organization. A young sturdy growing nation, history tells us, is one where this family unit was strong and fairly pure. With the decay of the family unit through disease, loss of religious enthusiasm, and lax educational methods, then, and then only, did the social and political power of the nation begin its downward course. The pessimist to-day sees the seeds of such decay eating like a cancer at the breast of America. But it is just here that the intelligent optimist takes his stand to do lusty battle. "The family is now just a place to eat and sleep"; "divorce rate has multiplied many fold in the last few years"; "tuberculosis and syphilis are eating out the heart of our family health"; these and other specific charges are hurled at the student of sociology.

The answers are simple and fairly conclusive. The average duration of life has been nearly doubled in the last two generations. The population of this country has increased many fold in the same time. Emancipation of woman has given her equality with the historically free male in political, economic, and religious life. Today woman is a free social agent and not dependent on matrimony and "mothering 'mothering" either as a career or as a means of livelihood. Despite all these facts of modern life, the American family and the social and political organization built and maintained upon it, is the very anchor of justice and social morality in the world to-day. The charges against the American family fall down as unproven. Every one of us can look about among our neighbors and point with pride, if we wish, to many foolish, immature, jazzcrazy youths and maids who have married, settled down to the raising of a family, and are as steady and peaceable and as ambitious

for that family as were the mothers and fathers of any previous generation. Such instances outnumber the social family wrecks familiar to us all in the daily papers by many, many times.

All of these generalizations are well known to the leaders and real students of education of these United States. But it is the actual working details of effective training for social betterment and moral adaptation to the environment of this high speed age, which are the uncertain and debatable educational questions. The social psychologist answers that, in education as in bodily growth, incoming sensory stimuli must be adequately discharged by motor nerve impulse and bodily activity. Thus all sorts and varieties of "working departments" have been built into our public educational institutions. Theoretically at least every young man who goes through the high school should have some familiarity with the trade or craft which attracts him. Every girl of the same social status should have had instruction in domestic science or some branch of office work if that suits her better. But the "crime wave and the jazz continue to attract this young generation with ever accelerating pace. The answer is not yet.

craze"

The "older generation" should remember that there are two phases in this "youth problem" which touch each one of us vitally. The first phase is within the family, where the direct social training begins and where the roughest corners are smoothed off and the rudest colors are somewhat softened. Here the Lordly Male leaves the problem pretty much up to the wife and mother. She in her turn pushes it on to the kindergarten and the graded school. The graded school finally passes the problem on to the high school or to the economic organization. The high school finally passes it on to the college and the university. This covers the first phase of the youth problem.

The second phase touches us vitally when we feel this young, peppy, jazzy, optimistic, enthusiastic generation pushing hard on our footsteps for the job we have been holding

down and considering as our very own, holding which, the world holds steady, losing which, the world, too, is lost. This is that younger generation which in turn irritates, angers, then maddens us. This is that younger generation which the Lord has thrust upon us to run the world when we are through. May He preserve His own! The prospect horrifies us! We cannot seem to see the wisdom or the sanity in allowing this "youth movement" to make the mistakes it is certainly headed for and into. It was different when we took up the burden the "Old Man"-God bless him!-laid upon us! We fail to see that we project the seasoned intelligence which we now are conscious of, back to cover the callow youth that stepped into OUR old man's shoes. In short, we haven't yet, with all life's experience behind us, gained a fair perspective of the inner purpose of the lessons the Good Lord laid upon us. We are conscious of the fact that we will continue to learn and drink eagerly of the fountain of knowledge to the very last breath. Only occasionally does it strike us that we may be the pathetic end of this educational problem.

It is most certainly true to-day, as always, that social betterment depends upon education. But if we think that educational leaders who are responsible for the job in America are asleep at the switch we do them a grave injustice. They are studying the problem and no detail of its solution is announced but it arouses a wave of enthusiasm or a storm of protest. Education is not static-it is electric, it is fluid, it is changing so fast that the school presses of the publishing end of the business of education are way behind on current production. It is definitely entered on the race to keep up with the mechanical and industrial advance of the economic and social order which it serves. It needs the helping hand that we of the Older Generation can give it.

There is one definite thing that we older ones could give to it in this world now grown so small and crowded. Most of us of any training realize the short-comings of the social order in which we move. We have an appetite already developed to know the truth about the other fellow and we want him to know the truth about us. What about the Russian and his thinking, back of his "doing," that so puzzles and disgusts us? We have no present way of knowing. What motives and what point of view are back of the peculiar things we observe, or believe we observe, in the Frenchman, the Englishman, the Irishman, to say nothing of the Africander and the heathen Chinee? All these are in a very peculiar sense to-day our neighbors, and to whom we must be neighborly if we would remain decent in our own eyes.

Here the present "older generation" needs to link hands, the business man, the scientist, the lawyer and the law giver, the farmer, the doctor, and the preacher with the wise leaders of education. We need such a union of modern social forces in the formation of a great international truthfinding body which shall be non-religious, non-political, and non-racial, pledged and devoted to securing real truth of humanitarian value the world over. To help finance such an organization would have first call on the resources of this same "older generation" outside of the primary support of the family unit. To secure the publications and the journal of such an organization we might well forego any number of the modern "speak-easy" magazines which we now patronize so liberally. To make such truthful world-wide reading matter available would be the greatest single gift we, of the generation which is passing, could make to the education of the younger generation which is coming so close behind.

-KINGSLEY

A

N ENDLESS line of children, chained one to the other, foot to foot, hand to hand: an endless line of weary children slowly moving along in monotonous lockstep that killed the joy in their young eyes and crushed the spirit in their young hearts: this was the vision that for thirty years tortured the great heart of Dr. Frederic Burk.

He died last year, broken down by a quarter century of ceaseless toil spent in grim determination to break the shackles from that long line of weary children. He lived and fought with little recognition; but now the world is slowly awakening to the value of the work he did. Some day, perhaps, it will lay on his grave the tributes it so withheld during his life.

Dr. Frederic Burk was a schoolman. The endless line of shackled childrenmillions upon millions-was the procession of weary boys and girls that have been doggedly marching through our public schools since the time those schools came into being that still march. "The Lockstep," he called it bitterly; and to-day that word has become the battle cry of his disciples.

It was when he became superintendent of schools in the little town of Santa Rosa, California, with his doctor's degree from Clark University newly hung above his fireplace, that he began his long fight. It started in the kindergarten. Indignant at the way little children were forced to fall into line, submit to their shackles and start on the weary march through the schools,

Doctor Burk abolished, with one sweep, all the mechanical drills, all the set lessons and gave them a chance to play. "Each child," he said, "is different. To drill them as we drill soldiers is to kill at birth all their wonderful possibilities and turn out an array of drab, defective little figures, each shorn of the one thing that makes him worth whilehis individuality."

And thus it was that he put into practice at Santa Rosa, some years before the world ever heard of Madam Montessori, the same. ideas that this country welcomed so enthusiastically when they came later from a foreign country. The world has gone further to-day than Madam Montessori went but the idea of play and freedom in the kindergarten was a lasting contribution to education. Doctor Burk went on.

The opening years of the twentieth century fround him president of the State Normal School at San Francisco, now a State Teachers' College. His duty was to train teachers but there was connected with the institution an elementary school of San Francisco, and here he began experiments that lasted twenty years—until his death.

"Break the Lockstep," was his watchword. He maintained that each child was different. He raged at the practice of herding forty of them into one room and making each one do the same work at the same speed. Some are very bright, some are very dull and the rest lie scattered along in between, endowed with varying degrees of brightness and dullness. He went further than this and, by careful tests, showed that

every child varied in the ease with which he could learn each of the various subjects; even varied from week to week in the ease with which he could master one subject.

It was not strange, this theory. We all like to do some things more than other things; and we know that others like things we dislike, and have an aversion toward things we care for. We also know that some days we can do a specific thing much more rapidly and better than we can do it other days. It is a matter of common sense.

Yet the schools did not seem to recognize this. Most of them do not recognize it yet. In the typical American class room there are forty children. Every child must study the same things, whether he is interested in them or not. Let us grant that this is as it should be, that he needs them all in life, though this might be open to question. But can we grant that it is right to force every child of the forty to go at exactly the same speed in every thing he studies? Is it right to make all of these children go through the same intellectual movements in precisely the same way?

"The Lockstep," Doctor Burk called it. We chain the bright child to the dull child, the fast to the slow, the quick to the dead. And so the procession moves on. The speed is too rapid for the slow children and not rapid enough for the bright. And what are the results? The slow children become hopelessly discouraged. They are not promoted; they clog up the schools and cost the taxpayers many millions of dollars. In some cities forty per cent. of the children in the elementary schools are these laggards. They usually get so disheartened that they drop out of school as soon as the law permits them.

What happens to the bright? Chained to the average and the dull they move far too slowly. They must go to their reading class day after day and listen to the duller children stumble over passages, when they have read the entire book before the end of the first week. They must go to arithmetic and listen again to things they have mastered a long time before. What wonder

they get tired and bored from it all? What wonder they get into mischief? It is usually the bright and active that are the trouble makers. What wonder they want to quit school and do something interesting?

Doctor Burk saw all this but for a long time he could find no remedy. He attacked bitterly the whole system, and so brilliant and sarcastic were his attacks that he made life-long enemies of many who could not look ahead. He was known up and down the Pacific coast as a destructive critic of all existing educational methods; his fame even spread over the continent. And then, about 1913, he stumbled on what he thought was a solution.

He developed it eagerly. It seemed to work. Children learned far more in far less time, even under the raw and inexperienced student teachers he had to use; they became interested and enthusiastic. Although his elementary school had about seven hundred children in it, not a single child dropped out from the time he got his system working until the day of his death. What was more remarkable, not a single child took more than eight years to finish the eight grades, and many finished in as few as five. All this, in spite of the fact that they were given more work in the regular studies, and more special studies, than is given in ninety-nine out of every hundred elementary schools in the United States.

At the time the exposition was held in San Francisco there came to visit his school Miss Parkhurst, who had much to do with the introduction into this country of the Montessori methods. Inspired by what she saw she devised what she called the Dalton Plan of teaching. After establishing a school in New York City and spreading the gospel to several other places she was called to England. What England thinks of the idea can be understood when we learn that there are now 2,000 English schools using it and a National Dalton Society which is every year influencing the establishment of hundreds more. Next Miss Parkhurst was called to Japan where a similar and nearly as sweeping adoption took place. Russia

followed suit and to-day every great European country is interested in the new idea.

Mr. Carleton Washburne, for some time a member of Doctor Burk's faculty, was called a few years back to become superintendent of schools at Winnetka. Here he developed the idea in a more practical way so that it could be used in a public-school system and now the Winnetka Plan has begun to draw the eyes of every educator in the land. A short time before his death Doctor Burk was told that the National Society for the Study of Education was going to devote its Yearbook to the study of Individual Instruction. He died knowing that soon, perhaps, the lockstep binding that endless line of weary, discouraged children, would be broken.

And how simple his idea was! "Let us abolish most classes," he said. Since each child was different he would treat him as an individual, not as a part of a chain gang. His procedure can be illustrated by using arithmetic. First he determined just what things a child should know when he finished the elementary schools. Then he divided this knowledge into eight parts, one for each grade with the simplest first, and so

on.

After this, the work of each grade was carefully organized into sections. Each section was simplified so that it became virtually self instructive. Instead of studying from books the child studied from mimeographed sheets which gave him instructions so minute that even the dullest could hardly go astray. There were many exercises for every principle taught.

As soon as the child finished one section he found out how much he knew by giving himself a little test which he found at the end of that section. If, as a result of this self-administered test, he found that he knew his work he went to the teacher and asked for a regular test. If he passed the regular test, he went on to the next section. There was no waiting on slow pupils. If he failed the regular test the teacher reprimanded him for applying for a test before he was prepared-he soon learned not to

ask for a test until he was ready—and sent him back with more work covering the same section. He did not repeat a year's work because he could not go as fast as others.

No one failed in Doctor Burk's school. Each worked at his own rate of speed. Many a child would do two years of arithmetic in one. When he needed help he went up to the teacher's desk and got it. The lockstep was broken. Every child had to get everything, of course, but he did it in his own way and at his own rate of speed. Astonishing things were found. Child number one might take over a year to get first-grade arithmetic but would rush through secondyear arithmetic in five months while child number two would reverse the procedure.

But no child took more than eight years. Most took seven and many less than seven. There was much criticism hurled at Doctor Burk. His opponents said class work was very valuable to the child. He granted this. He gave class work in the social studies like history, geography, etc. Actually he saved so much time in the tool studies like arithmetic, spelling, reading, writing, and the like that he was able to give his children far many more things like dramatics, civics, music, art, nature study, mechanical instruction, and elementary science than the ordinary school ever dreamed of giving.

He succeeded because he took his plan from life. The educational philosopher, John Dewey, says that education is not preparation for life, but is life itself. Doctor Burk made education life. In life we have work to do. When we finish one piece of work we do not wait on others but we go on to the next piece of work. So, Doctor Burk organized his school. In life those of us who cannot go as fast as others do not "fail." We simply keep working along at our own rate of speed and get there in the end. So, Doctor Burk organized his school. So, too, will all schools in the land be organized when people wake up to the grim tragedy of that endless line of children marching along hopelessly and wearily in lockstep.