participation on a wage-earning basis. Some day we shall in this connection.realize better than we do now the large possibilities of the "vestibule school" (a type which should not be refused public support solely because the best place for its location is in a building chiefly dedicated to industry or commerce).

14. Homemaking education.-Space does not here permit extended discussion of the possibilities of vocational education for homemaking. Widespread attempts are now being made to introduce this vocational education under the name "home economics" into upper grades and high schools. Where girls have had or can be induced to obtain a large amount of practical experience in their own homes, and if the school instruction is definitely correlated with such home experience, the net outcome will be a form of "vocational extension education" which may prove to be somewhat valuable for farmers' daughters and others not leaving the home to work for wages. But for the large majority of girls in our industrial and commercial cities, home economics education given at the ages from twelve to sixteen will probably produce little permanent power of "execution"; but it will, when properly organized, give rise to appreciations of a fairly definite sort, useful as foundations for subsequent training in skill and management.

But effective homemaking education-for the modal American home expecting three to five children, and operated without help of servants-can be given only when "motive" is ripe. If girls of from seventeen to twenty could look forward to acceptable wage-earning careers as household domestics, then the year (or possibly more) just before entry upon that calling would be the best time for definite, practical education for that form of homemaking service. A few girls at sixteen or eighteen years of ageonly daughters, or daughters with invalid mothers—can doubtless be found who will be effectually interested in preparing to take charge of the domestic work in their own homes. These two may be expected, in cities or suburban areas, to constitute a sufficient number to justify provision of practical training adapted to their needs.

But as regards the great majority of girls who serve some years as wage-earners apart from the home, it is doubtful whether

active motives for learning homemaking can be counted upon until after several years in the wage-earning career have passed, and the young woman has reason to anticipate the coming of conditions which will enable her to establish a home of her own. The years immediately preceding and immediately following marriage are, in the last analysis, the best for education in homemaking as a vocation. Of course existing social valuations-conventions, prejudices, fashions-are now opposed to programs having such education in view. But social valuations can readily be changed when sufficient leaders of ability see the light and are willing to spread it. There are many social forces now working in America toward the improvement of the home and the elevation of the vocation of homemaking.

THE RÔLE OF SOCIAL HEREDITY IN EDUCATION

WALTER ROBINSON SMITH

State Normal School, Emporia, Kansas

During the last two or three decades we have seen growing up two seemingly irreconcilable attitudes toward heredity. The theory of Weismann that acquired characteristics are not inheritable has been gaining general credence at the same time that eugenics has been formulated into a program. According to the accepted biological point of view acquired traits, either of weakness or strength, disease or health, boorishness or culture, unless they get into the germ plasm, which in general they seem not to do, cannot be perpetuated through organic heredity. According to the eugenic point of view the hope of speedy progress in civilization lies in guarding and guiding the hereditary factors entering into racial development. If the Weismannic dictum that the sort of lives we live has little effect on the organic inheritance we transmit to posterity, then the eugenic program can accomplish little without a more radical change in the processes of parental selection than the hardiest eugenicists have dared seriously to propose. Either the current biological views of heredity must be overthrown, or the eugenic crusaders must confine their hopes to the prevention of only a small, almost negligible, fraction of the most unfit from perpetuating their kind and the stimulus it provides the normal individual to cause him to pay attention to the laws of heredity.

If the eugenic crusade has done little else, however, it has stimulated interest in past achievements and has led to a better recognition of the debt we owe to our ancestors. It has paved the way for what Professor Conn has called "the other side of eugenics," that is, social heredity. If we cannot transmit to our descendants powerful physiques and giant minds, or new instincts, cultivated tastes and sentiments, or a thirst for scientific knowledge, we can at least transmit a social heritage which it is difficult if not impos

sible for them to escape. If we are not able to transmit mental and physical constitutions inherently superior to our own, we can transmit an exterior civilization as superior to the one we inherited as our cumulative efforts are able to make it. Any progress made in the arts, in science, in mechanical or economic processes, material contrivances, language, moral codes, government, etc., may be handed on ready-made to the rising generation for its permanent use. The social organism with all its forms and achievements constitutes an inheritance that should guarantee continuous progress, even though we are denied the boon of rapid advance through organic selection.

While the term social heredity has long been used and sociologists have understood something of its significance, it is only recently that attempts have been made to analyze its content and set forth its importance. Professor Conn's illuminating study has cleared the way. He has treated our social inheritance as a body of acquired traits in contradistinction to the natural traits obtained through organic heredity.

The chief factors which separate the European from the Bushman are not, then, in his innate, but in his acquired, characteristics. We do not mean by this that there are no innate differences between the Bushman and the European. The differences in inherited mental power of the two are perhaps great; but the chief differences between them, in adult life, are in the mental powers which each has acquired rather than in the mental attributes which each has inherited. Civilization is thus a heritage, handed down from father to child; but it is like property passed on from generation to generation, and not like that organic inheritance by which the parent transmits to his child the color of his hair, or his eyes, or his stature, or his mental power and moral sense. Organic heredity has produced the human animal, but social heredity has produced the modern social man.'

Professor Conn further contrasts human and animal evolution:

Human evolution has thus been a double one. The laws which had been at work for countless ages producing a world full of its numerous animals and plants produced also the first human animals with some points of strength and some of weakness. But among other features of this new production there were certain instincts that led to social life and to a spirit of self-sacrifice. These new characters in time brought to the front the force of social heredity

H. W. Conn, Social Heredity and Social Evolution, pp. 336, 337.

and a new era of evolution began, ending in the comparatively rapid evolution of civilization. This latter phase of the great sweep of the evolutionary processes of nature belongs to man alone, and has made him the unquestioned master of nature, the mastery having been given him by his own unique evolution, made possible by the utilization of the new phase of inheritance which has been called Social Heredity.'

While Professor Conn has made a valuable contribution to the study of social heredity, he has failed to make any clear distinction between the sociological and the psychological factors entering into it. He has treated the psychological and sociological aspects of man and of civilization indiscriminately. Approaching the subject from the biological standpoint he has accepted every superorganic element as a complex unity and has thus failed to organize his material into definite and usable form. In applying social heredity to education, therefore, it is necessary to get a more specific analysis of the factors concerned with our social heritage than he has given us or than is elsewhere extant.

As the child passes from the hereditary germ plasm to maturity he is shaped and molded mainly by three sets of forces, the organic, the psychic, and the social. The phenomena connected with these forces fall within the three realms of biology, psychology, and sociology. The impact of these forces and the importance of these phenomena vary with the age of the individual. We may say in general that during the prenatal period the dominating forces and phenomena are chiefly organic, during childhood they are largely psychic, and during youth they are pre-eminently social. It cannot be said that psychological and social elements are not concerned with conception, gestation, and birth, for the conditions and controls of all these things are determined to a large extent by the psychic attitudes and reactions of the parents and by social custom, law, economic sustenance, sanitation, and medical science. Neither can we say that the organic and social factors are not prominent in every element of childhood, nor that the biological and psychological factors are not highly important in controlling the youth as he approaches maturity. But in spite of the overlapping of these forces and phenomena there is a progressive trend

H. W. Conn, Social Heredity and Social Evolution, p. 339. .