balancing on a single plank staging, they do look like men.

"Best of it is," added the visitor with enthusiasm, "they seem to work like men, judging by that ceiling which they have just painted."

"They do work like men," said the faculty member in charge. He was a contractor, painter, and civil engineer before becoming a member of the faculty. "My eighth graders were figuring with me only last week," said he, "that the boys have laid close to a ton of white lead in two and a half years."

In the wood-working department, boys, working with men students and instructors, have made the cooking-tables and cabinets needed in the domestic science department, the sanitary clothes-racks for all the hats and coats in the school, and the fifteen teachers' desks used in the building. They have taken up and relaid floors, have built partitions of wood and brick, have constructed and painted all the scenery and property for their plays and pageants.

Wood and metal working is taught by a practical man. He served as a journeyman, foreman, and contractor in both trades before his services were secured for the school.

The simple household repair department particularly interests parents. The

school had hardly opened last year when boys came from all directions pushing and pulling lawn mowers. A mechanic instructed the young men and boys how to put the machines in condition for late autumn and spring use. All dripping faucets on the premises have been repacked, window lights reset, screens stretched and painted, tinware soldered, chairs reseated, school furniture scraped and refinished, and many similar household repairs made in a businesslike way in the household repair department.

A washing-machine in the home of one of the boys was broken. The family was supported by his and the mother's efforts with the machine. He wheeled it to school and carried it back repaired.

One efficient expert said he was glad that our teachers were practical workmen fresh from the trades. fresh from the trades. "It means that their classes of young men are going out to put something like the real thing into school shops. The boys that these young men came in contact with in this school and elsewhere who become industrial workmen will not carry into the trades of their choice out of date, school-made methods that are outgrown and impossible to-day in the world's work."

Concrete walks were needed around the new building. A master mason became a temporary member of the faculty. Two

hundred dollars' worth of walks were laid under his direction. A master printer and bookbinder is a member of the faculty. Ten acres of hillside property have been recently added to the Normal School grounds. The upper portion demands. attention. It is overgrown with bushes and saplings. It promises interesting experience in simple forestry. Walls have already been moved, trees trimmed and transplanted. Several thousands of dollars' worth of grading is being done. A transit is in frequent use in getting levels and laying lines. Gardens, playgrounds, and an athletic field for the league teams are being laid out. A large greenhouse is being built. The young men and boys are doing this work by efficient, up-to-date methods under practical men long experienced in their various trades.

At the Practical Arts School, as in real life, books are supplementing, not supplanting, personal experiences. Instead of spending their time studying books, the boys are acquiring more permanent knowledge, first by reliving, then by reading and telling of, the activities of those whose experiences are worth knowing.

With tradesmen on the faculty and trade methods in the school, it would seem that the purpose of these tradelike experiences was to start boys in the trades, but the majority of the boys are going

to college. The same experiences that are helping some boys into trades are fitting others equally well for college and for later life.

The school stands squarely for a general rather than a special form of education for boys under sixteen years of age. Up to this age the chief aim is to teach boys, at first hand, of the world's work throbbing about them. At last, culture begins where culture used to stop, with a knowledge of the world-builders of the present, their vocations and their avocations, then works back through the pages of the past. The motto of the school is "to learn the living of the world of to-day."

No visitor at the Practical Arts School, since the first year's rush of satisfying immediate needs, ever leaves with an impression that we seek only to train muscles. More and more the mental activity of neighboring business is being brought into the school. More and more the boys are receiving practical guidance in applying their minds to the materials and methods of business, that they may develop industrial habits of mind.

Last year school men came with a prejudicial attitude toward the school. They had heard that it stood only for manual labor. Their impression was soon corrected. They happened on a class planning a drawing-board cabinet to

hold the hundred school-made drawingboards. Arguments among the boys over the arrangement of the boards, the size of the drawers, and the kind of joints were to the point. "They remind me of drummers arguing the advantages of their ideas over a rival's in the market," said one school man. "That was a worthwhile debate," said another. The difference between a boy's first scheme and the last plan finally arrived at by the class was a saving of four dollars' worth of material and fifteen feet of space to be occupied by the cabinet.

Until recently a member of the faculty owned a large farm. One afternoon in a drizzling rain I found the boys working merrily and measuring the inside of a two-horse cart. "They are finding the number of cubic feet in a cart load of dirt. They have timed the filling and moving of one load," explained the instructor. "Now, with their plots showing the necessary cut and fill in grading this lot, they are figuring how much it will cost to bring the new garden up to grade." This is the difference between the real arithmetic being done by the boys in every department and the text book unrealities of the ordinary school room. "It required twenty-nine minutes to dig and move thirty-two cubic feet. We know because we have just tried," said one of the boys.

"How long will it take to move that hill of 20,000 cubic yards?" In the text book this same problem would read, "If it takes twenty-nine minutes, etc." The imaginative "if" marks the difference between real business arithmetic and the make-believe problems of the text-books that are commonly used.

The greatest surprise to visitors is the zeal shown by the boys, more surprising, perhaps, because with but few exceptions no results of their work have have been carried home. Not long ago a friend of mine visited me. He noticed the enthusiasm shown by the boys in the draughting rooms and shops.

"Say, this is great," he said. "I have coached football and baseball teams and can understand their ginger for that sort of thing, but I never expected to find anything of the kind in school work other than athletics."

That night we talked over this spirited attitude shown by the boys. The boys appreciate a chance to live - especially the life that is going on around them. With us, as in athletics and real life, they strive for a definite goal in each job that they attack.

The making of designs, benches, business-like and critical writings is only an incidental product. A higher human product is the school's aim.

W

ISCONSIN, in a quarter of a century, has raised itself from a poor state to a rich one, has taken the lead in agriculture, and is setting the pace for the rest of the United States in the economic reforms which are the objects of all progressive politics to-day. It has accomplished these things without the aid of much of the newfashioned political machinery that elsewhere is regarded as essential to progress. It has never had the initiative and referendum, for instance, or the recall, or woman suffrage. But it has had the State University, through which alone among the states Wisconsin has applied the scientific method to legislation. The representatives of its people act in coöperation with the teachers of its people, and the legislature translates into statutes for the common welfare the results of the scientific investigations of the University faculty. And back of both legislature and University stand the people of Wisconsin, gaining knowledge from one and economic freedom from the other, each in a degree unknown in most other parts of America.

The first impression one gains at Madison is of the intimate connection between the State Capitol at one end of the city and the University at the other end. The second impression, that soon becomes a conviction, is of an institution of learning

that deals with the living present and the inevitable future instead of with the things of dead yesterdays; an institution, moreover, whose student body includes, besides the few thousands in daily attendance upon its lectures and classes at Madison, in some degree every individual of the two and a half million men, women, and children in the state.

I rode down to Milwaukee with Dr. Wayland Johnson Chase, associate professor of history. We were going to attend a dinner in celebration of the close of the year's work by the Milwaukee students in the University Extension Division. Several hundred of them, young mechanics employed in the great machine shops, salesmen and clerks from stores and business offices — workers who had never even seen the University buildings — turned out to express the appreciation they felt for the aid the University was giving them in solving the problem that bore directly upon their own lives and work.

"How on earth can you make history interesting to these people?" I asked Professor Chase.

"Because we try to teach history in terms of what is going to happen in Wisconsin day after to-morrow," was the reply. Wisconsin University is not yet entirely free from the ancient traditions of education for the sake of education. Nor does it neglect the so-called cultural