The insistent demand of our people for an educational scheme co-extensive with their whole life, generous in amount, and adequate in kind, is in harmony with the demand of our government that both in public and in private life its citizens ungrudgingly sacrifice their inclinations, their property, and even their lives for the maintenance of American ideals.

The thrilling events of the last few years. have tremendously accelerated changes in our political and social life. State rights have given way to federalized, socialized control; labor has asserted and maintained its equal footing with capital, and a widespread spirit of degrading mammon worship has been succeeded by a rebirth of idealistic patriotism such as the world has seldom, if ever before witnessed.

As might be expected, the most efficient instrumentality of democracy, the public school, has not escaped the social pressure, but we are so immersed in absorbing tasks that we often fail to recognize the kaleidoscopic changes going on about us.

I refer briefly to a few of the educational changes in New York City made in response to the demand that the individual, of whatever age or status, may be free to fashion his career to meet both his own ideals and the demands of his country.

New York City is emphatically a city of realized visions, of dreams come true. For three years past, children in elementary and secondary schools have been given occupational experiences as a basis of self-determination. Other children have been working part time in industry and part time in school. Schools for wage-earners are open not only before and after school hours, but classes have been established in stores and factories.

Three years ago the elimination of pupils from the upper grades of our elementary schools and the demands of industry led to experiment with industrial education in the grades. Our controlling idea was that adolescent boys and girls standing on the threshold of industrial life should be grouped in pre-vocational schools in which they would receive in addition to instruction in formal subjects, such instruction and training in constructive activities as would develop aptitudes and abilities of distinct economic value. At present the opportunity to rotate term by term through various shops is afforded in seven schools to approximately 3,000 boys and girls in the seventh, eighth and ninth years. Through such experiences the pupils test their inclinations, discover their aptitudes, and glean an insight into the industrial and commercial world. The plan is essentially a protest against a bookish curriculum, assuming an identity of ability and social destination belied by everyday life. The occupational experiences are the basis of self-realization and self

determination, for to use Milton's words, the pupil has studied solid things as well as words and lexicons. Such work is the very essence of the development, stimulation and guidance of the life career motive, which comes to fruition in attendance at the various vocational or technical high schools of the city.

There are ten selected high schools in New York City that offer co-operative courses, in which 650 students of both sexes alternate weekly between high school and industry. A high school teacher, called co-ordinator, is selected by the high school principal to link up the work of the school and industry. Special progressive courses, based upon the charting of the business of the co-operating firm, have been arranged for each type of industry. These 650 students are in employment with 170 firms of the highest standing in various sub-divisions of manufacturing, commerce work, and transportation, which offer our high school students an opportunity to secure a combination of practical training and business. or industrial experience. During the past school year these students earned over $125,000. The co-operative course offers the solution of many of the perplexing problems in education, both vocational and cultural, and solves, in part, the problem of vocational guidance and placement.

A most interesting zone of educational expansion is that intended for children in employment still amenable to the compulsory education law, and that for adults of various types whether they be the man or woman of foreign birth, who feel the need of a knowledge of English speech and of institutional life to make them participating Americans, the man subject to the draft who wishes to perfect himself for admission to a technical branch of the service, or the man and woman in industry, commerce or municipal employment who wish to better themselves. Literally we provide for the waitress, the office boy, the salesgirl, the baker, the artisan, the shipbuilder and at the present time also the enlisted man. Indeed, this system of continuation work intended to supplement the service rendered by our evening school organization is designed to satisfy every type of educational need of the average earner.

In gen

eral, the classes are in session some time during the working day between the hours of 8 A. M: and 5 P. M. in school buildings, municipal offices, settlement houses, or the premises of the establishment in which the employee works.

These day continuation classes may be grouped into six types:—

Compulsory continuation classes require the attendance of working children who are nongraduates and less than sixteen years of age. During four hours per week these children attend instruction to insure general culture and

either prevocational or vocational training depending upon whether or not the pupils have found their vocation.

Industrial extension classes are practically are practically classes for apprentices in the skilled trades. The subjects taught are shop mathematics, related English, mechanical drawing and the mechanics of the industry. Thus 300 civilian apprentices are instructed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and smaller groups have been organized in the ship yards about New York harbor and in the yards of the Long Island and Baltimore & Ohio railroads.

Commercial extension classes have been organized in large commercial establishments and department stores for instruction in such subjects as stenography, typewriting, salesmanship, and merchandizing.

General improvement classes have been organized in department stores for junior employees less advanced than those in the preceding groups.

Improvement classes give instruction of secondary grade to students, such as civil service employees, whose working hours enable them to have free time in the late afternoon which they desire to use for self-improvement.

Other classes aim to Americanize the large number of foreigners in our city, as well as to educate in institutional life the newly enfranchised women voters.

Perhaps this last phase of the work has received the greatest publicity. New York City is the great entry port for immigration and is the great melting pot of the country. Because of its resident foreign groups, it is the largest Jewish city in the world, the second largest Italian city, and the third largest Russian city. Within our pupil population we include approximately sixty different nationalities and therefore the problem of benevolent assimilation is essentially the work of our public school system. The present war conditions, including the necessity of throttling German propaganda, have meant the extension and socialization of this work.

An educational program founded upon the life career motive does not imply a scheme of gross utilitarianism. There is no divorce between labor in this materialistic age. We must hold fast to our cultural heritage, but above all we must not fail to afford that equality of educational opportunity which is the fundamental thesis of democracy. Our ideal must be service rendered loyally and generously. There can be no conflict between the educational needs of our people and the demands of the government. To the extent that school systems are responsive to and co-extensive with the fondest hopes and the highest aspirations of the people, they constitute a bulwark against which no libertykilling militarism can ever prevail.

JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE

BY GEORGE PERRY MORRIS

When, in 1882, Mr. Munroe, at the age of twenty, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, he did not even imagine that in 1918 he would be a resident of Washington in a post of high importance in education and civics. He had been born and brought up in historic Lexington, where his family had been as prominently identified with the community as the Adams's with the town of Quincy. Traditions of the Revolutionary War were part of his education, for was not he a neighbor of the renowned Munroe's Tavern, and did not he live in "a house by the side of the road" along which the British marched out to Concord and along which they returned beaten? However, it was not past or coming wars or hopes of public office that the young Tech graduate then thought about. He had won a technical training that he knew would prove and has since proved useful to him as a successful manufacturer and business man, and

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what the newer and less traditional form education had done for him he wished to make accessible to other youth. Hence followed a chapter of personal devotion and official sponsibility to the Institute of Technology quite extraordinary when its length and the variety of its forms are considered. He was secretary of the faculty for seven years. He edited the school's monthly journal for nine years. Thrice was he chosen president of the alumni association. In 1897 he was added to the corporation which governs the institution, and he has and he has been its secretary since 1909. He has seen Presidents Walker and Pritchett go and Presidents Pritchett and Maclaurin come upon the scene. Few if any men know as well as he the history of the evolution of the great school that now adorns the banks of the Charles and that rivals Harvard University as one of the sights of Cambridge-an institution that since the began has been as much of a national institution as West Point or Annapolis, and that, formally and informally, openly and secretly, has

done much to match Uncle Sam against Germany's combination of militarism and applied science.

Mr. Munroe early in his career disclosed yet another side of his character that now is getting fullest expression. Lexington has civic as well as military traditions. Its old families have worked the town-meeting form of democracy for generations. The men it rears go forth trained to do things politically and as live units in a democracy. Consequently, you find that this Lexington man has served on the town school committee, that he has been chairman of the state commission for the blind, that he has shared conspicuously in planning for and carrying out civic-uplift plans in Boston, and that he has been an adviser and worker in many of its important civic agencies, like the Chamber of Commerce and the City Club.

was,

Here the story might close, if it were ail, and the record would be such as most men would envy. But it is not all. Years ago Mr. Munroe became the propagandist for a more utilitarian, democratic and, as he believed, imperatively needed form of education than was being given in American educational institutions, of whatever grade and whether for lads. or girls, men or women. For years he and still is, for that matter, the key personality around which a group of educators of Greater Boston gathered under the name of the Social Education Society. He instanter came to the aid of the North Bennet Street Industrial School in Boston, when, under the patronage of Mrs. Quincy Shaw, of ever redolent memory, it began to show local educators and visitors from afar what could be done for youth of a congested and immigrant settled area by a form of education that developed the creative powers of the pupil. Quite inevitably he became the president of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education when it formed in 1910; for his writings and and his speeches had given him a national reputation as a reasoned and persuasive champion of vocational education, and his experience in business life and in academic administration insured. against any doctrinaire use of high office for ends that might seem desirable but at the same time be inexpedient.

was

The next important chapter in Mr. Munroe's career opened when the national demand began to come for a type of education such as he had

been calling for insistently. He saw to it that Congress did not lack for facts and for arguments that he had accumulated, and when at last the nation was committed by Congress and the President to federal expenditure for COoperative action with the states in giving vocational education, he no doubt was one of the happiest men in the country. What the con

servative New England of his birth still looked upon with skepticism he had found supported by men of the South and of the West as well as those of the Interior.

But some one had to execute the new law, lay the foundations broad and deep and wisely for using national funds in unprecedented ways to create a more efficiently educated and more adequately equipped population of producers. No one realized this more than the Boston manufacturer, who also early had elected to be an educational pioneer; and hence when, as a representative of the business men of the country, he was nominated to be a member of the Federal Board of Education, he accepted, and forsook Boston for a time and came to Washington to serve the nation. Where he works it is sometimes difficult to say, so often have war conditions and expanding functions of the board forced movings from place to place. But you can catch him at the renowned Cosmos Club if you are canny. Since the war opened a work of vast importance, namely, the rehabilitation and re-education work among soldiers and sailors mutilated in any way at home and abroad, has been added to the educational serIvice of the Vocational Board, of which Mr. Munroe is now the vice-chairman and the responsible working head. One cannot watch him quietly going about his present task and sharing in the vast war for a new sort of world with its notions of education much transformed (and along lines harmonizing with the ideas and ideals steadfastly championed by him) without thinking anew of the saying that "America spells opportunity." There was a time, not so many years ago either, when he would have died happy if he could have got New England to doing what the republic and the nations are now being forced to do. He must occasionally let his well-known powers as a wit and ironist play privately, if not publicly, around the heads of persons who once smiled upon him with the contempt of the classicist for the modernist.

[This was written by Mr. Winship for use in the press of many foreign countries.]

Education must accept the responsibility of materializing International Democracy.

There has been much of democracy with all the Allies. The United States has had the most of a demonstration of democracy of any large country, but it now finds that it has need of modification and evolution to make its democracy an example to the large and small countries to which it is allied.

The educational mission in the evolution of more democracy is the development of more complete individual independence through higher consideration of the independence of others.

This requires the widest range of social classes in intellectual rivalry, and in the consideration of those above and below, in the acquirement of good manners and good behavior.

Autocracy is inherited by all classes in all lands. It is as natural as breathing for men to stratify society, and those at the bottom, being the more numerous, scheme to domineer over those at the top, while those at the top, having more wealth and better education, insist upon domineering over those less favored.

German "Kultur" is to be in disrepute for many years, but it must be met by uniform devotion among the Allies to education that makes for personal independence and cheerful acceptance of the social, financial, and civic responsibility in community life, which alone can make national democracy.

Nowhere is autocracy more aristocratic than in language. One who can speak correctly, and especially one who can speak more than one language instructively, places himself and his favored few in a class by themselves. They enthrone themselves in aristocracy.

There can be no democracy that does not rest upon thought and character as much as upon linguistic art. This is too ideal to expect in its completeness, but education must help to magnify the value of hand expression of intellectual power and personal character as an expression of intellectual poise.

Education must help each allied nation to be industrially, agriculturally, and civically independent as possible and must educate all the people of all countries to be as helpful to all other countries as possible. This alone can make International Democracy.

A CHARACTERIZATION

BY HON. J. L. MCBRIEN

United States Bureau of Education

No pen or tongue can ever picture the enormity of the crime committed by the Kaiser against humanity. Sergeant Marshall has given us the best description of it. He says that war as carried on by the Kaiser has so outdone Sherman's definition of war that hell is a pleasure resort compared to life in the front line trenches where our brave American boys were fighting the Hun. When we think of what the Kaiser has done we are reminded of a distinguished character in "Paradise Lost." When he had rebelled against the glory of God and led away a third part of heaven's sons conjured against the Highest; when, after terrible battles in which mountains and hills were hurled by each contending host with ejaculations dire; when at last the leader and his hosts. were hurled nine times the space that measures day and night, and after the terrible fall lay stretched prone on the burning lake, Satan lifted up his shattered hulk, crossed the abyss, looked back into Paradise, and soliloquizing, said: "Which way I fly is hell! Myself am hell!"

LEST WE FORGET

The unity of Germany is to be brought about, not by speeches nor by votes of majorities, but by blood and iron.-Bismarck.

We Hohenzollerns take our crown from God alone. Who opposes me I shall crush. Не who listens to public opinion runs a danger of inflicting immense harm on the state.-Kaiser Wilhelm II.

All treaties are concluded on the tacit unde:standing "until conditions change."-Treitschke. Little states have lost their right to exist, for only that state can make a claim to pendence which can make it good, sword in hand. Daniel Frymann, 1914.

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Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars. and the short peace better than the long.-Nietzsche.

When you meet the foe, you will defeat him. No quarter will be given; no prisoners will be taken. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation, in virtue of which they still live in historical traditions, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever dare to look askance at a German. May the blessing of God attend your flags-Kaiser Wilhelm II to his soldiers as they were leaving for China.

John J. Pershing was a teacher in Missouri when he was appointed to West Point.

EXAMINATIONS

BY CARRIE A. RITTER

A lack of comprehension of meaning as well as a lack of knowledge may be responsible for many of the mistakes and odd ideas found in the answers to examination questions.

How can we expect our pupils to know about things far beyond their comprehension? Suppose we were expected to describe the mountains and valleys in the moon, or to go into an elaborate discussion of some medical treatise, these would be just as plain to us as much of a child's work is to him.

Also, examples in arithmetic or the use of simple yet concise English is to him not something to be applied in everyday life, but an exercise to be done at school. Very often you will hear the high school students exclaim: "What's the good of English anyway? You never use it." Alas! they never do; we all know that.

One child when asked why Germany had little commerce during the present war while England had much (not a wise question) replied there had been floods there. Which leads to the point, do not the examiners ask peculiar questions so that one cannot entirely blame the children for their lack of comprehension? Here's one from a recent examination in geography given to sixth grade students (average age, thirteen years).

Answer following questions with reference to the place where you live:

(a) About what is the altitude?
(b) About what is the latitude?
About what is the longitude?

(c)

(d) What is the general direction of the prevailing winds?

(e) About what is the highest or hottest summer temperature?

(f) About what is the lowest or coldest winter temperature?

(g) About what time did the sun rise this morning?

(h) About what time will the sun set tonight?

(i) About how often is there a full moon? (j) What river or body of water receives the drainage of your locality?

(Ten credits for all this.)

Of course there were other questions in the same section that might be taken instead of this. Do you suppose any normal child would voluntarily select such a question? Would you?

Recently examinations were given in the grammar grades of the rural schools. Some of the answers were as funny as those we see in the joke columns of the newspapers. We did not dream so many queer answers could appear at once, showing so little understanding of their work or originality in thinking out correct replies.

Fifth grade geography said: "Mention three places in state that you would like to visit and tell why you would like to see each place named." One named a little country place and