352 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 949 



measure, independent of the "regular" 

 schools. This unfortunate double system 

 of public schools was made necessary be- 

 cause of two relentless and irreconcilable 

 facts: namely, (1) the needs of the people; 

 and (2) the "conservatism" of the school- 

 men. 



In spite of the fact that the vocational 

 schools of Germany did bring education 

 and life nearer together for the working 

 classes, the children of the intellectual 

 classes continued their double existence in 

 the world and in the school respectively 

 until very recently. Day has, however, 

 now begun to dawn on the academic land- 

 scape, and efforts, which originated among 

 the teachers of science, are now being made 

 to establish some semblance of a relation- 

 ship between the school routine and the 

 daily lives of the pupils. The evils that 

 are being eliminated are over-systematiza- 

 tion, rigid uniformity and the belief that 

 words, signs and symbols can be made to 

 serve in the educational process in place of 

 concrete materials and real problems.- 



Many will doubtless recognize the sim- 

 ilarity between the experiences of Germany 

 and those through which this country is 

 now passing in the matter of bringing 

 school and life to have something in com- 

 mon besides the children themselves. The 

 needs of the masses for vocational schools 

 are only equaled by the needs of the pupils 

 in the regular schools for mental pabulum 

 that nourishes them and helps develop their 

 characters. Can you doubt this in the face 

 of trustworthy reports, like that of the City 

 Club of Chicago, which show that the pres- 

 ent public school system fails to reach more 

 than half of the school population ? If so, 

 study the statistics of elimination and re- 



' Ostwald, ' ' Wider das Schulelend, ' ' Leipzig, 

 1909; Gutzmer, "Die Tatigheit der Unterriohts- 

 kommission der Gesellsehaft deutscher Natur- 

 forseher imd Aerzte, ' ' Leipzig, 1908. 



tardation and be impressed by the enor- 

 mous annual waste in material resources 

 thus caused — the much more impressive 

 and disastrous waste in human resources 

 can never be calculated. 



In this state of Illinois, as you all know, 

 the crisis is imminent. The state legisla- 

 ture is considering a bill for the authoriza- 

 tion of a second independent system of 

 schools, intended in some measure to atone 

 for the shortcomings of the present public 

 schools. The chief argument in favor of 

 the proposed plan is that the schoolmen 

 who are now in control are both incompe- 

 tent and unwilling to reorganize their work 

 so as to meet the needs of that half of the 

 school population which is not benefited in 

 any marked degree by the present system. 

 In support of their argument, Germany is 

 held before us as a model, and we are urged 

 that, as it is in the Fatherland, so must it 

 be here. In other words, the incompetency 

 of the teachers in permitting the proven 

 inefficiency of the schools to continue is 

 condoned, and we are invited to authorize 

 additional expenditures on the ground that 

 others, not schoolmen, can succeed where 

 we have failed. 



"What would a captain of industry think 

 of an analogous proposition with regard to 

 his manufacturing plant? Suppose that a 

 plant and its employees wasted half of the 

 raw material supplied to it; would the 

 manager enlarge the plant and take on 

 more hands of a different sort in an en- 

 deavor to reclaim some part of the original 

 waste? Yet the idea is abroad that this 

 sort of a procedure, obviously absurd in an 

 industrial enterprise, is, nevertheless, justi- 

 fied in school practise. The basis for this 

 idea seems to be the fact that teachers are 

 supposed to be so conservative that they 

 are unwilling even to consider a new idea, 

 much less to adopt it. 



We teachers, naturally enough, repudi- 



