EDITORIAL 429 



flavor (the chapter on manual training) and only a whisper regard- 

 ing efficiency in teaching. To-day, the 1914 report, gives about 

 eleven per cent, of its space to distinctly vocational matter, much 

 more to matter with vocational flavor and a conspicuous place to 

 methods of testing the efficiency of both the teacher and the school 

 system. Chapters on "Agricultural Education," "Education for 

 the Home," "Education for Child Nurture, etc.," "The Trend of 

 Civic Education," "Progress in Vocational Education," all make 

 one realize that public education is dealing more with materials 

 that touch the daily lives of the masses, less with many traditional 

 subjects. 



In no uncertain voice comes the demand that this change be 

 accelerated until the unproductive subject matter in the course of 

 study is replaced with that which meets present-day demands. 

 Note this excerpt from a recent address of the President of the 

 Board of Education of New York City. Thos. W. Churchill: 



"The core and centre of our public school teaching needs to be 

 completely changed. It was transported from a system which 

 proposed to fit children for a life of learned discourse, minute 

 scholarship and composition with the pen. The lineage comes 

 down as straight as the line of recorded live stock. But our boys 

 are headed straight for the store and the factory. The continua- 

 tion of our bookish, literary-centered course of study is therefore 

 absurd, unfair and an irreparable damage to those on whom it is 

 imposed. 



You must substitute for this beautiful but exotic culture, for 

 this over-emphasized grammar language, and literature, a prepara- 

 tion for successful mastery of the principles of industry and trade . 

 You must do it because it is a world of industry and trade in which 

 the men who are now children in the schools will live. You need a 

 grammar of machinery instead of the analysis of the parts of 

 speech. You need a mathematics of costs and losses, of con- 

 struction and estimate, instead of the Euclidean geometry of the 

 present course. You need a geography of resources, of products, of 

 lines of transportation in place of the unfunctioning study of that 

 name which is current in the schools to-day." 



One might suspect that this is the propaganda of an overz _ ealous 

 business man, biased in his educational opinions. But read this 

 from the pen of a professional educator, author and recognized 

 leader. It is quoted from the editorial in Journal of Educational 

 Psychology, Sept., igis, entitled "Fundamentals in Education." 



