^.V EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION. 517 



The whole subject is still a dark and perplexing one, and we 

 must refrain from dogmatizing. It may, however, be contended 

 that the evidence on the whole supports the view that the general- 

 izing process is up to a certain and not very high point independ- 

 ent of language. That is to say, an animal unassisted by any sys- 

 tem of general signs may make a start along the path of compar- 

 ing its observations, resolving them into their constituents, and 

 separating out some of these as common qualities. Whether in 

 these nascent operations of thought there is some substitute for our 

 mechanism of signs, we do not know and perhaps never shall know. 

 However this be, they remain nascent processes never rising above 

 a certain level. The addition of some kind of sign which can be 

 used as a mark of common features or qualities seems to be indis- 

 pensable to any high degree of generalization, and to any elaborate 

 process of reasoning. It is the want of such signs, and not the 

 lack of the " power of abstraction," that keeps certain animals, for 

 example the dog, from being rational animals in as complete a 

 sense as a large number of our own species. — Nineteenth Century. 



AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION. 



By MARY ALLING ABER. 

 SECOND PAPER. 



ENGLEWOOD, III, is now a portion of the city of Chicago ; 

 but formerly it was a suburban town with an independent 

 school system. In October, 1886, Miss Frances MacChesney, a pri- 

 mary teacher in the Lewis School, obtained permission from her 

 principal. Miss Katherine Starr Kellogg, and her superintendent, 

 Mr. Orville T. Bright, to try some work on the lines wrought out 

 in the experiment made at Boston.* Her request was granted, 

 on condition that she would complete the grade work in the re- 

 quired time. 



At first nothing was attempted beyond the giving of simple 

 science lessons as bases for reading lessons. In these the children 

 were furnished with specimens, and led through their own obser- 

 vations to the acquisition of facts and ideas, which the children 

 expressed ; these expressions put upon the blackboards constituted 

 the reading matter, and were written in script or print on slips of 

 paper for further use. At this time Miss MacChesney herself 

 thought of the work mainly as a more interesting way of teaching 

 reading ; and, although the basal lessons were usually drawn from 

 Nature, little attention was paid to the quality and value of the 



* See this Monthly for January. 



