355 lessons in unrelated mathematics and 1,135 lessons in Latin or a foreign language to every boy and girl. In this canvas of four years ago the 91 per cent., of respondents emphasized the duty of public schools to prepare men and particularly women voters, "to have an abiding consciousness of what it is right and proper for a citizen to be," "a habitual will to do what it is right and proper for a citizen to do." In the hearts of those four hundred and two superintendents and principals the Revolution had arrived. The Pennsylvania Commissioner of Education said, "unless the public school makes its chief business the support of democracy why should democracy support it?" The superintendent of the twenty-four New York City high schools said they ought to scrap their aims, their methods, and their organization and begin anew.

THE

CLINGING TO THE DEAD WOOD

HE school revolution, a century or so behind the political one, has to contend with the habit and affection of school men for their system. To save their faces teachers of Latin are giving a modern emphasis to it as one might show the advantage a chauffeur must derive from a study of Roman chariots. Exhibits to emphasize our debt to Roman civilization are hung up in the colleges. Motion picture films of classic stories are shown in the schools. Laborious lists of allusions to Addison, Shakespear, Scott, and Burke are collected to prove what essential preparation for life now-a-days these old worthies furnish. Through all this camouflage shines the old world purposes of education: leisure, mental discipline, scholarship, personal distinction. History, geography, composition, and science are put to a lesser strain to explain the introduction of more modernity. The history teacher and the composition teacher have admitted the periodical magazine alongside of the text-book because, as Jonathan Scott, university professor, remarks, "history is still making; and interest in past history is stimulated by the present." It seems to mean: "A new idea can't be right in itself. It must be justified by what we have always done."

This use of current periodicals in school has had a striking growth. In 1887 I heard a speaker in an educational convention say that in Dunfermline, Scotland, there was a class in magazine reading. No one at that meeting had ever seen a magazine in school, except a

smuggled one subject to seizure and confiscation. In 1920, the last time I saw statistics in the case, more than fifty one thousand class rooms were making a regular business of discussing the subjects brought to school between magazine covers.

A methodology of magazine study is springing up. I am afraid of it. Over again methods have ossified the original purpose of a study. If we don't take care we'll have magazine study as an object, not a means. If you are going to call this "Current Events" and stop there, you are nothing. It is Americanism we want.

In one particular the magazine text-book will offer resistance to the oldtime teacher's power to perpetuate dreary didactic. The periodical is different every month. This puts some check upon the deadly outline, analysis, and syllabus, dear to the heart of the pedagogue. Just as the army_regulations require the men to take the setting up exercises every day so as to keep fit, there ought to be a requirement that we teachers digest current thought, if only for our own mental health. If I run in a groove, travel in a rut, my American right to the pursuit of happiness is hampered. After I have taught the same books three years in succession they have cut grooves for later teaching. Our disinclination to talk shop, that is, school doings, is appalling. No other decent business is so silent about itself. But give me a daily taste of the work of the world, collected by men of experience in that service; give me frequent and regular statements of what is going on outside of my little school kingdom, and you end my isolation, level my ruts, enlarge my disposition, and make me no longer the petty person whom generations have ridiculed, but a fit member of society, able to hold my own in social intercourse.

and women away from home conceal the fact that they were teachers because the country had conceived of them as strangers to the concerns of other men. I resent being held in such isolation; I want to study and to teach what the live citizens around me are thinking about. I want to "know what is going on in the world." It is essential to my happy life. Unless teachers are given such study regularly as a school duty, so many of them will neglect it as soldiers omit the setting up drill when left to themselves. It is, therefore, essential to the mental tone of a teacher to be given regular rations of public opinion, gathered by trained editors, served appetizingly, prepared for people, not for schools, fresh, warm, but not, as many lessons are, cooked to a crisp.

That such a diet is needed by the children is plain to any one who will imagine what their duties as citizens will be. Their earliest and most impressive act will be the casting of a ballot. This will be a judgment on one side of a disputed question. The weakness of school preparation lies in the superabundance of settled matters. Slavery is ended; Columbus is dead; twice two is always the same. A news magazine confronts you with the unsettled questions of the time. It provokes thought, invites divergent opinion, cultivates courteous tolerance of differing minds, calls judgment into play.

INFLUENCE OF EARLY MAGAZINES

able to the eloquence of Athens in her most famous days. This was the means of spreading Americanism in 1760, and in 1860 and bids fair to be the means in 1960. This is the medium employed to create and spread the propaganda of socialism, of Bolshevism, of communism, of free silverism. There has not yet been invented any more competent means of enlightening public opinion, giving the knowledge useful in the practice of citizenship, qualifying society to discharge its duties, and informing citizens what is going on in the world, that they may help their part of it go on right. As these purposes are distinctly what Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and the others said public schools are for, the belief has come to the majority of school men that Americanism, as a preponderating, not an incidental, interest, must mark the work of the public school. A living, and therefore a changing, text book must be used to cover "what is going on in the world."

The whole regeneration of schools is hardly dependent entirely on the study of magazines. I have enlarged upon their use because it presents a measurable fact. The entire realization of the Revolution of 1776, which has lingered long outside of the school house, develops in the tendency of such superintendents as William Ettinger, of the New York City schools, to doubt the place of any study which can not be "saturated with Americanism." The Revolution's advance is indicated by recurring declarations of superintendents,

supremely desired result of schooling. But the public school's chief duty, the thing that justified its support at the expense of every one, whether he has any children or not, is that it should give us progress in Americanism, that is, in union, justice, tranquility, defense, general welfare, and liberty. It is vital to recall that the country was originally converted to Americanism by the periodic press. Samuel Adams in New England, Hamilton and Jay in New York, Franklin in the middle colonies, Jefferson in the South, Paine and Hopkinson everywhere, spread the sentiment for liberty first and then for union, and did it by periodicals. This silent oratory, as Coit Tyler terms it, was, he says, for enormous power compar

national defense, actually doing things for the general welfare, not merely writing essays and singing songs about it, knowing and practising American liberty which was never license but is always based on law and order, constitute the programme of such an American public school as will justify the expenditure of the common funds upon it. My brother's business, buying and selling, corrects itself every time a customer or a profit is lost. He doesn't need to bother much with aims. My business, schooling, always has tended to lose its aims in the formalities of its programme. I need to be held to account for a purpose and an output that conforms to the national theory: viz., American Citizens.

VOLUME XLIII

T

HE United States is enjoying the presence of an unprecedented number of distinguished foreign visitors, whom we welcome and delight to honor. Many of them have come officially upon the invitation of the President to the Washington Conference, and others have come of their own choice to see for themselves this Western people who have suddenly become the richest and most powerful in the world. They are all deeply interested to study this new figure, who henceforward must be counted in all calculations upon the balance of world power. They all wish to make acquaintances and friends here for future reference.

We, are, in short, the subjects of a searching examination by our European neighbors. It is as significant, in a way, that Mr. Punch, of London, has sent his political editor here to study our social structure as that Mr. Venizelos, the maker of modern Greece, has combined with his honeymoon a thorough tour of America, or that Mr. Lloyd George and M. Briand were anxious to leave the most exacting domestic concerns behind to engage in a conversation at Washington with our Mr. Hughes. The attitude of these rulers of Great Britain and France implies immediate important business with the very important Government of the United States. Foreign travel by premiers of leading powers has been as exceptional as similar excursions by Presidents of the United States and is as significant of the gravity of the business that occasions it.

But the coming of Mr. Punch and Mr. Venizelos is almost equally good evidence of an en

NUMBER 2

during change in the world. Their arrival means that Europe considers America as henceforth a permanent member of the society of nations. Europeans now feel that they must know us, not merely generically as Uncle Sam or the Young Giant of the West, but intimately, in every detail of life and motive and mood. Athens, Georgia, now has a tangible influence upon the concerns of Athens, Greece; and Mr. Venizelos is indulging his accustomed instinct for political realities when he takes the trouble to visit this country at this time.

Our visitors have come because they think our society is worth cultivating. They will certainly carry away a new knowledge of us, gained by conscious study. On our part, we should be glad of their coming, if only that it is a reminder to us that we shall be wise to imitate their sagacity. Every American who has an opportunity to talk with one of these visitors will by that much enrich the total store of American understanding of Europe. He will be by that much the better equipped to help form the intelligent public opinion regarding international affairs which must ultimately guide our Government upon its path in world politics. The Conference at Washington, the visits of distinguished guests, both are an unrivalled opportunity for Americans to become acquainted with their world neighbors. With this pleasant personal intercourse we shall have to cultivate the habit of hard and continuous study of their lives and motives and moods. We are members of the family now, and shall have to live with our relatives. It will make it a lot easier if we understand them.