Schools to-day are as effective as they ever were in developing reverence and the will to live the good life; but in spite of much effort there is no marked advance toward bringing religion or ethics into the school as subjects of study. The conviction persists that in the United States church and state should remain separate and that the state should conduct secular schooling, leaving to the churches all religious teaching and training. The conviction grows that morality can neither be taught nor learned; that character is not a list of virtues to be studied and exemplified nor a set of habits to be acquired, but the devotion of the whole man to good purposes intelligently chosen. It is the fear of ecclesiastical domination and the conflict of churches that makes us wary of connection between church and school, and we believe that the church can accomplish most for religion if it will take religious education seriously as its own great task. It is the fear of perfunctory learning, without effect in life, that makes us hesitate to list ethics as a "course" in schools. The development of great systems of schools conducted by the churches, rivaling the public schools, competing with them for interest and support, looms meanwhile as one of our gravest problems of public policy in education.

The seventh group of essays, "The Profession of Teaching," opens, finally, a problem so difficult that it is almost impossible to discuss it in brief compass. It is easy to set forth the need for teachers of broad education, high character, developed technical skill, and personal attractiveness and power, and to say that they should be well rewarded. But we need a million such teachers in this country, and they are not to be had. And we are not willing to pay enough to attract young men and women into teaching from the other professions. We can get enough teachers, but not enough of the sort we ought to secure. Nor is money the only consideration. We have

not so organized our schools as to make teaching an independent and satisfying career.

as an

The difficulty and the remedy are best set forth in one of the references added to this group of essays, Dr. W. S. Learned's Introduction to the Fourteenth Bulletin of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: The Professional Preparation of Teachers for American Public Schools. This admirable monograph is issued by the Foundation, 522 Fifth Avenue, New York. It pleads not primarily for higher salaries for teachers, but for an organization of our schools which shall permit every teacher to work somewhat as a doctor works expert in his own right. Most teachers to-day can hardly claim more than craftsmanship in the execution of orders from above. They have neither the training nor the background to enable them to deal with individual children as experts should deal with them — diagnosing difficulties, detecting special abilities, guiding activities, measuring achievements, relating results to the native endowment of the child as revealed by tests and to his temperament and circumstances as revealed by observation, and prescribing the indicated studies, methods, and interests. The state should devote its best effort and all its available resources to the training of teachers for this expert service.

At the close of the book will be found reference lists covering certain topics not suggested by the essays. The Atlantic Monthly may have published articles on some of these topics; but we have not found it possible to include in this collection a larger number of articles nor to cover a wider range of subjects. That there should be fields of technical interest which are not represented among the educational essays of this magazine is not at all remarkable; on the contrary, it is remarkable that the magazine has published so many educational essays on such important questions. An Atlantic essay must be written with a

literary skill which is not fostered by exclusive attention to the technical problems of education. These technical problems, however, cannot be ignored by anyone who seeks a vision of education as it is moving forward under the impetus of a new devotion to its possibilities, a new method of approaching its issues and difficulties, a new professional spirit. It is in our added reference lists, indeed, that the reader will find this modern professional spirit most clearly indicated. To one who has seen education emerge from the status of a petty craft to the status of a profession, conscious of its own ends and capable of speaking in the councils of nations with its own voice, a great hope shines through all the technicalities - the obscurities, if you will — of the new pedagogical literature.

Humanity moves slowly toward the conscious control of its own fate, within the limits, never clearly fixed, of human power to control external forces and the inward processes of growth. The amazing progress of the last century toward command of nature may be matched in our own time by equal progress toward command of the life within ourselves. The institutions and relationships by which we define our lives, in which we find ourselves and grow into manhood, may become burdens under which we blindly stagger or instruments of a will that knows its own purposes. Governments, churches, industries, and schools may bind life or may serve it; and if the latter, then only by virtue of our power to understand, direct, conserve, transform, and create their influences and their forces. The groups that make it their life work to study human institutions, human nature in its social expressions, are pioneers of a new period. As they succeed in mastering their problems, the institutions they control become better instruments for building a new and fuller common life. When the aims of education are so clearly seen, and its means and agencies and methods so com

pletely under command that no teacher need doubt his power to achieve the results he sets himself to accomplish; when the teachers of the nation are united in their vision and conscious as a class of their ability to serve it; and when their functions and their status are recognized and the recruiting and training of teachers has become a foremost object of the state then the schools will be a strong and flexible instrument of the conscious progress of mankind.

Here in truth is a high enterprise for students and practitioners of education. They will need humor and patience, as well as devotion and intelligence, to make good their purpose to create an educational service which is genuinely professional. Two broad paths of advance are open before them and these are indicated in this volume by the grouping of the additional reference lists mentioned above. One is the path of scientific inquiry, the other, the path of educational reorganization.

The basis of assured attack upon educational problems is complete and accurate knowledge of human nature. How do human beings grow, and what are their reactions to educational influences? Can growth and reaction be predicted? Are there laws and norms of development and response? Are certain methods and materials more effective than others in securing desired reactions and promoting desired growth? What are the relations of physical growth to mental development and to school progress? What are the relations of natural endowment to the growth induced by education and environment? Does nature fix the limits of development? What are the typical courses of individual growth, physical and intellectual? What are the major processes of learning, and what variations may be expected from different minds and within different fields of study? What subjects and activities should be combined to serve the needs of different

types of persons during youth? These are the questions to be answered by strictly scientific inquiry in education.

Educational psychology, broadly conceived, covers most of these questions. It reaches back into anthropology and biology and forward into the exact measurement of native ability, of growth, and of school achievement. It has developed, under modern leadership, an array of standard tests for measuring progress in school studies; it has extended the measurement of intelligence beyond the beginnings made by Binet and Simon; it has reached out to include measures of physical growth.

In another direction, but closely related, lie the more strictly pedagogical studies of the curriculum, the values of the various subjects, the effect of examinations, the organization of play and children's activities generally, the technic of teaching, and the possibilities of progressive schooling. The principle in all this effort is everywhere the same. It is the principle of controlled and accurate observation, the substitution of fact for generalization unchecked by measurement, the critical analysis of hypotheses, and the careful examination of results. Statistical methods are its servant.

Let no one suppose that the end in view is the complete mechanization of education — a perfection of infallible methods by which standard results shall be achieved by standard processes. The end is fuller freedom, greater abundance of life. The spirit is not conquered by its own creations. If our younger students of education generalize too quickly from the premises of the scientific method and conclude that education is to be deterministic, — a fatal process by which we make children inevitably into what we wish them to be, they have only to reflect that the knowledge of the scientist in education is the knowledge into which these very children are to come, the knowledge which shall light their feet into a freedom they could never